Tolkien’s Insights into the Masculine Soul

What is a woman? People today find it difficult to answer this question. How many could answer the related question, What is a man? For modern psychologists and those influenced by them (which is practically everyone), “masculinity” and “femininity” are not directly equivalent or applicable to “man” and “woman.” You can just as easily be a feminine man or masculine woman, “identifying” contrary to your biological sex and then trying, through clothing, cosmetics, pronouns, and even surgery, to conform your body and appearance to this subjective identity. Though this attempt is disordered, it also unintentionally reveals something: Masculinity is intrinsically associated with being a man, and femininity with being a woman.

What does this have to do with J.R.R. Tolkien? As a traditional Catholic, not merely a “product of his time” but a product of the Truth, which is universal and perennial, he believed what most people clearly recognized before the proliferation of feminism, psychologism, and transgenderism: The body is a gift from God that, in union with the soul, forms one integral person. Therefore, the sex of your body is determined by God and is perfectly suited to your soul; it’s not something to be bulldozed and rebuilt according to the mechanistic mentality of the Industrial Age.

In this light, Tolkien knew that men and women are inherently distinct in both body and mind, while still being equal in their shared human nature, and that these distinctions are expressed as masculinity and femininity. How each is represented in individual men and women varies, of course, and what determines their precise forms depends on culture and changing fashions — but the distinction will always exist and thus should be upheld as an immutable principle. As Tolkien wrote in his explanation of the pre-existence of the Music of the Ainur in the mind of Ilúvatar: “It is the view of the Myth that in (say) Elves and Men ‘sex’ is only an expression in physical or biological terms of a difference of nature in the ‘spirit,’ not the ultimate cause of the difference between femininity and masculinity” (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 2012).

Tolkien shows this distinction in his stories, while also corroborating them in his nonfiction writings. I addressed the topic of femininity in “Tolkien’s Insights into the Feminine Soul” (Nov. 2025). Now I would like to focus on his portrayal of men and masculinity.

For Tolkien, as a reasonable man and a devout Catholic, a man is properly a father, just as a woman is properly a mother. Even men who never beget children or enter the covenant of marriage remain called to fatherhood in one form or another. For this reason, the men in Tolkien’s legendarium can be judged as men according to their fatherly virtues — including those, such as the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo and the wizard Gandalf, who are effectively celibate. From the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, the first man, Adam, was a father, the father of all mankind. As a father, he was charged by God his Father, “of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:15), with the mission “to work and to guard” the Garden, as theologian John Bergsma explains (Jesus and the Old Testament Roots of the Priesthood, 2021), cultivating it and protecting it from any threat. Adam was thus the “primordial priest” (and Eden the “primordial sanctuary”).

God then gave Adam a wife, who was taken from his side, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains, “to signify the social union of man and woman.” A woman “should neither ‘use authority over man,’ and so she was not made from his head; nor was it right for her to be subject to man’s contempt as his slave, and so she was not made from his feet” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 92, a. 3). However, Adam failed in his fatherly mission, allowing Eve to be seduced in his presence and then joining her in Original Sin, so that both were cast out of Eden. Now, the sons of Adam must work “by the sweat of their brow” to fulfill their original duties of tilling and guarding, while their sexual relationships and interior control over their passions are distorted by the “hard spirit of concupiscence,” which, Tolkien says, “has walked down every street, and sat leering in every house, since Adam fell” (op. cit.).

The fatherly virtues of a man extend from the original duties of Adam to cultivate the earth and to defend the world — those entrusted to his care and ultimately himself — against the evils of sin and Satan. Throughout history and unto today, men are thus tasked with the twin responsibilities of providing and protecting, both of which involve leadership and authority — making a man the head, or king, of his family — as well as self-sacrifice, moral example, and instruction, duties characteristic of a priest and a prophet. Adam possessed these traits prototypically, but they were truly fulfilled in the three munera, or offices, of Jesus Christ, the New Adam and the perfect Son of Man: priest, prophet, and king.

Tolkien shows this dual nature of masculinity, of original and fallen fatherhood, in many of the male protagonists of his legendarium. I would like to focus on two in particular: Boromir and Gríma Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings.

It could be said without much argument that Boromir was the most famous man of his time. From his great leadership abilities to his heroic acts of self-sacrifice in defense of his homeland alongside his fellow soldiers of Gondor, he was a true man of honor, doing whatever was required of him to guard those entrusted to his care and provide them an example of integrity, valor, and courage. For this reason, Boromir’s father, Denethor, the Steward of Gondor whose talents lay more in intellectual knowledge than in battle, believed his people to be doomed to destruction by Sauron, the demonic ruler of Mordor, upon learning of Boromir’s death. Other men, such as Éomer of Rohan, expressed a similar sorrow.

The failures of a man can be judged by his lack of the fatherly virtues of priest, prophet, and king. Boromir, like his father, thought little of wisdom. Though Denethor confused wisdom with mere accumulated knowledge, Boromir valued strength of arms above both. In this way, he was deficient in the office of prophet — not due to simple ignorance, which has never hindered a man from being a good father, but from the foolishness that results from a lack of wisdom and leads to imprudent and even malicious choices. Ultimately, Boromir attempted to steal the One Ring of Power from its appointed bearer, Frodo, in order to use it as an evil means, justified by the good end of protecting Gondor and defeating Sauron. By contrast, Éomer and Faramir, Boromir’s younger brother, both of whom shared many traits with Boromir, chose to obey the higher wisdom of doing what is right, even against the wishes of their human rulers, King Théoden of Rohan and Denethor, respectively. By following St. Peter’s principle that “we ought to obey God, rather than men” (Acts 5:29), they retained their full honor.

Despite this grave mistake, Boromir redeemed himself, proving his manly virtue and heroism by giving up his life as a kind of priestly sacrifice to protect two young hobbits, Merry and Pippin. Though they were captured anyway, and so in worldly terms Boromir was a failure, in truth he corrected his betrayal of Frodo, whom he had been charged with protecting. Through his service to the Fellowship, a brotherhood of Free Peoples who banded together to destroy the One Ring, he also gained the humility to recognize Aragorn, Tolkien’s primary typological representative of the kingship of Christ in Middle-earth, as his true king, being “satisfied of that claim,” according to Frodo. This submission of a man’s royal office to his true king is the highest fulfillment of masculine virtue: All Christian men are called to be kings in knightly fealty to the King of Kings; in a diaconal role through the baptismal priesthood, acting as “an ambassador” (Eph. 6:20) of Christ the High Priest; and as prophets of the Word of God, conforming their lives to His truth as given through the tradition of the Church.

Tolkien’s friend and fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis, in his essay “The Necessity of Chivalry” (1940), which should be required reading for every man (and every parent of a son), identifies one of the greatest contributions of medieval Christendom as the virtue of chivalry. He describes this virtue as the harmonious balance between gentleness toward friends and ferocity toward enemies. Through chivalry, the best medieval knights were able to go to battle against the foes of Christendom and perform legendary feats of valor and gallantry, only to return home and write poetry, uphold courtly manners, be modest and respectful toward women and fervently pious in religious devotion, and maintain strict household discipline. As Lewis explains, this was not a kind of two-faced hypocrisy or even a “happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.” This chivalrous ideal is represented by few men, whether today, in history, or even in Middle-earth, as most tend to favor one quality at the expense of the other. Attaining the ideal balance requires rigorous training. But it is a uniquely Christian achievement not found even in the greatest heroes of antiquity, though it is evident in Boromir and forms the highest ideal for any man. As Lewis writes:

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.

Every man from boyhood wants to be a hero, a chivalrous knight in service to a king and a cause greater than himself, to sacrifice himself to save others and to vanquish evil. It takes time for boys to realize that they can do this by wisdom and moral virtue, even if they lack martial strength — or that they can forgo it altogether, as do priests and religious. It is the duty of parents to discern the aptitudes and weaknesses of their sons, encouraging their God-given gifts and helping them learn how to compensate for and correct what they lack, while also accepting their special vocations in life.

Tolkien gave a supreme example of this higher heroism in the character of Frodo, who, Tolkien admits, “‘failed’ as a hero,” according to his task of destroying the Ring, but who succeeded morally by exhibiting pity and mercy, for which God rewarded him. Even so, each man, regardless of his vocation, should strive after Lewis’s chivalrous ideal, one which, he observed, is rejected both by the “‘liberal’ or ‘enlightened’ tradition which regards the combative side of man’s nature as a pure, atavistic evil, and scouts the chivalrous sentiment as part of the ‘false glamour’ of war,” and by the “neo-heroic tradition which scouts the chivalrous sentiment as a weak sentimentality, which would raise from its grave (its shallow and unquiet grave!) the pre-Christian ferocity of Achilles by a ‘modern invocation.’”

Unfortunately, in Middle-earth, Gríma Wormtongue, chief advisor to King Théoden, lacked formation in chivalry. Despite growing up in Rohan, where kingly strength and priestly self-sacrifice were prized far above prophetic wisdom, Gríma preferred the latter and wholly eschewed the others. He thus fell into the effeminacy characteristic of modern men in “developed” nations, where the “liberal” or “enlightened” rejection of chivalry is standard and used to beat masculinity out of men from their youth, to make them ashamed of being men (just as feminism makes women ashamed of being women). This goes some way toward explaining why many, though not all, of the men in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings are less masculine than those in the books (e.g., Viggo Mortensen’s portrayal of Aragorn and his so-called “masculine wars”), or else are barbaric in the “neo-heroic” form Lewis describes.

In this vein, a term commonly heard today is “toxic masculinity,” for which Boromir would be the most likely example in The Lord of the Rings. This term, however, derives from the standard “liberal” notion of masculinity that generally regards men as a negative force in the world, amenable only insofar as they can be feminized. The truth is that masculinity is good in itself, as is femininity, but both are liable to corruption. For masculinity, this takes one of the two forms Lewis described, whereas chivalry is the true fulfillment and perfection — not “correction” — of masculinity. Gríma is an example of the “liberal” corruption, and Boromir could be given as an example of the “neo-heroic” corruption, though perhaps other, less chivalrous alternatives could be found, such as the barbaric warriors from Dunland, Rhûn, and Harad, who only valued strength of arms without any concern for mercy or restraint. Neither Gríma nor Boromir, however, represents “toxic masculinity” but a false masculinity corrupted by sin.

Alongside Aragorn (and the hobbit Sam), Faramir is arguably the best representative of purified and ennobled chivalrous masculinity in The Lord of the Rings, someone whose willingness to lead and fight was coupled with a strident adherence to principle (he was unwilling to take the Ring even “if it lay by the highway”), a profound sense of mercy (as toward Gollum), and a deep respect for lore and prophetic wisdom (for which he earned the pejorative title “wizard’s pupil” from his father due to his friendship with Gandalf). Likewise, Sam (not Faramir, as in the film version) showed a truly Christian appreciation for the dignity of every person when he reflected on the death of a Haradrim warrior: “He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.”

Gríma desired wisdom, to be a prophet like his hero, the wizard Saruman. But by failing as a priest and a king, he became a mere politician, using schemes, deceits, and manipulations to appease Saruman, who thus usurped Gríma’s true sovereign, Théoden. By Gríma’s machinations, Théoden became similarly effete, abandoning his home to invaders and even imprisoning his faithful nephew, Éomer. Gríma, having become, by his effeminacy, unworthy of the affections of a good woman like Théoden’s niece Éowyn, expected to win her as a reward for his obeisance to Saruman, a mere object, a prize he did not deserve. In the end, Gríma would finally rebel against his slavery and slay Saruman, though this act, like the suicide of Judas Iscariot, was no longer one of love or honor but only a final display of cowardice and failure as a man.

Even in our modern, classless society, where the old form of chivalry is practically (but not utterly) dead, men are still called to recover and live up to it as the highest fulfillment of their fatherly vocation, no matter their individual calling in life. In this heroic quest, examples like Boromir, Aragorn, Faramir, Sam, and Éomer can inspire us, while others like Gríma and Gollum can caution us. Lewis concludes:

Now, it seems, the people must either be chivalrous on its own resources, or else choose between the two remaining alternatives of brutality and softness…. The ideal embodied in Launcelot [the greatest knight] is “escapism” in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.

As Tolkien understood, true escapism is not a “fugitive” escape from reality (On Fairy-Stories, 2008) but an escape deeper into it — to go “further up and further in,” as Lewis’s Aslan says in The Last Battle, the eschatological climax of The Chronicles of Narnia. Today, we cannot depend on cultural impetus or inherited tradition to make men manly (or women womanly); the Enlightenment and the Sexual Revolution severed us from the lifeblood of civilization through which our ancestors received these norms of common sense. Now, as Lewis exhorts, we must rediscover reality for ourselves by recovering our lost tradition and seeing the world as our ancestors did — and as God created it. To live as, or to raise, good men means following the examples of great men in history, both historical and fictional, including the heroes of Middle-earth, and disciplining our God-given masculinity with the virtue of chivalry, as they did, to become good fathers as priests, prophets, and kings — exemplifying not toxic, not effete, but self-sacrificing, controlled, protective, and providential masculinity.

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