Through Ben Reinhard’s book, readers can recognize more deeply the beautiful power of Tolkien’s enchantment and come to treasure it even more.
The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination, by Ben Reinhard (184 pages, Emmaus Road Publishing, 2025)
The title of Ben Reinhard’s book might lead one to suppose it is another specialty entry in the immensely rich and fascinating world of J.R.R. Tolkien studies. But it has a much more ambitious goal—to change how serious readers of Tolkien relate to that great author and his greatest works. The subtitle is really the key to answering the central question of the text: “Is the Lord of the Rings simply a story, to be read and enjoyed entirely on its own, with no reference to external realities, or do its characters and actions point toward higher things?” (7)
I think Dr. Reinhard might have had me in mind. I always rejoiced in Tolkien’s avowal of a cordial dislike of allegory, and his denial of its presence in The Lord of the Rings. The search for allegories in English classes did nothing to help me enjoy with passion the works so analyzed. I certainly needed no allegories to enjoy with passion The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Many suggested allegories seem to me to threaten the integrity of the tremendous stories themselves.
Reinhard aims to convince readers like me that we are missing something important in our reading experience. Not an easy task, as The Lord of the Rings in particular has had a profound effect on my entire life, as on countless others (cf. Marquette University’s collection of oral testimonials). Reinhard understands. Like I, he was deeply formed by continual reading of The Lord of the Rings during his adolescent years.
It is no exaggeration to say that all this reading left no significant corner of my life untouched: My daily life, my academic career, and friendships—and eventually my conversion as well—were all colored by Tolkien’s world (13).
He lures us in with the promise that “the liturgical lens draws us closer to Tolkien, his life, and his imagination” (7). On the other hand, he is also critical of those who “ignore Tolkien’s warnings entirely and allegorize with occasionally reckless abandon.”
Reinhard is remarkably successful on both fronts. He effectively models how to read higher connections out of Tolkien’s works rather than into them. He argues carefully, beginning most of his chapters with paradoxes and seeming contradictions, often arising from Tolkien’s own claims. He sorts through these riddles by drawing on Tolkien’s letters, his other works, works which formed him, insightful critics, and the testimony of acquaintances. (His bibliography notes provide a good guide for those who wish to enter into Tolkien studies.) He is not hesitant to reject some possible connections as coincidental because of a lack of evidence, such as a liturgical significance of October 24, the date Frodo awakens in Rivendell, which also happens to be the feast of St. Raphael, God’s healer.
Reinhard begins in the right way, not by listing many seeming allegories, but by revealing how Tolkien’s profound liturgical life formed his imagination and so impacted his creative process. He focuses on the liturgy rather than theological doctrine or Scripture, and shows how references to the prayers of the Mass and Psalms from the Divine Office peppered his letters. A striking example: Tolkien reveals to his son that he recited the Roman Canon (in Latin) from memory when he could not attend Mass (29). What he had taken into his mind, heart, and memory would naturally enter into his writing process, as Tolkien himself recognized:
A story, he said, ‘grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps (11).
Through the reflections of Thomas Howard, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Conrad Pepler, Reinhard shows that the liturgy for all of us is intimately connected to our imaginative and moral lives (5), and concludes that
Tolkien was a prime candidate, if ever a layman was, for a liturgically formed imagination—in Pepler’s words, an imagination ‘coloured by the Mass drama’ and ready to connect any and all activities to the pattern of the liturgy (31).
Dr. Reinhard offers powerful evidence that Tolkien’s imagination was active in this way from a draft of his famous essay, “On Faerie Stories.” In the course of his writing, Tolkien interrupted his struggle to explain the nature of Faerie and of the Elves who inhabit it to inscribe long passages from the Gloria and the Te Deum, along with references to the Sanctus and Christopher Dawson’s Progress and Religion (41ff).
From this perspective, Dr. Reinhard is able to offer a nuanced understanding of Tolkien’s unique knack for eliciting in his readers imaginative experiences in which Catholics feel at home (133), which have prepared the ground for conversions, which in Tolkien’s words are “fundamentally religious and Catholic” (2), and in which actual religious connections can sometimes go beyond Tolkien’s conscious awareness. Reinhard uses the terms “model,” “pattern,” “type” among others to express the relation between story and reality. This is more than the simple freedom that Tolkien recognizes every reader has to apply what he gains from a work to his own life. But it remains distinct from a typical understanding of literary allegory.
As an example of a non-allegorical pattern at work in Tolkien, Reinhard links the thief scene in Beowulf, which Tolkien knew intimately, with the scene from The Hobbit in which Bilbo steals a cup from Smaug the Dragon’s treasure bed. Tolkien denied that he did this consciously, though he does not deny the influence (131). In one of the most powerful sections of the book, Reinhard makes a strong case that the Easter liturgies provided such patterns for the eucatastrophic celebrations that follow the destruction of the Ring in The Return of the King.
In these crucial chapters, structure, imagery, and coloring mirror the Paschal liturgies; certain ‘plot’ points do as well. As Tolkien confessed in 1958, ‘Far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of fairy-story’ (Letters, 411).
Reinhard strengthens his case by pointing out that devoted but non-liturgical readers like Tom Shippey, one of the most prominent of Tolkien advocates, found some of these passages “without appeal” and unconvincing (138). This includes the blend of joy and weeping on the Field of Cormallen, a passage which evoked tears from Tolkien himself as he wrote it. As Reinhard points out, “For anyone who has felt the full force of the transition from Good Friday to Easter, the emotion described is immediately recognizable” (140).
At important moments, Reinhard raises a question that has led me to put aside most interest in allegorical interpretations: Why should we as readers care? What does this do to enhance our reading? Reinhard concludes this Paschal section by making one of the many daring assertions to be found in the book.
His heroes are presented as real children of Adam and Eve—and thus as real participants in the drama of salvation. As such, they could, like Melchizedek or Job or Cyrus, stand as types or figures of the coming Redeemer.
In promoting High Hallow, Dr. Erik Ellis captures this particular strength of Reinhard’s presentation:
In moving our consideration of the symbolic power of Tolkien’s work from stale discussions of allegory to the vast and underappreciated domain of typology, Reinhard enables readers to imitate what they read and become what they imitate (Dust jacket).
Frodo foretold of The Lord of the Rings that through it the folk of the Shire would come to “love their beloved land all the more.” Through Reinhard’s book, readers like I can recognize more deeply the beautiful power of Tolkien’s enchantment and come to treasure it even more. Perhaps more importantly, the rest of the Church can come to recognize Tolkien as “the greatest imaginative evangelist of the twentieth century” (151) and to see the source of the power that led Stratford Caldecott to acclaim him “one of the great spiritual writers of our time” (The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit).
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The featured image is “A Mountain Landscape with the Journey to Emmaus” (1602), by Paul Bril, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.