Taking the Imagination Seriously

There was a period in my life when I regarded The Letters of JRR Tolkien as a bona fide epistle - a profoundly literary and imaginative expression of the good news. He took imagination so seriously that he said that he discovered Middle Earth - including its creation and ancient history. C.S. Lewis once commented that Tolkien `had been inside language'. Tolkien had been inside the word, and experienced its power and seen with its perception. Others who knew Tolkien came to much the same conclusion. Simonne d'Ardenne, one of Tolkien's Oxford students and herself a philologist, recalled saying to Tolkien once, apropos his work: `You broke the veil, didn't you, and passed through?' and she adds that he `readily admitted' having done so."

 In his letters - to editors, publishers, his children, friends, readers of The Lord of the Rings - he answered penetrating questions of origins and meaning. He spoke of Middle Earth and its people as if they really existed - because they did. Implicit in all this, and at many times stated explicitly, was the belief that the human imagination is an objective aspect of the world. Being a devout and thoughtful Catholic, that meant for him that the imagination is an objective aspect of the spiritual world - what's on the other side of the veil that he passed through. Imagination and the good news interpenetrate.