Interview with Acha Rezak (Quente) by Shadow by Acha Rezak (Quente), daughterofshadows

Acha Rezak, who writes under the penname Quente on our archive, will be presenting her paper "Mythmakers vs. the made myths: Exploring a reader’s levels of religious alienation and connection in works about and by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis" at Mereth Aderthad 2025 in July. Shadow sat down with Acha to ask her about her paper, its inspiration, and the topic of religion in Tolkien.

Shadow: We'll start off with the easy stuff. Do you have existing work (scholarly, fannish, or both!) that you would like us to highlight?

Quente: They say that fanfiction authors tend to be drawn to the space left in fiction where there is a vacuum, or a need, or a gap … I’ve read so many wonderful fics written about the tiny “and love grew between them” line about Elrond and Elros and their kidnap-parents; I’ve seen this about the “Fingon had been close in friendship with Maedhros” line. For me, the void that drew me in was the scant page worth of information about Dior, and his sons Elurín and Elúred. Here was a half-Elf who lived during some of the most violent and jam-packed decades of First Age history, yet Tolkien never seemed to get around to writing about his deeds. And his poor sons never survived long enough to make history. Therefore, I have been writing various AUs of the same moments. What happened to Dior after he died? What if his sons could shift their form into birds like their sister Elwing did? I’ve written about it here.

Shadow: Probably the most important question, given the reason we're doing this interview: Why did you choose your topic? You’re going to be talking to us about feelings of religious alienation and connection in works by and about Tolkien.

Quente: Tolkien made it plain to all of us that he wrote his tales with England in mind—he wanted to dedicate his mythologies to his country, England. However, he accidentally made a mythology that is so inclusive, and draws upon so many sources of diverse history and his own invention, that his audience became all of us. By "us" I mean—myself and all the other non-English—a half-Asian kid growing up in Bangkok, stumbling across The Silmarillion in the British Council Library. The pantheon of demigods felt very Hindu to me; the description of the music of the Ainur felt like the chanting in Buddhist temples; the description of the creation of the land out of song touched upon deep Vedic traditions of the earth arising from sonic vibrations. So imagine my surprise when I read a Christian-focused biography of Tolkien and Lewis and felt such a strong sense of alienation that I felt I had to scrutinize it further. Why did the thought of Tolkien's Christianity so firmly shut the doors I'd felt he'd opened? It was this, my sense of sudden and jarring outsiderness, that inspired my paper topic.

Shadow: Then, perhaps one of my favourite questions to ask any fellow Tolkien fan: What draws you to Tolkien and/or what is your favorite part of the legendarium?

Quente: I am a weirdo and my favorite scene in all of The Lord of the Rings is ... the description of Treebeard at Wellinghall:

Treebeard lifted two great vessels and stood them on the table. They seemed to be filled with water; but he held his hands over them, and immediately they began to glow, one with a golden and the other with a rich green light; and the blending of the two lights lit the bay; as if the sun of summer was shining through a roof of young leaves. Looking back, the hobbits saw that the trees in the court had also begun to glow, faintly at first, but steadily quickening, until every leaf was edged with light: some green, some gold, some red as copper; while the tree-trunks looked like pillars moulded out of luminous stone.

I love a few things about this description. (1) The magic is so subtle and matter-of-fact that it seems perfectly natural. Of course the tree-being can cause water to glow, and inspire all of his trees to behave like they are sunlit in darkness. (2) The glorious celebration of nature! This magic is not creating castles out of air, it is celebrating the perfection of trees. The magic is ecological, and enhances what is already existing, not creating a new construction of man. (3) Every bit of the nature writing is lovely. And so, I am drawn in by the subtle magic, the ecological message, and the lovely writing.

Shadow: That is a wonderful scene to love! I must admit, I rarely think about the magic present in Tolkien's world. For me it's such an ingrained part of the worldbuilding that I don't pause and appreciate it for what it is by itself. Definitely something I'll try to pay more attention to during my next reread! Do you think this celebration of nature is part of what makes the mythology so inclusive? In my own experience growing up as a (semi-practicing) Catholic, I never felt that the faith puts a strong focus on celebrating nature for itself, only for what it can give us. I know that many other religions have very different views on this, so I'm curious to see whether you think this plays a role in what makes the mythology approachable regardless of one's beliefs.

Quente: This part is not an answer, but something of a prelude to an answer: I am a bigger fan of magical realism than high fantasy, and although Tolkien's work is often shunted into high fantasy (as one of the originators of the genre even), I find that the realism of his world is detailed enough that it feels like magical realism. The distinction, to me, is that the world is one that I could potentially live in, where magic wells up from the nature of the world itself, rather than being something separate. I'm using the term "magic" rather than "religion" intentionally. My mother's religion is Thai Buddhism—it has a focus on Right Action, Right Intention, and Right Speech, etc., and less of a focus on the Hindu pantheon. Buddha is an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, but we live his philosophy rather than worship his godliness in itself. The religion is also somewhat nihilistic. Simplistically speaking, it speaks of all good and ill things in the world as ephemeral and passing—and points out that people shouldn't hang on to suffering OR glory, and shouldn't want self-flagellation OR self-aggrandizement. All things pass away, and the end result should be that we climb out of this place of incarnation after incarnation, and dwell instead in the center of being, in peace and oneness.

Here is a two-part answer! First is the simple answer: Nature as written by Tolkien does call to the spiritualist in me. It's the clear manifestation of the growing and creative nature of existence, and I honor how he wrote it.

My second answer is a little longer. If I were to draw a religious parallel to Tolkien's world, it is to the sepulchral nature of the landscape. Walking through the landscape, we see a palimpsest of old worlds laid upon the new (thank goodness that nothing much from the First Age exists, or the world would be so littered with ancient Elf ruins that there wouldn't be much room for the Third Age Mortal Human ones). But reading The Lord of the Rings reminds me most of this Tennyson poem:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,   
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,   
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,   
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Everything ends. The story of The Lord of the Rings is the tragedy of the passing of Frodo. This calls deeply to the Buddhist background I learned as a child (although I also have the hard practical overlay of scientistic thought on top of that): that the ephemerality of the world and all the decaying relics within it point back very firmly to the passing of all things made by humans, and we should not hang on to any of it, neither the bitter nor the sweet.

In summary, nature calls to my own vision of religion; but how Tolkien wrote about the ephemerality of Elves and Men and all their creations reminds me very much of my Buddhist upbringing.

Shadow: The ephemerality of the world and passing of all things is one of the aspects that draws me back to Tolkien again and again. There can be much beauty in the impermanence of things, in my eyes. We've spoken about how reflections of the religions of our world can be found in Tolkien's universe, but let's talk about religion in-universe, since you are prompting your fan creators to think about that, too. Has putting together this presentation sparked any new ideas that you might want to explore yourself in the future, whether that takes the form of scholarly work or fanfiction?

Quente: As of this moment I have yet to complete my research, but I am reminded of the rarity of seeing religious observances at all in Tolkien. He has a light hand with them. In fact, the only religious rites that seem overt are the ones performed by the Dark Númenóreans, who cut out human hearts and fry them up for Sauron. The other overt moments of worship are the Standing Peace of the Gondorians, who look toward the West, and the various hymns to Elbereth. Frodo and Sam also pray at difficult moments, singing songs of defiance and calling for aid. But to whom or what they pray, sometimes they don’t even know. My prompt for whomever is writing fic for this presentation centers around this conveniently empty vessel that Tolkien has so kindly provided regarding religion. What would a religious ceremony look like, to an Elf, to a Hobbit, to a Human? I think I’d probably want to write about the same, someday.

Shadow: So do I now! It’s a fascinating topic.

We're doing this series of interviews to introduce our audience to the presenters and fan creators contributing to the SWG's Mereth Aderthad celebration. If the audience takes one thing away from your talk on that day, what do you hope it will be? Without giving too much away of your talk, of course! We still want people to listen to it, after all!
 

Quente: I want to open people up to the idea that Tolkien is intentionally writing for more people than just his Christian countrymen. He is also an inventor and creator of a mythos that has worldwide and culture-inclusive reach. Perhaps due to decisions that he made while writing, perhaps due to not feeling like he had the authority to speak for his own religion (as he often chastised C.S. Lewis for doing), he managed to create a somewhat hazy and liminal space without real religious practices or rules. In this space, Tolkien has written of gods that are fallible and that make poor decisions, but that are part of a pantheon that could delight any polytheist. He's intentionally made the greatest creators out of the most flawed beings. This might mirror Christianity, but it also mirrors a bevy of other religions and mythologies. This intention, along with other elements that I'll discuss at our conference, creates a space for all of us to feel included rather than excluded, and involved in his world and work rather than left out.