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November 21 - December 18, 2020
“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”
The tragedy, as he saw it, was the attempt to use technology to actualize our desires and increase our power over the world around us—all of which leaves us unsatisfied.
Tolkien deliberately submerged the Christian elements of his story, making even the idea of God only a suggestive aspect of the narrative. “Even when I was far away,” says Gandalf, “there has never been a day when the Shire has not been guarded by watchful eyes.
NO! This was the Rangers, especially Aragorn.
Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes life majestic and tolerable,
Middle-earth is not, Tolkien insisted, an imaginary world, but rather our world—with its ancient truths and sorrows—set in a remote past.
Their exchange—an encounter between intensely creative minds over the meaning of Christianity—should be ranked as one of the most transformative conversations of the twentieth century.
In the worlds of Tolkien and Lewis, the choices of the weak matter as much as those of the mighty.
Tolkien’s account of the condition of their hearts is as true to human life in the shadow of death as anything in modern prose.
set before our imagination in the works of Tolkien and Lewis is one of the great paradoxes of our mortal lives: the mysterious intersection of providence and free will.
Near the moral center of The Lord of the Rings is the ancient problem of the Will to Power: the universal temptation to exploit, dominate, and control the lives of others.
Given the contemporary infatuation with “virtual” relationships, Tolkien and Lewis’s achievement not only remains but continues to grow in stature. Like few other writers over the past century, they show us what friendship can look like when it reaches for a high purpose and is watered by the streams of sacrifice, loyalty, and love.
To some extent, Tolkien and Lewis were swept along this ruinous road: the realization that the prewar beliefs in mankind’s inevitable progression, in the creation of something like heaven on earth, were cruelly mistaken. Indeed, the Will to Power remained a permanent feature of the human predicament. The struggle between Good and Evil would not be resolved within human history.
For all the accusations of “medieval escapism,” Tolkien comes closer to capturing the tragedy of the human condition than any postmodern cynic.
