A new book from the Eerdmans Library of Religious Biography coming soon!
“You are inside a very great story!”
– J.R.R. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, May 1944
The shadow of anguish and war had enveloped the world once more in May 1944. Trees, humans, and souls bore the scars of a global conflict that attempted to best power with ever greater power. It was the second such shadow that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had seen in his lifetime. Yet from his own experience in the desolate trenches of World War I, he now wrote to his son who had been taken in by World War II. The correspondence between Tolkien and his son who was serving in the war revived much of the pain Tolkien still carried from his own experience. Yet out of that pain Tolkien offered a spiritual practice that had all but saved him. “You are inside a very great story!” Tolkien wrote. The key was not only to recognize it but to write it out – to enter it and explore it. “I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical),” Tolkien said, “the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering.” Only by locating himself in the very great story, Tolkien insisted, would his son be able to make sense of the horror and receive the joys around him. To empower his son to that end, Tolkien assured him that “I visited church on your behalf,” a routine ritual for Tolkien at St. Aloysius Catholic Church.
Inside a Very Great Story: The Life & Wonder of J.R.R. Tolkien (Eerdmans, under contract) is a religious biography of the man who Tom Holland dubbed the twentieth century’s “most widely read Christian author.” It explores two interrelated questions: 1) What did religion mean for J.R.R. Tolkien? and 2) What did J.R.R. Tolkien mean for religion? The book seeks to be an enchanted biography of the man behind the many beloved myths. It locates Tolkien amidst the very great stories of Catholicism and religion in the twentieth century while taking seriously the ways Tolkien intervened in those great stories.
This book is ideal for fans and scholars alike! Continue to check back here for the latest updates including preorder links and speaking engagements.
