Tolkien's Heresy

’In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’

Thus the Holy Scripture of the Catholic Church begins and the profession of the Catholic faith takes the idea up when it confesses in the Apostles’ Creed that God the Father almighty is ‘Creator of heaven and earth’, and, in the Nicene Creed, ’of all that is, seen and unseen’. Tolkien, as a devout Roman Catholic, took these things to heart and confirmed them in his daily and weekly routine as a practitioner of that faith.

The universal human questions of ‘Where do we come from?’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What is our origin?’ ‘ What is our end?’ and ‘Where does everything that exists come from and where is it going?’ were answered for Tolkien, as they are for Catholics all over the world today, in these Christian precepts. For the modern, agnostic or atheistic mind, which is often haunted by a lack of answers to the above, it may seem strange to suppose that one can live life with a high degree of daily certainty about these answers, not only knowing when and how the universe arose physically, or when man appeared, but also living within the mea