For a Christian—and let’s not forget that Tolkien was a lifelong practicing Catholic—the world is a prison. In the words of the Salve Regina, one of the most popular Catholic prayers, the world is “a vale of tears” and its inhabitants, the “poor banished children of Eve,” are exiles awaiting their true home in heaven. For the Christian, the world is a valley of death, a land of shadows, or the shadowlands. The light that vanquishes the shadows is not of this world but has its source in our true home beyond it. One of the purposes of fairy stories is, therefore, to enable us to evade the
...more
