I had the great privilege of reading Holly Ordway’s latest book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography, in manuscript, and I was quite taken with it. I’ve now had a chance to give it a second, very close reading and my suspicions — which began when first reading Ordway’s previous book, Tolkien’s Modern Reading — are confirmed. Ordway not only has written the great book of 2023 with Tolkien’s Faith, but she has also proven herself one of the great Tolkien scholars, having now written some of the best things that exists on the great man.
Fifty years after Tolkien’s death, Ordway reminds us with every sentence of Tolkien’s Faith that the author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, was, first and foremost, a devout Roman Catholic. Ordway is certainly not the first to make this claim, but she is the best at doing so, being, in many ways, the culmination of nearly 25 years of argumentation by figures such as Joseph Pearce, Stratford Caldecott, Phil and Carol Zaleski, and, most recently, prior to Ordway, Carl Hostetter.
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