The only reason to torture Tolkien’s work like this is not to understand it more deeply but to tear it down. And why would modern scholars want to do that? Because everything that Tolkien was, and everything he wrote, is an affront to the modern secular scholar’s understanding of the world, reality, and the meaning and purpose of life.

Put bluntly, the worlds Tolkien created sprang from an imagination shaped and suffused by his deep Roman Catholic faith. “The Silmarillion” in particular is in some ways a poetic and literary reflection on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In considering Tolkien’s Middle Earth, there is no way to escape this reality.

His creation, as he himself said, was a kind of sub-creation under the inspiration and aegis of almighty God. His grand themes — good and evil, truth and falsehood, power and glory and honor and sacrifice — all flow forth from his Christian faith and his decidedly sacramental view of the world. For Tolkien, all the world is shot through with meaning by a Creator who loves mankind and is manifest in His works.

That men and women now come to slander and distort and ultimately destroy these sub-creations of Tolkien is also, in a strange way, a testament to his legacy. Like Melkor, they are possessed by dark thoughts of their own imaginings, unlike those of the great Tolkien, and seek not so much to increase their own power and glory, but to bring Tolkien’s down to their grubby station, where everything can be reduced to race and sex and politics.

These people are taken today to be Tolkien scholars. What can we, who love Tolkien and his profoundly Christian art, do but repeat in sorrow a line from “Lament for the Rohirrim”—

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.