Biblical and Theological Notes on Tolkien's Short Stories
(avg. read time: 7–15 mins.)
This is one of the more challenging entries to write in this series of commentaries. There is simply not a lot of material to work with in Tolkien’s short stories without going too far afield, straining to make application, or engaging in disconnected meditation. But I would be remiss if I skipped over these works altogether in this series, even though the sparsity has led to me retitling this particular entry. Specifically, we will be addressing two of Tolkien’s short stories assembled in Tales from the Perilous Realm (some important background to analyzing these stories beyond what I do here is provided in “On Fairy-Stories,” which I have already written about here). Namely, I will be looking at “Farmer Giles of Ham” and “Leaf by Niggle.”
“Farmer Giles of Ham”
As in The Hobbit, the element of “luck” or providence by another name remains an element in “Farmer Giles of Ham.” Indeed, the farmer’s whole career as a hero is moved along by luck. He scares off a giant with his blunderbuss when, despite his terror, he happens to have it pointed at the giant’s face “by luck,” and “by chance and no choice of the farmer’s many of these things [put in the blunderbuss] struck the giant: a piece of pot went in his eye, and a large nail stuck in his nose.” In the aftermath it is said that “luck smiled on him” during his farm work. The parson describes the farmer as having a “luck you can trust,” and he does indeed trust in it for his fateful encounter with the dragon Chrysophylax. When the farmer is with a company of knights to track down the dragon, his life is saved from the dragon’s initial onrush because, “As luck (or the grey mare herself) would have it, when at last they drew under the very shadow of the dark mountains, Farmer Giles’s mare went lame.” Indeed, Giles himself recognized in hindsight that he needed to “thank his fortune (and his mare).” As noted in my commentary on this subject in The Hobbit, it is not as if providence works without intermediate instruments, including the choices of others. And when another will is involved, one can, of course, be wiser in cooperating with providence, particularly in using what has been provided, which wisdom Tolkien sometimes refers to as “wits.” That applies to this story, too, when the narrator makes this summary statement, “It must be admitted that Giles owed his rise in a large measure to luck, though he showed some wits in the use of it. Both the luck and the wits remained with him to the end of his days, to the great benefit of his friends and his neighbours.”
As I noted in the commentary on The Hobbit, the notion of “providence” is often invoked in contexts where seemingly small actions and events can have results in kinds and scales that we cannot comprehend. A well-known biblical example of this is in Genesis. Out of jealousy and bitterness, Joseph’s brothers decided to sell him into slavery, yet we see by the end of the narrative that God worked through this event and even Joseph’s imprisonment to accomplish the salvation of many lives and, ultimately, the slavery in Egypt followed by God’s long-promised exodus, and all that pertained thereto. All of this came as consequences of Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery. One can see such providence as well in the story of Esther, a book that famously never mentions God by name (that is, before the Greek additions that sought to correct that omission) and features several seemingly small actions and placements of people moving the story to its resolution. And indeed, we see this providential work all the time in which seemingly small or insignificant happenings turn everything around for someone. One conversation can change someone’s life. One act of prudence or imprudence, wisdom or foolishness, kindness or apathy can profoundly affect a person’s life. God can use any such small openings for the work of his purposes.
As such, even when the typical terms Tolkien uses for providence are missing, one can still see this concept at work. Most significantly, after Giles scares off the giant, the king sends him a sword as a reward. It was apparently unbeknownst to the king that this sword was Caudimordax, Tailbiter. If a dragon is within five miles of the sword, it will not stay sheathed, and indeed there are multiple times where it acts unbidden or beyond Giles’s ability to wield it. If not for the king’s oversight, the rest of Giles’s story probably would not have unfolded as it did, for he would not have had an advantage to press in his encounters with Chrysophylax.
Moreover, this particular story bears a Christian influence in its very warp and woof. It is set in the Middle Ages (though featuring an anachronistic blunderbuss), complete with the facets of Christendom known in Great Britain at the time. That includes a parson and the church he ministers from. Indeed, the parson is one of the more prominent neighbors of Giles, and certainly the most learned. There are also several references to Christian holidays that the Catholic Tolkien knew and would have been celebrated in such a time. These holidays include, in order of appearance, the Feast of St. Michael, St. Nicholas’ Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas, St. John’s Day, Twelfthnight (i.e., the twelfth night of Christmas), Epiphany, the Feast of St. Hilarius and St. Felix, the Feast of Candlemas, and St. Matthias’ Day.
“Leaf by Niggle”
As Tolkien had a habit of saying, “Leaf by Niggle” was unusually easy for him to write. He woke up one morning, got to writing this story, and finished it in one sitting as it more or less appeared in published form. Although he is not a fan of the kind of literary criticism that seeks to connect the author’s work to biographical details, he provides the most background on this in Letter #241 to his aunt, Jane Neave, that he wrote in 1962, seventeen years after the original publication in Dublin Review. Though it was not originally published alongside “On Fairy-Stories,” it is, since the publication of Tree and Leaf in Tolkien’s lifetime, properly read as a companion story to the essay and what Tolkien says in it about sub-creation. At least part of it is a narrativized version of some of Tolkien’s theological comments on sub-creation. Tolkien himself noted in the aforementioned letter how reminiscent Niggle’s work was of his own experience in writing The Lord of the Rings, and one could imagine it was similar for The Silmarillion, but it is not as if the story is a one-to-one correspondence for either:
There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow. Niggle lost interest in his other pictures; or else he took them and tacked them on to the edges of his great picture. Soon the canvas became so large that he had to get a ladder; and he ran up and down it, putting in a touch here, and rubbing out a patch there.
For all that he seeks to finish it before “the journey” he is preparing for, life, as they say, keeps getting in the way. Indeed, he never finishes, and he is made to go on his journey by the arrival of the Driver.
This “journey” is, in fact, an indirect way of referring to his death. Upon his death, he is sent to the Workhouse, a purgatorial place. There, he learns how to focus on a task and what he could do with his time. One day, after being exhausted from his work, he is made to rest and he overhears voices examining and evaluating his life, both the good and the bad. Climactically, they note how he gave of himself in self-sacrifice as his last notable act before he was compelled to go on his journey in getting a doctor for his neighbor Mr. Parish instead of simply ignoring him in favor of his artwork that he tried so hard to finish.
Niggle is then allowed to leave the workhouse on a train that arrives at a wide-open space where there is a bike with his name on it. He takes the bike around and finds to his utter astonishment the Tree:
“It’s a gift!” he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally.
He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if only he had had time. Nothing was written on them, they were just exquisite leaves, yet they were dated as clear as a calendar. Some of the most beautiful—and the most characteristic, the most perfect examples of the Niggle style—were seen to have been produced in collaboration with Mr. Parish: there was no other way of putting it.
He then realizes that the Tree is part of a Forest, including some trees that are not “finished.” And for this work, he wants Parish to join him. He had been perhaps the prime source of life’s interruptions for Niggle, but he acknowledges, “There are lots of things about earth, plants, and trees that he knows and I don’t.” And almost as a granting of his wish, he finds Parish, whom he had “put in a good word for” earlier with the voices. They work together, eventually being so refreshed by their work that they cease to grow tired. Once they finish, they go on a long walk through the country, at which point they encounter a shepherd-like figure who informs them where they are: “It is Niggle’s Country. It is Niggle’s Picture, or most of it: a little of it is now Parish’s Garden.” Niggle’s part of the story ends with him going with the shepherd towards the Mountains, which were always on the border of his imagination and he could not guess what they were like or what was beyond them. Parish remained behind to wait for his wife and behold in wonder the realization of what his friend had imagined in life but he never knew about.
The rest of the story consists of some commentary from other characters reflecting on the significance of Niggle’s work. The councilors of his homeland quickly reflect on how seemingly useless Niggle’s work was, and indeed how his canvasses had been used to patch holes and not for the enjoyment of others. His name is said to never even come up in conversation after this initial reflective exchange. Only a corner of a canvas was preserved portraying a single leaf (hence, “Leaf by Niggle”) and it was even hung in the Town Museum, but it, too, eventually perished in a fire and no one remembered it.
Conversely, the two voices Niggle had heard in the workhouse open in direct contradiction to what the councilors had said in saying that Niggle’s work was “proving useful indeed … As a holiday, and a refreshment. It is splendid for convalescence; and not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains. It works wonders in some cases. I am sending more and more there. They seldom have to come back.”
This, of course, is an imaginative portrayal of heaven and its contrast with earth. The one who builds for the age and world to come may not be judged well in the present time, but they will have works that will survive the testing of God’s judgment (1 Cor 3:10–15). The one who stores up treasure on earth will ultimately lose it, but the one who stores up treasure in heaven, which will not be conspicuous by the world’s reckoning, will find one’s treasure where one’s heart is (Matt 6:19–24). As is a regular refrain in the Gospels, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. Likewise, those who are blessed in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain (Matt 5:3–12; Luke 6:20–23) are those whose wills are in some way frustrated in the present age, but will find the completion of their dreams when the kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven.
While Tolkien’s essay was more eschatologically oriented, the notion of the works of sub-creation in the present being taken up, hallowed, enlivened, and completed by being made part of a larger whole in God’s kingdom remains the same. But it is presented as something that happens at first step-by-step in heaven while the course of history continues on earth, rather than at the culmination of history in the eschaton. After all, there is a role for purgatory in this picture, as is unsurprising for a Roman Catholic author. That is, the purgatorial state of the Workhouse is presented in such a way that it is preparing Niggle for the Other World. There is also the fact that, consistent with traditional Roman Catholic teaching on purgatory, the intercession of others, including the dead, can possibly reduce one’s time there. (A famous abuse of this doctrine in the sale of indulgences to reduce time in purgatory was the catalyst in Martin Luther’s calls for reformation. I mention this only to illustrate the importance that has been attached to such notions of purgatory for a long time, as Tolkien is obviously not concerned with sales here.)
His own works of the Tree and the Forest are themselves something preparatory for the higher glories of heaven as signified by the mountains and what is beyond them. As sub-creation is itself a way of bearing the image of the Creator, and thus of enacting the purpose for which God made us, so also when the sub-creative projects of God’s image-bearers are raised to the plane of Creation (i.e., given Primary Reality as opposed to only Secondary Reality) they become part of God’s creative work in representing at a lower level the higher glories of God. And as Tolkien made a point of saying in his essay:
But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending.’ The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.1
The narrator of this story likewise says of Niggle’s realization about his Tree that it is a “gift” and that he meant this literally. The gift implies a giver, of course. Moreover, another word for “gift” in traditional Christian parlance (as derived especially from the original Greek terminology) is “grace.” And this hallowing of the sub-creator’s work by the Creator is certainly a divine grace, a loving expression of favor in affirmation of the gift he himself bestowed on the sub-creator and in fulfillment of the same for the one who bears his image as a child of the Father. I have written more about the significance of this idea in my commentary on Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation in “On Fairy-Stories.” And as I said, this short story is the narrativization of this belief.
However, in keeping with the allusive nature of this story, the presentation is not exactly fully “Christianized.” There is no reference to the role of Christ in judgment, faith in Christ, the book of life, or other such teachings as we find in the Bible. One could, of course, say the same about many of the parables, particularly the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), which does not exactly speak directly to the importance of faithful union with Christ (or any other such related matters) all on its own. Neither this story or that parable are meant to be a direct, literal presentation of life after death, and so it is unsurprising that we do not get all of the supposedly expected features.
At the same time, there remains a noteworthy Christian ethos here. Beyond what I have already noted, the fact that his self-sacrifice is considered something of an ultimate demonstration of Niggle’s character appears to invoke an ethos shaped by the cross of Christ. In a lesser way that refracts the light of Christ, he laid down his life for his friend (John 15:13), even as he was often irked and nettled by him, and that in turn was honored by those evaluating him.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 156–57.