A new memorial to JRR Tolkien will be unveiled in Westminster Abbey in spring of next year, marking the 90th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit. The memorial will be placed in Poets’ Corner where his friend and fellow writer CS Lewis is also honoured.
The memorial, which will be two and a half metres high, takes inspiration from Tolkien’s Tree of Tales and is the work of artist Stephen Broadbent.
It will be made of wood from British trees, including a tree from Oxford University’s Botanic Garden, which Tolkien himself was particularly fond of.
Tolkien and Lewis, as well as being arguably the most prominent fantasy writers of the 20th century, were close friends, with Tolkien being instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity.
Lewis is also known for his Christian and apologetic writings, after being an atheist in his youth, while Tolkien was a lifelong Catholic. By 1929 Lewis had come to accept the existence of God, but had yet to accept the truth of Christianity.
By Lewis’ own account, it was an encounter with Tolkien and Shakespeare scholar Hugo Dyson in 1931 that removed the final barriers to him accepting Christ. At the heart of Tolkien’s view was the idea that Christianity and the story of Jesus in particular represented “true myth”.
While the pagan myths and legends, of which both Lewis and Tolkien were fond, could hold elements of divine truth, with ideas such as sacrifice, resurrection and the proper ordering of the world, they remained just myths. The story of Jesus, Tolkien argued, was the one instance of the myth occurring historically.
While pleased that his friend had become Christian, Tolkien was disappointed that Lewis chose the path of Anglicanism rather than the Catholic Church.
A skilled linguist as well as a traditionalist, Tolkien remained a Catholic to his dying day and continued to respond during the Mass in Latin, despite the reforms of Vatican II that encouraged the use of vernacular languages.
How he he would feel about being memorialised in a Protestant church we shall never know.
