How Did Tolkien Write Great Books? – Bradley J. Birzer
Since roughly 1999, the scholarly and academic community surrounding J. R. R. Tolkien has been deeply divided. The divide comes from those on one side who emphasize Tolkien’s scholarship, his intense love and knowledge of languages, and the vast number of sources Tolkien drew upon to create his massive mythology. Tolkien was Catholic, they begrudgingly admit, but one should not focus on that. Theirs is an essentially secular Tolkien who also happened to be Catholic.
On the other side, starting with Richard Purtill and Joseph Pearce, are those who emphasize that nothing was more important to the man than his Catholicism. After all, Tolkien famously wrote, The Lord of the Rings was a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Everything the man did, this side claims, served as a further elucidation of his deep and abiding faith.
Generally, these two sides of Tolkien writers have talked right past each other. Such a divide began, however, to break down with the stunning work of Tolkien scholar Holly Ordway, equally conversant in both sides of the debate, but healthily synthesizing the two sides. Like Pezzini, Ordway begins with an absolute mastery of the secondary literature on Tolkien. Armed with a deep if not mystical understanding of Catholic theology, Ordway seamlessly connected Tolkien’s faith to massive scholarship.
Now, as of late 2025, Giuseppe Pezzini’s master work, Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation, has finally ended this Manichean divide in Tolkien scholarship. In wildly unexpected ways, Pezzini not only transcends the debate but he really completes it, offering nothing less than a perfect blend of the two sides. He does so, not by backtracking on Tolkien’s faith, but by taking it even farther than any previous Tolkien scholar has done. Most writers on the Christian side of the debate have spoken almost always in terms of applicable symbols: Gandalf as a symbol of St. Michael as well as of Odin, the Lembas as the Eucharist, Galadriel and Arwen as Marian figures. But, Pezzini has taken this much, much farther, arguing that the entire mythological project—its symbols as well as its very forms and essence—is deeply rooted in Tolkien’s faith.
Pezzini has written a critical work, a stunning work, a work that simply cannot be ignored by any Tolkien scholar.
Pezzini, a professor of Latin Language and Literature at Oxford as well as the Tolkien editor of the preeminent Journal of Inkling Studies, has been well-positioned to unite all Tolkien scholarship. Indeed, this is the best book to come out on Tolkien since Ordway’s 2023 Tolkien’s Faith and, before that, John Garth’s 2002 book, Tolkien and the Great War, and, even before that, Tom Shippey’s 1982 The Road to Middle-earth. In other words, Pezzini’s new book is not yet just one more book published on Tolkien; it is a serious event and cause for celebration. In every aspect—its original insights, its grasp of the secondary literature, its writing style, and its structure—Tolkien and the Mystery of Creation is, simply put, a gorgeous book.
As noted above, Pezzini finds Tolkien’s theological views, rooted in the human person being made in the Image of God, the ultimate Creator, at the very heart of Tolkien’s mythology, symbols, and structure. God, far from being absent from Tolkien’s mythology, can be found penetrating every aspect of it. After all, Pezzini rightly claims, when it comes to Tolkien, one must put stories first before all else. And, to be certain, God is the ultimate storyteller, giving us His Word, the Logos, as well as speaking the universe into existence in six days. We live in His story. There is a distinct beginning (Creation), middle (Incarnation), and end (Apocalypse).
Tolkien made his theology of literary subcreation most explicit in his address to the University of St. Andrews, “On Fairy Stories.” At the end of that August lecture, Tolkien claims
I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.
Pezzini uses this idea to interpret all of Tolkien’s thoughts and mythology, thus placing Tolkien solidly within the Christian tradition. As already noted, where other scholars have looked for Christian symbolism, Pezzini has found a thoroughly Christian experience.
Admittedly, Pezzini’s own argument confused me at first; he has written a very humanistic book within a European-style social science framework, complete with numerous headings, sub-headings, and sub-sub headings. Yet, once one gets used to Pezzini’s own somewhat foreign style—after the introduction and chapter one in my case—the book was perfectly logical and even quite beautiful. As such, each chapter becomes its own self-contained argument. In fact, I came to like and even embrace Pezzini’s logical structure of his book. It’s not something I would or could imitate, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the overwhelming amount of research into secondary literature (Pezzini’s bibliography is the finest I’ve seen in Tolkien scholarship), the author wants to address the non-Tolkien scholar: He writes that his “ideal reader is the educated reader of English literature” who may have encountered Tolkien in his youth but nonetheless harbors “strong doubts and biases about the literary merits and sophistication of Tolkien’s enterprise, and may even belittle the genres with which it is often(inappropriately) associated, namely ‘fantasy’ and ‘children’s literature.’”
To my mind, Pezzini succeeds in reaching every reader, Tolkien scholar and otherwise.
Pezzini breaks down his book into six chapters, each a profound and in-depth argument, but also filled with nuggets and tidbits of wisdom. These arguments include an analysis of Tolkien not knowing who Berúthiel and her cats were; an examination of who actually wrote the Red Book so celebrated in The Lord of the Rings; an exploration of Free Will and the divine; the extensive connections between Beren and Frodo and their respective stories; Gandalf’s death and resurrection and the meaning of prophecy; and, finally, the death of an author but the continuation of his mythology and story.
While the entirety of Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation is excellent and gripping and flows as a single argument broken into six parts, for the purposes of this review, I’ll just be focusing on a few of Pezzini’s sub-arguments. Thus, the reader can get a taste of Pezzini’s argument. Let me offer a few observations.
First, as has often frustrated Tolkien fans and reviewers—especially those coming from more evangelical traditions of Christianity—Tolkien did not consider himself the author of his books or his mythology. “More deeply, the meta-textual frame allows Tolkien to express and self-reflect on his own experience as a literary writer: Tolkien considered his stories as something ‘other’ from him, something given or discovered, free from the control of his rational mind,” Pezzini explains. “The meta-textual frame thus reflects Tolkien’s own views on his literature as a ‘puzzle,’ as the work of ‘a strange hand,’ written by ‘someone else,’ of which he is only providing an ‘approximate’ report; it also explains why he often declared a fundamental ignorance about many details of the background story, why he indulged in self-exegesis of research on his own books, and why he was convinced that he did not write all that book by himself.”
In Pezzini’s example, one can see Tolkien’s mischievous perplexity in his claiming not to know much about Berúthiel, queen of cats. She, however, provides just one example of many. For example, Tolkien expressed shock at the appearance of the Ringwraith toward the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, and he expressed equal surprise at the introduction of Faramir in the second half of The Two Towers.
Second, Tolkien loved blurring the line between dreams and reality. He had experienced an apocalyptic wave in his own dreams, and this became the wave that destroyed Numenor. In this, though Pezzini does not put it this way, Tolkien was exceedingly Platonic.
Tolkien was the greatest author of the twentieth century, the mythmaker, equivalent to our age in the way that Homer, Virgil, and Dante were to their respective ages.
Third, Pezzini does a wonderful job putting together Tolkien’s ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful. As the author notes, God especially loves beauty, and He offers it as a thing in and of itself and without utilitarian purpose.
Fourth, Tolkien, as Pezzini wisely claims, never knew who had authored what text of his. Even if God was the primary author, several of Tolkien’s characters—Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, and Elrond—wrote much as well. Addressing the nested narratives of Tolkien’s Legendarium, Pezzini writes: “The Hobbit was originally authored by Bilbo, but was partly emended by Frodo; The Lord of the Rings was authored by Frodo and Sam, but incorporated accounts of Bilbo and several other characters; The Silmarillion (or more precisely its archetype) was (at least partly) written by Elrond and later translated by Bilbo. All three original works were later heavily edited in a process that included emendation, supplementing, and abridgement, and whose last stage consists of Tolkien’s own compilation and translation.” This allows Tolkien, of course, to embrace different styles—high, low, etc.—with his different voices and different authors. It is, in fact, simply genius on Tolkien’s part to do so.
While this might just be fun on Tolkien’s part, Pezzini convincingly argues that such hesitation reveals Tolkien’s desire to be just one subcreator in a line and lineage of subcreators. By claiming different authors, Tolkien, then, is given permission to write in contrasting styles, alternating between high and low, transcendent and earthy. Further, while writing in the latter style, Tolkien can dignify the humble.
When writing the high, though, Tolkien can glorify God, thus entering into the mystery of literary creation. “By contrast, Tolkien recognises his literary works, like Niggle’s Tree or the Ainur’s Music, to be ‘other’ and ‘given’; they are the offspring of his artistic, sub-creative aspiration and the vitalising power of God, an offspring which Tolkien only ‘delivered’ with ‘labour pains,’ which were revealed through him rather than by him,” Pezzini explains. “Tolkien’s stories are thus not only his own stories, just as a translation belongs to the translator but primarily to its original author. This is the reason why Tolkien considered literary creation as a ‘mystery’: its occurrence and offspring cannot be fully explained, for Tolkien, in rational terms, as purely human activities autonomously performed by individual human beings.”
Again, while Pezzini never employs this term, Tolkien is clearly being Platonic, imitating the Crito as well as the Timaeus. As such, Tolkien has entered into Plato’s metaphysics, especially with the god, the Celestial King, his flawed creation by imitating the forms of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and by connecting this world with the eternal world through dreams and visions.
Fifth, and related to the above points, Tolkien considered himself an instrument of God’s will and design. “Tolkien’s creative work has certainly something to do with God, but not because it openly talks about Him or doctrines supposedly related to Him; rather, Tolkien considers his own sub-creation as an ‘instrument’ and fruit of God’s own creative power; in this way, God participates in the artistic event,” Pezzini convincingly notes. “This event (‘the mystery of literary creation’) involves a mysterious interplay between the freedom of the writer and the freedom of God, for the love of the freedom of the reader.”
As such, Pezzini takes the Catholic argument even farther than Catholic scholars have ever done before. He has, however, done so in such a convincing way that those scholars who have focused on the secular will be invited to see that this is not in opposition to the Christian, but that the two are intertwined and mutually enriching.
Pezzini has written a critical work, a stunning work, a work that simply cannot be ignored by any Tolkien scholar. As noted above, the publication of this book is an event, and it will forever change the way we understand the greatest author of the twentieth century, the mythmaker, equivalent to our age in the way that Homer, Virgil, and Dante were to their respective ages.
