Oxonmoot 2024

This paper reads The Lord of the Rings through Charles Taylor’s genealogy of disenchanted modernity A Secular Age (2007) to offer one explanation for the novel's continued resonance in an era of declining religiosity. In its treatment of time (Flieger 1997), space (Curry 2004), and narrativity (Bowman 2006), LOTR transgresses the boundaries of Taylor’s imminent frame and re-enchants the world. However, by scrubbing all explicit religious reference from the text, Tolkien presents not so much a pre-Christian as a post-Christian world: one still deeply influenced by its Christian and pagan roots but in which God is experienced as absent, moral decisions must be made without reference to theology, and eschatological hope is not guaranteed (cf. Madsen 2011). Thus LOTR speaks to our own post-Christian spiritual landscape, moving readers of many faiths and no faith in ways perhaps best described as spiritual without requiring us to share Tolkien’s ontic commitments (Taylor 2007).