I first read The Lord of the Rings back in my early university days—I checked out hard copies from the university library, skipped class, and read Fellowship on a green hill. I had already had some Tolkien-adjacent experiences. I’d played D&D, which was very Tolkien-inspired in its first and second editions. I’d seen enough Tolkien-inspired fantasy and its very cliched expressions to stop reading most fantasy fiction.[1]

The many resonances that Tolkien and his legendarium have had in my life and my practice has led me often to consider how to operationalize Tolkien—in this sense, Tolkien as his works and legendarium rather than the historical person, for he apparently reacted rather poorly to folks finding their own significance in his works.

Let me qualify what I’m going to try to say about Tolkien’s “imagined” materials, let alone his engagement with the imaginal, unconscious, and depths that he expressed through Middle Earth. Tolkien viewed his Middle Earth and Elvish as lore, legend, and information that he would discover rather than invent. They had reality for him rather than being “just” fiction. For me, my engagement with much of this material has often felt like “remembering.”

Becca Tarnas has observed the roughly contemporaneous explorations of the imaginal that both Jung and Tolkien undertook, and she has engaged in the comparative research that notes the many motif matches that both writers had as they delved and produced their respective Red Books: Jung’s The Red Book and Tolkien’s The Red Book of Westmarch. As she describes her research that she recently articulated through her doctoral dissertation:

Beginning in the year 1913, both C. G. Jung and J. R. R. Tolkien independently began to undergo profound imaginal experiences. They had each stepped across a threshold and entered into another world, the realm of imagination, the world of fantasy. For Jung these initially spontaneous visionary experiences, which he later developed into a meditative technique called active imagination, were recorded in Liber Novus, usually referred to simply as The Red Book. The experiences narrated in The Red Book became the seeds from which nearly all Jung’s subsequent work flowered. For Tolkien this imaginal journey revealed to him the world of Middle-earth, whose stories and myths eventually led to the writing of The Lord of the Rings, a book he named within its own internal history The Red Book of Westmarch. Although they were working in different fields—psychology and philology, respectively—there are many synchronistic parallels between Jung’s and Tolkien’s Red Book periods: the style of the many works of art they produced at this time, the nature of their visions and dreams, and an underlying similarity in world view that emerged from their experiences. All these suggest the two men may at times have been treading parallel paths through the imaginal realm.

The revelations of this research bring to the surface questions about the nature of imagination and its relationship to the collective unconscious and perhaps a cosmic psyche, which in turn may hold deep implications for modernity’s assumptions of a disenchanted world. In this work, I point to the possibility that Tolkien and Jung are preliminary guides on a journey to the depths of an ensouled cosmos in which imagination saturates the very foundations of reality.[2]

The implication I would argue is that both men were mediums through which archetypal images and currents “came ashore” into human consciousness, finding expression through them. In his experience, Jung seems to have encounters that entwined gnostic Christian motifs with western European symbolism, and I would be very curious to see an ecocritical and psychogeographic engagement with Jung’s works that account for his own embeddedness in not only Switzerland but also his Goethe-inspired heritage. Tolkien seems to have mediated his encounters with these motifs through his medievalist and philologist training and his embeddedness in the English countryside.

Others have come up against or experienced these same kinds of archetypal motifs, and as much as Jung himself represented the archetypal in psychologized terms, he also recognized that others had identified them in spiritual terms. Later in his life, Jung reflected that “analytical treatment makes the ‘shadow’ conscious,” and ultimately, the goal was to find some way for the conscious and the shadow to find some kind of “compensation in unity.” The process, if successful, comes “usually [through] an unfathomable mixture of conscious and unconscious factors, and therefore a symbol [presents itself], a coin split into two halves which fit together precisely.” Wholeness is the goal—not the previous un-conscious lack of awareness and attention where the conscious and unconscious had existed in consciously-imposed separation. Jung argued that the desired wholeness was represented across cultures through “the form of the mandala, which is probably the simplest model of a concept of wholeness, and one which spontaneously arises in the mind as a representation of the struggle and reconciliation of opposites.” I would hazard that the supposed opposites are only so through opposition, for they are conceived as “opposite” by the conscious because it has deemed the shadow as Not-I, as some kind of negation. That shadow is always already there, part of the self: the conscious has convinced itself that the shadow isn’t part of itself. Jung argues that this process of reconciliation and integration is in theory always ongoing, and “the [resulting] God-image [associated with the process] is always a projection of the inner experience of a powerful vis-à-vis [face-to-face].” The conscious cannot escape the encounter with the shadow, and that encounter “therefore feels…overpowering.” The conscious mind recognizes “that [the shadow] do[es] not spring from” from the egoic I, so people have typically dubbed “them mana, daimon, or God.” That is, as some overpowering psychic force.[3]

I don’t want to belabor the Jungian side here. I’m not a depth psychologist. And unlike the public Jung, working to bring psychology and himself scientific legitimacy, I will as a magician articulate myself through mythical language. But, so does Jung, at least in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections and The Red Book. He writes of Freud and himself and others at various points as being “in the grip of [their] daimon[s].”[4]

My point, though, in this extended Jungian tangent is that the archetypal has its own agency, its own personhood. It expresses itself through humans even as humans can also reach out to and engage with the archetypal. We could substitute gods or spirits with archetypal and have much the same meaning, but I would argue that holding the divine, imaginal, and the archetypal together in comparison helps practitioners consider the dynamics, the tensions, and the interweaving of these spiritual lines coming forth and entangling with our human lifeways, life-lines here in our physical existence.

You see, one of the points I’m getting at is that Tolkien and Jung are particular points in this longer line. Tolkien’s conception of “Faerie” and Middle Earth likely uncovers similar territory—or maps similar territory—with the archetypal British, Faerie, and classical motifs that found expression through what Louis Montrose calls the “Elizabethan imaginary.” Montrose defines that imaginary as “designat[ing] the collective corpus of images, tropes, and other verbal and iconic resources that provided a growing and changing matrix for the varied and sharply contested processes of royal representation.”[5] That imaginary includes the Elizabethan “cult of Diana,” Elizabeth as Gloriana, as the Faerie Queene, as England’s “Virgin Mother,” and of the Tudors themselves as inheritors of King Arthur (and of Rome, and of Troy) and the imaginal forces that will help generate the British Empire. Further along this line, Tolkien’s works have inspired unofficial enchanted engagements with “Middle Earth.”

Tolkien-Enchanted Culture

It has long been observed that 1960s counterculture and the Hippies (and Hippie-adjacent folks) found a lot to like in Tolkien. Jane Ciabattari observed how

Middle Earth was a literary escape hatch for a generation haunted by the Vietnam War and the atomic bomb, a return to simple living. Many felt the experience of reading the text itself is akin to an acid trip.

Ciabattari goes on to link the novels themes to 1960s protest culture, wherein “the military industrial complex targeted by protestors resembled Mordor in its mechanised, impersonal approach to an unpopular war.” She also points to “Tolkien’s anti-materialistic worldview,” and the way that the fantastic elements of Middle Earth fueled rock music, let alone the popular expressions of Middle Earth and Middle Earth-derived culture, like RPGs, fantasy movies, and more.

Beyond these cultural influences, I find it interesting to consider the seeding of magical thinking that results from Tolkien. In an article on “The Origins of Wicca & Druidry” from the Order of Bards, Ovates, & Druids, the influence of Tolkien on the “Founding Mothers” is suggested:

Gardner met Valiente in 1952 and immediately encouraged her to improve and augment the rituals in the Wiccan Book of Shadows – a term for the book used to record Wiccan rites, which Gardner apparently adopted on reading of its use in India in an article published in The Occult Observer by a friend of Ross [Nichols]. Valiente, who knew Ross too, wrote inspired poetry with an unashamed expression of sensuality and Paganism. Vera Chapman, who matched Ross in both her depth of learning and her fascination for history and poetry, was a successful author, keen proponent of women’s freemasonry, a member of the Woodcraft-related Kibbo Kift movement, and the founder of the Tolkien Society [where she was known as Belladonna Took]. Like Ross she was also interested in a fairer distribution of wealth, and supported the Social Credit movement. Ross appointed her Pendragon of his Order, and after the success of her Arthurian trilogy, Warner Bros. bought the film rights, using her work as the basis for a disappointing cartoon film – Quest for Camelot. [emphases in bold are mine]

None of this should be particularly surprising. However, it’s the more “inspired” groups who catch my attention. One esoteric group had “centered around a mystical woman” in the Mojave who believed Gondor had once been in the Mojave Desert. More interesting to me are the Elf Queen’s Daughters (EQD) who, in 1975, had been contacted by a spirit through a Ouija board session, leading them to form the group and to begin dispatching “Elf Magic Mail” through local occult shops.[6]

The EQD are viewed by many as the instigators of what would eventually become the modern Otherkin movement. And for as much as it has always been “popular” to bash on Otherkin, I can’t help but see that some kind of contact event happened here and likely have been going on. Something gripped Tolkien. In turn, something gripped these two women who started the EQD. And while it is also popular to look down on Ouija boards, well, a famous LA landmark wouldn’t exist without them.

Furthermore, I find the stellar entanglement that emerges through the EQD interesting. The EQD invoked “Elbereth”—the Valar Varda, Tolkien’s “Queen of Heaven” and star goddess—as their Elf Queen, and I have to compare what results to, say, Crowley’s first part of Liber AL where Nuit speaks or the other “star goddesses” who have made themselves known, including Mary Queen of Heaven, who was certainly on Tolkien’s mind. While the EQD eventually moved on to other things, the “Silver Elves” they inspired still survive and in turn inspired the wave of Otherkin groups that sprung up online since the mid-1990s. I find many of the ideas that the EQD advocated interesting as Middle Earth-inspired attempts to re-enchant the self and the world in the face of 1970s materialism. For example, one of their letters, “The Primordial Egg” expresses a rather politically radical message that embraces the power of the imaginal:

It is foolish to believe that you’ve escaped enculturation. It is even more foolish to seriously attempt to do any thing about it. We are programmed sisters, and almost all of us can only re-program ourselves with bizarre “programming” seemingly our own, yet mostly “borrowed” from India or China or even Romantic-Western-America. It appears to the elven sisters, that it’s only the seriousness that really endangers both our security and our freedom. If we can singularly and mutually “face” the utter ridiculousness of our real predicament and almost eternal bondage to the illusions so artfully created for endless distraction, we may begin the long and perilous journey into and out-of fear.

There’s something here that reminds me of many of the ideas that will emerge out of 1990s chaos magic, even a certain gnostic turn, but there’s also a critique of the western European willingness to appropriate other cultures in order to re-enchant the western mind. Indeed, it seems almost as if that, in the face of western and other forms of enculturation, they have sought to embrace the absurdity of the situation by embracing something that others will see as “fictional” but which they saw as escaping the traps of modern culture. They continue:

And yet, sisters, we pass through normal and elven America and find so very much opinion about everything imaginable. The warm smiles are what counts, sisters; it is the elven smile that makes for a new day, and the elven chatter as well as the elven letters we all have grown to love are not a real part of our mutual liberation. Only a real human smile has the magic and true enchantment necessary to attack with love (in elven style) the almost ageless human preoccupation with deception. Would that people only attempted to deceive folk other than themselves.

As I read this letter here, I find that it’s almost as if the EQD found the human condition to have been colonized, as hijacked in such a way that robbed it of real meaning. The difference between “normal and elven America” isn’t so much, I would argue, about humans and elves (though that’s a thing), but it’s the difference between the disenchanted, materialist American culture and enchanted America. The first task, though, is to free oneself of that disenchantment and of the illusions that Americans have internalized. They continue:

We find sisters everywhere that would learn the magic. They find their elven natures to be more than just “surface” qualities; they feel they’ve found something recognizable in their real kinship with the elven sisterhood. We pray and call upon She Who Dreams to guide them past all of this and into and out-of what men call real. There is no substitute for self knowledge. So very few spend the time to find out who they really are. The unseen realms of mind and reality are so very devastating to those who know so little about themselves, their motives, their sexual needs and desires, the “nitty-gritty” stuff that wizzards [sic] expose to the light of day on only one or two days in a single year. And Alchemy, and astrology, and all the “heavy “ stuff, what is it all about, beloved .. what is it all about? Let us firstly make arrangements for our mutual evolution and growth from a disenchanted folk alienated primarily from ourselves … into a real people who not only know themselves but know themselves relative to their real environment.

And, indeed, the EQD are getting at re-enchanting the self, reclaiming the self from the ways that it’s been hijacked, embracing and using magic as acts of personal sovereignty (consider your Apocalyptic Witchcraft here), and pursuing self-knowledge. In a way, I can see that human and elf are, for the EQD, less about “race” or physicality than about reclaiming oneself from how “human” has come to be narrowly defined for particular parties’ advantage.

Markus Altena Davidsen has argued that most Tolkien-inspired groups do little with Tolkien’s works directly and primarily operationalize the Tolkien expressions of these archetypes through a mishmash of neo-paganism, New Age techniques, and other western magical structures (including plenty appropriated from other cultures). I also suspect that most groups have focused on something primarily religious or devotional in nature, and there is a certain “bhakti-yoga” or “devotionalist” way of viewing these enterprises. In expressing devotion to the Valar, elves, or other cultural expressions of similar archetypes like the Irish Tuatha de Danaan and so on, one also probably seeks to become more like them. It’s a kind of soul engineering through sympathy. However, that enterprise is also the enterprise of those who seek to become actually Christlike and not the capitalist, exclusionary, satanic Christ that has come to predominate many Protestant expressions of Christianity.

Words, Words, Words

I suspect that the impact of Tolkien’s works on the western psyche has more to do with exposing persons to western European mythic surfaces that had been obscured or displaced by the movement of Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment. That said, there’s also something there in Faerie.

In my case, and as I’ve noted here before, I’d already been pulling Sindarin and Quenya from my head despite never seeing anything like a Tolkien elvish dictionary until ten years later or so. I still get called on to name “elvish” things by a friend who does far more with roleplaying games these days than I do.

“What’s the elvish for ‘first, primordial ones’?” he asked me once.

I was sitting, opened some curtain in my mind, let the word sort of find its way forth through my diaphragm, lungs, tongue, mouth, teeth—I said it a few times until the mouthfeel seemed satisfactory. What I do at these points is something like how Alkistis Dimech talks about using the body to sense and speak, the dark senses of the occulted body, but what Dimech accomplishes via her whole body—she’s a dancer and in better condition for that than I am—I can pull off with speech at times.

I say the word to my friend. He notes it, and he goes on. He’s used to how this works. I go and note the word to myself, look it up in a Tolkien language reference site, poking at morphology and affixes and roots and such. The “official” translation I find for my word—the word that I felt said first, primordial ones—Tolkien would’ve glossed as dawn (or royal) time. I find it apt that the ones in question are, perhaps poetically or lyrically in my expression, inscribed in my word as synonymous with the dawn and most royal period.

This is one of those currents I’m plugged into for whatever reasons. This is one of those mythic surfaces I come up along against.

By the way, if you’re looking to develop your Power of Naming, then I would recommend something like the visceral, dark senses method above. I have noted before that the result of such naming has been akin to using gematria and infinitely more fulfilling even as the words will literally fill me. I may sometimes have a sense for what the word might mean—sometimes, I have even been rather surprisingly accurate when I could “actually” translate into Tolkien’s official Quenya or Sindarin—but other times, the translation is an after-the-fact synch that makes perfect sense for whatever happened and whoever I encountered. And at those points, it convinces me that I connected with something and someone rather than “just” talking to myself.

Or, I should say, the way to perform/enact elvish is as necessary as the PGM’s voces magicae. For me, the PGM came far more alive when I started treating the names in a sort of “Gregorian chant” manner, taking my time and letting the vowels and sounds ring forth. If engagement with the imaginal is our royal road into the spirit world, then the imaginal—indeed, practically received—quality of Tolkien’s languages should resonate, though perhaps I would be more accurate if I said could resonate.

That said, I have had little luck launching Tolkien Elvish in an operant capacity beyond the Power of Naming, at least on its own. The barbarous names from the PGM are far more “already live”—someone(s) pays attention to many of them, especially the longer strings. I suspect part of the problem for really operationalizing Tolkien’s languages for magical uses is to find a way to connect into a live line. Or, one needs to find those in Faerie who would listen and respond and get their attention first.[7]

In a sense, the PGM’s voces magicae had to become a wordless song for me, though I may think I recognize many of the sounds as words in places. It helps me to pair the sound with what I know of the beings or forces I am literally resonating with and employ a combination of visualization with visioning. I have to approach Tolkien’s languages in a similar manner.

Obscure Welsh Saints

My own personal Arthuriana and Welsh synchronicities go back some ways, and they intersect with things that my allies have pointed to—and which have amplified over time. And thinking with and imagining Paul Weston’s Glastonbury Aeon and related work has helped unfold much of this, but so has thinking with Tolkien and Faerie and more.

The Mabinogion has proved fruitful to think with and reflect on. That the collection is contemporaneous with Owain Glyndwr I noted with interest, and I find that much of the collection reads like accounts of “shamanic” journeying, especially in relation to local Welsh psycho- and mythic- geographies. Along the way, I found myself resonating and synching with the “Lady of the Fountain” story of Ywain, Laudine, and Luned. I had discovered a while back that Luned constellates out of what’s essentially a faerie/otherworld/Annwn tale with a now obscure Welsh saint, Saint Eluned.[8]

I have been doing St. Eluned’s novena (feast day is August 1, wink wink), though I had to develop my own prayers and litany as little survives that I can find without digging through archives in churches in Wales. Her biography has her as one of King Brychan of Brycheiniog’s daughters. Brychan is legendary for having many holy sons and daughters, most if not all of whom became Welsh saints. I note that Eluned is accounted sister to Saint Dwynwen as well as many others. There is likely quite a bit of glomping on to Brychan’s legendary family lines, and the numerological component (multiples of 12 seem most common) is noteworthy, as well.

Eluned is a headless martyr, dying to secure her virginity even after fleeing her father’s kingdom to avoid a very unwelcome non-Christian suitor. She is also one of the saints associated with holy wells, her beheading causing the well to erupt from the earth, much like Saint Winifred (but without the reattaching). Her well became a healing well, and a chapel grew up near the site that proved popular in the medieval period. The Tudors would prove disastrous to the chapel and site, but the holy well has seen some restoration work in the last few years.

Eluned’s legendary history in the Mabinogion has her as a cunning counselor to both her lady Laudine, Countess of the Fountain, and to Ywain who seeks Laudine’s hand. Ultimately, it is a tale of enchantment in which Luned proves essential. I personally read the tale as very much a story of Ywain’s journey into Annwn to find the blessings of Faerie/Annwn through a wife associated with enchanted waters, which is a recurring European mythic motif (such as in the Melusine stories).

Now, having done so myself, I know that it is fashionable to decry older, pagan myths as being “appropriated” or “plastered over” with Christian veneers. It is that rather offensive perspective that presumes that, somehow, our ancestors were too stupid to realize that the Christian clergy had built a church on their holy sites, but the stupid pagans kept coming anyway. While Christian erasures of older pagan sites did occur, it is more accurate to describe the process as syncretic. The older pre-Christian spiritual realities, ancestors, faeries, nature spirits and more did not go anywhere, though some transformations, syncretizations did occur, perhaps rendering the more dangerous or uncanny beings as “demonic” or “diabolic.” In the case of Brychan’s legendary children, you have a cultural conservation of older heroic dead—or of wise women and wizards, for all intents and purposes, which are common amongst the “Celtic” saints—as saints and as part of the cult of the saints, which has always existed uneasily beside mainstream Christianities.

My own experience with St. Eluned is that she is saint and more—at least more than what I had imagined saint-ness entailed. My previous experience with saints like Cyprian, Brigid, and Teresa and others—and even with Eluned—has pointed to experiences of the saints as often rather emotional, and in that sense that someone very close to you, someone very supportive of you, actually loves you and you know it. It’s like a close family member radiating what close family members should radiate. But my own upbringing in Protestant Christianity and as an anti-Christian “devotional polytheist” meant I had a dim notion of what a novena could entail. Based on hints I’d heard, I actually thought with Eluned to light the candle, offer the prayer, and to sit with her. I would meditate lightly and pay attention to her image (I use the stained glass image I first learned about from the Wikipedia article)—and, really, I realized that I should use the same tech I’d used intuitively for forever with other allies.

The result, though, has been great. The Luned of the Mabinogion and the Arthuriana is also with the virgin martyr, and all of that mythical, imaginal depth is part of who she is. Indeed, she wound up helping me think about enchantment and, well, substantive things.

I have come to realize that “faerie,” “spirit,” “saint,” and more are often more words and surfaces that we use here in the physical, in this little slice of the world, to try to describe deeper, realer stuff. It suits Eluned’s purposes and sense of agency from the other side of the mirror to respond along the saintly and (at least for me) the Mabinogion line. How much any of these words and ideas matter away from our experience of Earth is debatable. At that point, the mythic surfaces I’ve found that help me make contact with and do things with Eluned—or with any other spirit—are more channels and fonts, paths between me and there, me and them. I find myself wondering how much my disdain and revulsion for things “Christian” owes more to my personal emotional experience of Baptist churches and conservative American Protestantism and technocratic scientism.

Some surfaces I respond viscerally and hostilely towards. I’ve always felt uneasy thinking with Enochiana or the Kircher Tree of Life. And, I don’t resonate with all saints, believe me.

So, this is where I’m going to come back to Tolkien and Middle Earth. As much as I may find myself wanting to operationalize Quenya or Tolkien-expressed archetypes, I think there are more immediately useful things to take away from his works.

Processes of Enchantment

So, here are a few things I’ve noted in my return to Tolkien.

People—especially fantasy RP gamers—like to drag Tolkien’s works for not having much magic in them. I found that explicit, spectacular magic was everywhere, as were subtler enchantments all throughout.

Song and storytelling are enchantment in Tolkien—the world is birthed through song; elves hymn often to Varda for protection and guidance as they travel; Tom Bombadil sings and enchants everything, including (especially) himself and his place in the world, denying others the chance to reframe him in other than his terms; the barrow wights whisper-sing the hobbits into torpor; Frodo is often moved and inspired to sing or utter spontaneous, often visionary poetry; Frodo engages in a battle of enchantment with the Nazgul at the river crossing at the edge of Rivendell, leading the Nazgul to magically silence him to keep that from getting out of hand; characters tell stories of love and heroics when they can; Saruman’s most immediately dangerous when he’s talking to you.

Talk about certain things at certain times. Talk about dark and evil things that you have to worry about in the bright light of day. At night, tell inspiring tales and sing inspiring songs instead. You can think of this as a Tolkien concern with timing enchantments.

Dreams matter. How often does Frodo or another character dream of far-off events? Keep up your dream journals.

Consider the significance and meaning of tools and place and times. Rings convey very particular things—whether Gandalf’s, Galadriel’s, or Sauron’s. Staves do, too, but also swords. Place matters.

The world around you is alive and paying attention and acting.

Friendship, compassion, perseverance are their own enchantments, and sometimes they are the best enchantments we can have on hand. But, they are also the enchantments everyone can weave.

Do not enchant against yourself. Look always for opportunity. Avoid dooming yourself if you can.

Galadriel is a boss. She scries. She does astrological magic with Eärendil/Venus in those scrying waters. She is constantly enchanting, and she’s at the top of her consciousness and psi game.

Herblore and wildcrafting and talking to your plants and technical hermetica matter.

The heroic dead are always present—or can be—and partly through your storytelling and songs and associated enchantments. Consider what stories you tell of yourself, then, and what stories others tell of you.

As I was thinking about many of these lessons in enchantment from Tolkien, I reflected on the use of spiritual songs as part of the protests associated with the Civil Rights Movement, especially in the United States but also overseas. I think we underestimate how we can enchant our lives every day, especially in the face of strife and oppression. These lessons aren’t ultimately “Tolkien’s,” but I think his works offer one of many windows into the deeper spiritual realities that many in the West are still recuperating from losing access to.

And that’s part of the larger point: our lives, the world around us, our communities–we all have meaning, and we can create and assert that meaning and the meanings we want to pursue. After all, for the longest time, we’ve been enchanted to believe there is no point here, there is nothing for us here, there is no hope for us here, and we have no meaning or purpose or value. Tolkien points to how meaning is all around us, under our feet and in our voices and in the wind and trees and stars.

Featured Image: King Brychan and St. Eluned (Alud) by Menter Brycheiniog&Maesyfed (CC-SA-4.0)

[1] There was a reason I retain an appreciation for Michael Moorcock, not counting the ways that Moorcock resulted in synchs for me just as Tolkien did.

[2] Italics added from the original for book titles.

[3] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, edited by Aniela Jaffé, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, Vintage Books Edition (New York: Random House, 1989), 335-7.

[4] Jung describes Freud as being gripped by the daimon that spurred him to see everything in terms of sexuality while Jung feels he was driven by his daimon to pursue psychoanalysis doggedly.

[5] Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3. Montrose’s interests are primarily Foucauldian and New Historicist/Cultural Materialist.

[6] Markus Altena Davidsen, “The Spiritual Milieu Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Literary Mythology,” Handbook of Hyper-Real Religions, edited by Adam Possamai (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 191; see also this site.

[7] I am now imagining using the A Elbereth Gilthoniel hymn and an image of Varda (or, perhaps, ahem, Stella Maris) and then intending “Varda is praised” for a few minutes or so.

[8] Yes, White Wolf nerds, they named House Eiluned from Changeling: The Dreaming after her. The developers did that often with the sidhe houses.