Disability, diversity, Frodo Baggins and Aslan

September is one of my favourite times of year. Keats called it the season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’.

It marks the start of the academic year – new school shoes and lots of enthusiasm from both teachers and students. If we’re lucky, there’s an Indian Summer beautifully balanced by that crispness in the air in the early mornings. Closer to home, it is the month of our wedding anniversary and my youngest son’s birthday; he has the distinction of being born on Hobbit Day. Hobbit Day is the 22nd September, a date chosen because it is Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’ joint birthday. In the last few decades, it has become an opportunity for Tolkien fans across the globe to share their appreciation and enjoyment of Tolkien’s work.

Tolkien and diversity

This is not simply limited to people who enjoy dressing up and having hobbit-themed parties – although that sounds fun! No longer simply dismissed as genre fiction, there is a wealth of academic scholarship on Tolkien and his work. The recent Tolkien Society Summer Seminar asked contributors to submit academic papers on the theme of ‘diversity’ in Tolkien’s work, particularly how race, gender and disability, among other topics, are portrayed in his books or can be used as a lens to view his writing.

There was the inevitable eye-rolling of Tolkien purists who insist that none of this was ever in the author’s mind. Those seminar topics addressing gender and sexuality have certainly provoked such reactions online.

However, there is lots to be praised and appreciated in this focus on diversity. Papers on physical disability and PTSD in The Lord of the Rings, remind us of the real-world scars, mental and physical, carried by Tolkien and his contemporaries who fought in WWI. Many, including Tolkien’s own grandson, have written movingly of his experiences in the trenches and how it shaped his writing, despite Tolkien’s own disapproval of viewing his work as allegory.

The summer seminar also featured papers on how Tolkien’s work has been translated and abridged in different societies, from the censorship of the Soviet era to problematic racist descriptions of ‘slant-eyed’ goblins which have been erased in modern Chinese translations.

Domesticating the Bible?

This made me think again about the way we look at the Bible. It is very easy for us to try to create God in our own image and to read our own culture, politics and prejudices into the Bible. But we must be careful not to domesticate it – as C.S. Lewis, a close friend of Tolkien, writes of Aslan, the Jesus figure in his Narnia stories, ‘he is not a tame lion’. Neither is the Bible tame. It is the very ‘word of God, living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart’ (Heb.4:12). Unlike other books, it is not our place to ‘reimagine’ the Bible – instead, by the Spirit, it changes us!

The true diversity of God’s design

Equally, as Kanato Chophi puts it: ‘We must abandon this absurd idea that Christianity is a Western religion.’ Rebecca McLaughlan’s excellent book Confronting Christianity reminds us that Christianity is the largest and most ethnically diverse belief system in the world. The ‘average’ Christian today, statistically speaking, is a young, black woman in sub-Saharan Africa. As Revelation 7:9 points out, we are a multicultural and multi-ethnic church: ‘After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.’ We shouldn’t be scared of true diversity, as it is God’s design.

An old saying reminds us that when people freeze water, we make ice cubes: all identical. When God freezes water, He makes snowflakes: every single one unique. Let’s remember that as we enjoy cold drinks and the coming colder weather.