Fr Michael Ward on a new book exploring the writer’s spiritual side.
I became a Catholic in no small part because of JRR Tolkien. Raised as an Evangelical Anglican in the 1970s to be extremely suspicious of Catholics, I nonetheless found Tolkien’s imaginative world of Middle-earth captivating. I also knew that Tolkien had been close friends with his Oxford colleague, CS Lewis, whom I was taught to regard as a Very Good Thing. And since Tolkien had played a crucial role in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, I concluded that papists couldn’t be quite so bad as I had been led to believe.
