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Holly Ordway is a professor of English at Houston Christian University. She is known also as a Tolkien scholar. She won a 2022 Mythopoeic Award for her book Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages.
In 2005 she joined the faculty at MiraCosta College, Oceanside, California, teaching English literature. In 2012 she became a professor of English at Houston Christian University. She is also the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute.
Since 2010, when she became a Christian while already a lecturer, Ordway has published several books on Christian apologetics, and two on the Roman Catholic novelist J. R. R. Tolkien.
Ordway fencing competively for twenty years; she gave up after becoming a Christian.
In 2022, Ordway won a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies for her book Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages.
Hannah Bitner, for The Christian Librarian, writes that as a child, Ordway longed to immerse herself in the imagined worlds of Anne McCaffrey and Gene Roddenberry. The joy of these worlds faded, but that of Tolkien did not, even though Ordway was an atheist, unwilling to accept the Christianity behind Middle-earth. She became a Catholic when a Christian friend enabled her "to see The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia with fresh eyes."
Kris Swank, reviewing the book for Mythlore, praises Ordway for her "deep dive into sources" and for studying just a specific period (after 1850) and only books Tolkien certainly "read, owned, or mentioned", but regrets the book's limited fact-checking. Swank finds some claims of resemblance "unsubstantiated, such as Tolkien's and G. K. Chesterton's uses of the word "shire". Swank agrees there is "some similarity" between Tolkien's painting The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water and William Russell Flint's The Fir-Topped Hurst. Ordway notes that Tolkien took a print of this from Matthew Arnold's 1910 book The Scholar Gipsy & Thyrsis and framed it. Swank observes however that John Garth has shown its close resemblance to Shell Oil's 1936 advertisement which depicts Faringdon Folly. Otherwise, Swank writes, Ordway's conclusions will not come as "news to Tolkien scholars", though they may be of interest to fans. The claim that Tolkien was significantly influenced by his modern reading was, Swank notes, demonstrated by Anna Vaninskaya in 2006,Anna Vaninskaya. "Tolkien: A Man of his Time?" Tolkien and Modernity, vol. 1, edited by Frank Weinreich and Thomas Honegger, Walking Tree, 2006, pp. 1-30 and by Ralph C. Wood in 2015. On the other hand, Swank endorses at least part of Ordway's "welcome corrective to Humphrey Carpenter's outsized effect over Tolkien biography."
The Protestantism minister Tom Emanuel, in Journal of Tolkien Research, writes that Ordway's earlier book, Tolkien's Modern Reading, gave him the strong impression that she was frustrated with Carpenter's depiction of Tolkien as "a staunch anti-modernist". Emanuel was therefore not as surprised as Ordway was that she would write a "Roman Catholic biography" of the author, in which she states up front that earlier scholarship played down Tolkien's faith, and her work is meant to counterbalance that, indeed to show that his faith was as he had indicated "central to his identity". She adds that she is writing a "work of biography, not an hagiography". Emanuel writes that Ordway's intention already "expresses a particular perspective", assuming there is "only one kind of Catholicism", and opposing a major theme of both Carpenter and Verlyn Flieger: " that even as he was a staunch Roman Catholic, Tolkien was also a man of paradoxes, and it is his dynamic tensions which power his literary art." Emanuel notes that Tolkien's friend, the Jesuit priest Robert Murray, cautioned that he "could not support an interpretation" which set Tolkien's Catholic faith as "the key to everything". Emanuel comments that Dimitra Fimi warned in her book Tolkien, Race and Cultural History that it was not safe to take Tolkien's own word about himself, since he was building a "biographical legend" to place literary criticism of himself in the frame he wanted.
Emanuel writes that he "actually agrees with Ordway" that subjectivity on religion is inevitable, and it can be productive. He finds it so in parts of Ordway's book, where she has found aspects of Tolkien's life "which a non-Catholic would miss"; and he notes the "painstaking research" into Tolkien's time at the Birmingham Oratory from 1904 onwards. But he observes that Ordway does not consider whether the Oratory, and Father Francis Morgan's guardianship, was necessarily always "perfectly benign". He comments, too, that Ordway seemingly intentionally ignores evidence of anti-Protestant prejudice. She largely avoids the question of Tolkien's attitude to race, complete with higher and lower "human-like beings" on the lines of the medieval great chain of being, a matter clearly related to his faith. In Emanuel's view, the book largely fails "to acknowledge the wider social and political valences of Tolkien’s faith." He expresses "enormous sympathy" for Ordway and her feeling that The Lord of the Rings was for her "the Roman Catholic work of imaginative apologetics par excellence". He interprets her biography of Tolkien as "an attempt to lead others" to the Catholic faith, whether consciously intended as such or not. Was Tolkien then "a plaster saint" for Ordway? She replies to that "No. A complex, fascinating, flawed, devout, funny and brilliant man"; in other words, Emanuel concludes, Tolkien was to Ordway a genuine saint; and the book is, despite Ordway's statement to the contrary, a hagiography.
The Catholic priest Juan R. Vélez, in The Downside Review, writes that Ordway proposes numerous possible sources for events in The Lord of the Rings from Tolkien's personal experiences, giving as an example the way that the protagonist Frodo Baggins's act of mercy to the monster Gollum "is repaid": Gollum turns out to be essential to the destruction of the One Ring. Ordway likens this to the adolescent Tolkien's learning of forgiveness from Father Francis Morgan.
Books
Reception
Not God's Type
Janet Brennan Croft notes that Ordway's apologetics may interest Mythlore readers, as Ordway credits the The Inklings authors Tolkien and C. S. Lewis for her conversion from being an atheist to a Roman Catholic.Croft, Janet Brennan. "Not God's Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms." Mythlore 33.2 (2015): 187-189.
Tolkien's Modern Reading
Maureen Mann, responding to Tolkien's Modern Reading in Journal of Tolkien Research, called it "a surprising book", presenting authors that he had read "in some unexpected ways". Mann was surprised in particular by the " style of rhetoric", including an "extended diatribe" against Tolkien's official biographer, Humphrey Carpenter. Further, Mann considers that Ordway has made an "exaggerated claim" to be the first to study "Tolkien's interest in modern literature". Mann acknowledges Ordway's "substantial" research, and finds "valuable" the study of children's books read by Tolkien: she notes that, like fantasy, the area has often been "dismissed in ... scholarly study". She wonders what Tolkien's "nod" to Beatrix Potter's "dark and ruthless animal fantasy" might mean, mere homage not being the only possibility. On authors of adult fiction mentioned later in the book, Mann writes that many are merely listed, and that Ordway does not attempt to show that they influenced "the Middle-earth works or Tolkien's creative imagination" in any way. Mann suggests that "Not everything identified in this article is necessarily attributable to her [Christian apologetics]], but many things can be." Mann concludes that Ordway has the ambition to establish "a new narrative about Tolkien the man, the growth of the writer's mind". In Mann's view, Ordway's "polemical method tarnishes her work" and crosses the boundary "between literary criticism and apologetics".
Tolkien's Faith
Steven Umbrello, in Literature and Theology, writes that Ordway "rigorously explores Tolkien's spiritual development" to uncover how his faith influenced his writing. He writes that the biography provides "a holistic view of the man behind Middle-earth", incorporating evidence from Tolkien's letters, unpublished documents, and "the socioreligious context of his time". In Umbrello's view, the book "neither critiques nor endorses Tolkien's religious beliefs but presents them with an academic rigor that allows readers to form their own interpretations."
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