(LifeSiteNews) ― J.R.R. Tolkien, the famed Catholic author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, will be honored with a new memorial at Westminster Abbey.
The tree-shaped memorial will be inlaid vertically in a stone pillar and unveiled at a dedication ceremony in Spring 2027, the 90th anniversary year of The Hobbit, according to Westminster Abbey. The “tree” will be mostly composed of wood native to the U.K. and will include a piece of the black pine known as “Tolkien’s tree,” cut from Oxford University’s Botanic Garden. The tree was a delight to Tolkien during his time at Oxford.
The design is inspired by Tolkien’s Tree of Tales, which he called the Tree of Amalion, a metaphor he used to describe the massive body of stories that make up the mythical and fairy tale tradition.
Best known for his fantasy novels, Tolkien spent much of his life as a distinguished professor at Oxford, where he taught Old and Middle English, and Old Norse.
Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and many commentators attribute the themes of his work to the influence of his Catholic faith. Tolkien himself said in a 1953 letter to the Jesuit Father Robert Murray, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”
He had a special devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and later in life resisted the changes to the Mass after the Second Vatican Council. A memoir by grandson Simon Tolkien attests that after the Novus Ordo was promulgated, his grandfather “made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English.”