Fr. Longenecker on the Little Way Through Middle Earth

"'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' Tolkien admitted that he wrote these words absentmindedly on the back of an exam paper he was marking.

"Such spontaneous inspiration suggests the work of the subconscious mind, and if the subconscious mind, then a more mysterious source of inspiration may well be at work. Peter Kreeft has suggested that The Lord of the Rings is a divinely inspired work, and in the broadest sense this has to be true. Inspiration comes from earthly experience just as much as from heavenly guidance, and Tom Shippey has shown how the very word 'hobbit' emerged from the context of Tolkien's lifelong interest in words and language.

"The idea of little people who turn out to be the greatest would also have sprung from Tolkien's devout Catholic faith. Not only does the gospel say that we have to be little to get into the kingdom, (Matthew 18:4) but the apostle John constantly refers to the faithful as 'little children'. (e.g. I John 2:28) Furthermore, Tolkien would have been well aware that one of the Catholic saints most in the ascendant during his lifetime was the apostle of the 'little way.' Thérèse of Lisieux teaches that, 'To be little means recognising one's nothingness, expecting everything from the good God, as a little child expects everything from its Father.'

"Now Tolkien was not writing a book about saints and going to heaven. Apart from a minor character saying grace before a meal, there is nothing in The Lord of the Rings which is remotely religious in the conventional sense of the word. Nevertheless Tolkien was clear that his Christian faith provided the underlying matrix for the story. In 1953 he wrote that The Lord of the Rings, 'is of course; a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.'"

In a commentary written some months ago, Father Dwight Longenecker (parish priest at Our Lady of the Rosary Parish, Greenville, SC) reflected on how Frodo's humility and obedience, like these virtues as reflected in the life of Saint Thérèse, are "an inspiration to every soul who attempts the little way."

To access Fr. Longenecker’s complete post, please visit:

Standing on My Head: The Little Way Through Middle Earth

Background information:

Dwight Longenecker - Catholic priest and author