The returning soldiers did not feel tempted to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and races with the proctors’ “bulldogs”, as in the old days.

via Oxford Oxfordshire – All Souls College, Balliol College, Bodleian Library, Brasenose College, Christ Church, Clarendon Building., Corpus Christi College.

Tolkien was a student “in the old days.”  I don’t know how much he may have indulged in the above, except that we know of one evening he stole a public bus and joy-rided it around Oxford, giving free rides to other students.

Continuing this thought.

On one famed island in hereabouts looms the fortress of Michael Moorcock, who made his name by reversing every trope coined by Robert E. Howard. Howard’s Conan was a barbarian; Moorcock’s Elric was an over-refined aesthete from a corrupt civilization. Conan was bronzed brawny; Elric was pale and sickly; and so on.

There is also a strong element of rebellion of Moorcock against Tolkien. Tolkien’s universe has a Dark Lord, whose represents all the evils of the mechanized modern age, the love of power for its own sake, the contempt for nature, and yet also represents an eternal evil; and opposing this darkness is a clear and piercing light, sometimes literally seen in the radiance of the phial of Galadriel, sometimes adumbrated as the light in the West that calls to the dying elves, a divine light. Moorcock substituted for the concise dichotomy of Light and Shadow a meaningless and endless rivalry between Law and Chaos, both equally deadly to man, should either prove the victor. Because the moralistic element is absent, replaced by a nihilism by turns melancholic, morose, ironic or inhuman, the Moorcockian body of work never rises above the level of a Conan story. It is not serious, and has no wisdom to impart to a grown-up. A fantasy of despair is no less juvenile than Howardian power-fantasies.

via johncwright: The Elf-Thirst for Waters Beyond the World.

Absolutely right.

I’ve been reading Robert E. Howard.  Just finished a short-story about a crusader.  Howard is better known for his fictional characters such as Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane.

If you wonder how Tolkien’s fiction qualifies as “Christian,” reading a few stories by Robert E. Howard will snap the issues into focus for you.  Howard, like Tolkien, made up imaginative universes set in history, and also showed a real enjoyment of poetry and song in his fiction.

But Howard’s heroes are reductionist caricatures compared to Tolkien.  It is an amazing contrast.

“Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire but it’s damn good for you”

–J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (p. 133)

… Very much love to you, and all my thoughts and prayers.  How much I wish to know! “When you return to the lands of the living, and we re-tell our tales, sitting by a wall in the sun, laughing at old grief, you shall tell me then” (Faramir to Frodo).

So wrote J. R. R. Tolkien to his son Christopher on May 12, 1944.  Tolkien insisted his stories were neither allegorical nor even topical.  This seems interesting since he so easily invoked his own writing to explain or illuminate situations in his own life.

I think his point was that he wanted all his readers to be able to do the same as he did without feeling constrained by his own “topical” use of his text.  That, at least, is the best I can do to make sense of his “anti-allegoricalism.”

YouTube – Leonard Nimoy’s Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.

When I typed “Nimoy” in Youtube’s search blank, the top suggestion was “bilbo baggins.”  As far as I know Nimoy is more famous for this among the young than for Star Trek.

I’m not Anglican Catholic, but I thought this post was a pretty good (and humorous) use of Tolkien.

It may not seem fair at first since Julie Andrews’ character goes into a crisis after her first song among the live hills (and that is something of a Tolkienish emphasis).

But Tolkien’s epic is a much better portrayal of the Christian life. The writer is correct to point out that Christian portrayals of following Jesus should not make it sound like a Musical.

The contrast between the stories is really stark when you think about their different endings.  The Grey Havens and the wound that never heals are far from the way the musical concludes.

Truthfully, the way the LOTR ends is probably the greatest thing about it, if any one element can be singled out (of course, no one element probably can be singled out).

YouTube – J.R.R. Tolkien reads …. ‘Elbereth Gilthoniel’.

It has always surprised me how “secular” Middle-earth is, but I think I said in my book (which I’m in the middle of revising) that there is no prayer in the story.  I’m not the only one to make that observation, but this song keeps bothering me.  Does it count as an exception to the rule?

(Has anyone else ever wondered if Stephen R. Donaldson’s first Thomas Covenant trilogy was an attempt to wrestle with questions about providence that LOTR raises?)