Forthcoming Lewis-Tolkien Documentary

A new documentary about C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien is set to be released sometime next year. For the trailer, see below:

From Aeneas to Batman: Myth and History

by Bradley J. Birzer

With stealth and no small amount of cowardice, the Greeks creep out of their strange gift, a large wooden horse, under the cover of night and safely within the locked city walls. Rather than face Aeneas and the Trojans as men in battle, the Greeks unlock the gates, letting their murderous comrades in, and proceed to slaughter women and children wantonly. To almost all present, it seems the end of the Trojan civilization. Even Venus, the goddess of Love, and the mother of the great warrior and leader Aeneas, despairs. In answer to her anguish, Jupiter, the king of all gods, assures her, “And, lest new fears disturb thy happy state/Know, I have search'd the mystic rolls of Fate:/Thy son (nor is th' appointed season far)/In Italy shall wage successful war/Shall tame fierce nations in the bloody field/And sov'reign laws impose, and cities build/Till, after ev'ry foe subdued.” Though destroyed at Troy, the Trojans, fierce but true men, would rebuild elsewhere. The new city, Rome, would become the eternal city. “Of martial tow'rs the founder shall become/The people Romans call, the city Rome,” Jupiter continued. “To them no bounds of empire I assign/Nor term of years to their immortal line.”[1] The Aeneid is, in large part, a story about timeless truths, and the great Stoic mythmaker, Virgil, is telling the ages that truth can not be destroyed. It can be forgotten, ignored, or even perverted, but it could never fully cease to exist. For truth to cease to exist, the world would cease to exist. Instead, almost buried, the truth can be replanted in new soil. And, though the wheat will grow with the tares, the wheat will still grow, waiting to be fed, watered, protected, and, ultimately, harvested.

Almost nineteen centuries after the siege of Troy, Representative John Quincy Adams stood in New York City and praised the first president of the United States, who had earned the reputation of being a new Cato the Younger, a new Aeneas, and a new Cincinnatus.[2] Indeed, at the time of his death in 1799, Washington was the most famous man in the western world. In his 1839 speech, Adams invoked the image of the first president of the United States as the Virgilian hero, but with a vitally important twist.

Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination to conceive that on the night preceding the day of which you now commemorate the fiftieth anniversary—on the night preceding that thirtieth of April, 1789, when from the balcony of your city hall the chancellor of the State of New York administered to George Washington the solemn oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States—that in the visions of the night the guardian angel of the Father of our Country had appeared before him, in the venerated form of his mother, and, to cheer and encourage him in the performance of the momentous and solemn duties that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a suit of celestial armor—a helmet, consisting of the principles of piety, of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence; a sword, the same with which he had led the armies of his country through the war of freedom to the summit of the triumphal arch of independence; a corselet and cuishes of long experience and habitual intercourse in peace and war with the world of mankind, his contemporaries of the human race, in all their stages of civilization; and, last of all, the Constitution of the United States, a shield, embossed by heavenly hands with the future history of his country?[3]

With almost perfect harmony, Adams mythologized Washington by combining the Virgilian, Stoic heroism as embodied by The Aeneid with the admonitions of St. Paul to arm oneself with the weaponry of Christ in the fight against evil.[4] Washington took the best of the western tradition and planted it on the banks of the Potomac, just has Aeneas had planted it on the banks of the Tiber. America, of course, then served as the culmination of the best of the western tradition in Adams’ imagination.


Nineteenth and Twentieth-century Myth: The Particular or the Universal?
Driven by the romantic impulse as found most recently in the arguments and writings of Edmund Burke, many in the nineteenth century reacted strongly to the dry, calculated liberalism and utilitarianism of the eighteenth century by embracing myth. Many of these myths proved specifically nationalist, providing a glue for the emerging nation states of that century. One can find the most blatant of the nationalist myths in Finland and in Germany. In Finland, for example, hoping to unify his people, Elias Lönnrot compiled the Finnish Kalevala. While Lönnrot’s vision proved benign, the German project did not. In Germany, both Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to create a uniquely German myth by paganizing the origin and character of the emerging nation state. In his diary, Wagner recorded “I am the most German being, I am the German spirit. . . . But what is this German? It must be something wonderful, mustn’t it, for it is humanly finer than all else? Oh heavens! It should have a soil, this German! I should be able to find my people! What glorious people it ought to become.”[5] Seventeen years earlier, Wagner had embraced a form of universalism, socialism for all of mankind.

I [revolution] will destroy every wrong which has power over men. I will destroy the domination of one over the other, of the dead over the living, of the material over the spiritual, I will shatter the power of the mighty, of the law of property. Man’s master shall be his own will, his own desire his only law, his own strength his only property, for only the free man is holy and there is naught higher than he. Let there be an end to the wrong that gives one man power over millions. . . since all are equal I shall destroy all dominion of one over the other.[6]

Wagner successfully combined these two things—universal socialism and a pure German character (according his lights)—in his four-part grand opera, The Ring. Inspired by an era earlier than the then nineteenth-century divide between Lutheran north and Catholic south, Wagner embraced the pre-Judeo-Christian pagan myth of the Ring of the Niebelung and the Scandinavian Poetic Edda and the Volsunga, portraying the gods to be malicious and manipulative fools who deserved death. Wagner, English philosopher Roger Scruton explains, “proposed man as his own redeemer and art as the transfiguring rite of passage to a higher world.”[7] Certainly, the death of Siegfried, leading to the fiery consumption of Valhalla in Wagner’s re-write, strongly suggests the apotheosis of man.

Tolkien and the Hope against the Lies of Men

Yet trees are not ‘trees’, until so named and seen–
and never were so named, till those had seen
who speech’s involuted breath unfurled,
faint echo and dim picture of the world,
but neither record nor a photograph,
being divination, judgement, and a laugh,
response of those who felt astir within
by deep monition movements that were kin
to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:
free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves,
and looking backward they beheld elves
that wrought on cunning forges in the mind,
and light and dark on secret looms entwined. . . .

The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is now wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship one he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, ‘twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

Yes! ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ we spin to cheat
out timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and other ugly deem?
All wishes are not idle, nor in vain
fulfilment we devise–for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is dreadly certain: Evil is.

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate,
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
though small and bare, upon a clumsy loom
weave tissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.

Blessed are the men of Noah’s race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced). . .

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends–
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker’s art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.

--JRRT

The Withering of a Rose, August 8, 2007

by Bradley J. Birzer

On the Feast of St Dominic, a beautiful, unique, and never to be seen again Rose faded from this earth.

St. Dominic, pray for our Rose.

But, I. . . . I am blessed. I beheld her twilight radiance for a bit. I cradle her gently for a bit.

Even with all the voices of heaven supporting us, it was so difficult. For I knew that when I let this rose fall from my anxious grasp, it would be forever. Rather than letting go, I fiercely caress her soft but dying skin.

But, just for a bit. St Dominic, you are praying for us, right?

My tears flow, bulbous drops defining heaviness itself. They pelt the soft unopened pedals but they did no damage; the damage already done is of a magnitude that cannot be undone.

Oh you holy men and women, you white robbed martyrs, you saints of the eternal kingdom, you angelic beings, do you not hear our prayers? Blessed Mother, are you there? Do you not see a father holding his tiny stillborn daughter? Do you not see a mother, just like you Mary, crying over the loss of her child?

Oh, please, court of our most heavenly King, we need that small still voice to assure us. Will you pray for us now as well as at the hour of our death?

Did her precious soul already pass through the gates of heaven?

Did my grandmother take her hand and dance with her? Did my great aunt give her a mischievous smile? Did my father say he was thrilled to finally meet one of his grandchildren? Did Mr. Tolkien tell her about a white star? Did Mr. Eliot assure her that in her end is her beginning.

But here and now, in this terribly sterile hospital room, the soul departs before we can even say goodbye. . . .
Tears flow down my face and onto hers. But, as heavy as they are, they do not damage this flower. God had decided from the beginning not to let this flower bloom; her damage is beyond repair.

My tears that fall onto hers became a stream--one that bridges eternity.

The Gucci Awakening

by Julie Robison
Joshua also said to the people, "Sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will perform wonders among you." (Joshua 3:5)

“People in my grade look so much more mature than me,” said my 15 going on 16 year old sister. We peered into the computer screen, and looked at a girl we’ve all known since she was a wee tot, not yet 16, wearing a tight fitting tank top and shorter skirt. I felt a twinge of simultaneously feeling young and old at age 23, wearing a green blouse and blue jumper dress, and then felt sorry for her, so grown up in looks and  not realizing her whole worth, and the need to protect her body, not just show it off.

A few Sundays ago, the head pastor at my grandparents’ parish wrote in the bulletin about proper Mass attire during the summer months. Father wrote,

Once again the summer months are here and we have to remind ourselves of proper Mass clothing. It is hot, and sometimes we don’t give it a second thought, but we should be conscious of what we wear to Mass. Remember our church is air-conditioned. Men and teenage boys should wear trousers and a dress shirt. Women should wear modest dresses that fall below the knee, and modest blouses and slacks. Flip flops, shorts, tee shirts, and any type of immodest clothing should not be worn to Holy Mass. Remember the rule: I am conscious of what I wear to Mass and it is modest for the Holy Congregation. We owe this respect to Jesus and Our Lady, and to each other. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

While I am in complete agreement—perturbed, even, at how people are so casually dressed at Mass—my grandmother, aunt and I said the same thing: good luck getting most women to wear dresses that fall below the knee.

Sorry it's above the knee Father, but I love this skirt.

Today’s retail stores simply do not offer many (if any) dresses or skirts that long at the wide-scale level. Most of my dresses and skirts go to my knee, or slightly above. Pencil skirts notwithstanding, dress and skirt lengths today do not typically go past the knee unless they are going all the way to the ankle. Moreover, length is not the only litmus test for modesty.

In South Korea, women do not show their shoulders. They may wear very short skirts and high heels, but their chest area is completely covered. A lot of summer dresses in the States have skinny straps and lower fronts (and sometimes lower backs as well). I wear cardigans to work almost every day, especially if my dress has no sleeves. But what of the dress’s fit? I tried on a dress last week for an upcoming wedding. It wasn’t tight, but it was fitted, and made me self-conscious of my figure. I asked the sales ladies for their opinion.

“If you’ve got the figure, wear it!” was the consensus.

Middle Earth Update

By Stephen Masty

The handsome youth climbed unsteadily onto a nearby picnic table and began to sing, waving his arms in abandon as the afternoon sun reflected off of the fine silver embroidery on his elven cloak.

“Four and twenty virgins came down from Inverness,” he roared tunelessly, “and when the ball was over there were four and twenty less...”

“The son of Prince Legolas,” muttered one of the hobbits. “Everyone calls him Prince Legless which he surely is, and by the look of it on his fifth firkin of hard-cider.”

“Pity that we cannot go home for another hour,” grumbled his companion squinting at the late afternoon sun. “The traffic won’t let up until the orcs stop protesting cuts in their entitlement programmes. Strider! What ho! You’re late.”

The tall wiry fellow sat down, threw back the hood of his cloak and helped himself to a cold but ultimately unsatisfying can of Meadweiser. “Apologies, chaps,” he explained, “I was strip-searched again under the Homeshire Security Act. Those dwarves can be a little rough.”

“Sorry,” said one of the hobbits sympathetically and the others nodded.

“Lady Galadriel was supposed to join us, but she’s playing a concert tonight in the Lothlórien Heights Elvindrome,” the furry-footed creature continued. “She’s never been the same since she started calling herself Lady Gagadriel and took to wearing cellophane blouses.”

“She’s getting a bit old for that if you ask me,” another grumbled.

“I blame it all on Sauron,” said the first hobbit.

“Well, you voted for him,” another objected. “You fell for all that New Mordor crap.”

“We gotta move with the times,” the smallest hobbit explained. “Wraiths are people too. It was only our bigotry that drove them to be somewhat unpleasant. Society is guilty but change we can believe in.”

Strider sighed and hurled his empty can across the garden and into the mandatory recycling bin. Middle Earth was not as fun as it used to be.

“Given up your pipe?” asked the smallest hobbit.

“Yes, anybody have any rolling papers?” asked Strider and one of his companions offered him some. Soon, tiny and rather anaemic smoke-rings rose in the darkening sky amid the sound of coughing.

“I spoke with Gandalf,” he said in between gasps and the hobbits all craned toward him for the news.

“How is he? Where is he? What’s he doing?” they all asked in unison.

Strider shook his head sadly. “I’m not sure how smart he was to move back from the Undying Lands,” he explained. “His insurance coverage is all screwed up and MordorCare doesn’t want to pay for his treatment. He is more than 2,000 years old, you remember, and President Sauron’s medical reforms do call for some rationing.”

“The government is bust,” admitted one of the hobbits. “The tax-wraiths have taken every piece of elvin silver out of Rivendell. If they ain’t got it, they can’t spend it.”

“That bothers him,” Strider continued, “plus his nurses park him all day in front of the television and he loathes the trendy game-shows in particular. He says that dwarves never look very good in the nude.”

“What does he think about the war? The new War of the Rings?” asked one of the hobbits.

The small, formerly-merry creatures all nodded sombrely, interrupting one another to ask whether it was necessary, how it could be paid for and whether it could even be won, especially considering the thousands upon thousands of newly-discovered rings that the president claimed had imperilled Middle Earth.

“Gandalf thinks it’s stupid,” Strider explained. “And he’s right. A war against ring-around-the-collar? Gimme a break! When was the last time that you guys washed your jerkins?” He called for a passing waitress to bring the bill.

“Sorry but we don’t accept cash,” she explained. “Any of you got a MordorCard?”

Stephen Masty lives in Kabul and London.

Lord of the Rings and Christian Education: Developing the Human Person

by Andrew Seeley

For classical educators, developing the human person is the primary goal, and the cultural treasures of the past are the principal means to that goal. Making the thoughts, words, stories and beauty of Christian civilization a living part of students gives them standards and ideals that direct their maturation into adults who help shape their world.

JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings epic, wonderful in so many ways, also resonates with the spirit of classical education. In a surprising statement at the end of the story, Gandalf, the wizard who has guided and protected the hobbits, speaks of their adventures as a kind of education:

I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand?

Without realizing it, the four hobbits, three of them relatively young, have been prepared to become leaders of their society.

At the beginning of the story, Sam, Merry and Pippin are much like their fellow hobbits of the Shire – decent folk but almost completely unaware of anything outside their little world. Most hobbits were not only unaware, but proudly so. Sam’s father was suspicious of the fact that Sam had learned to read: “Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters—meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it.” He had no idea why Sam left, and no interest in his tale once he returned. Tolkien, like Gandalf, admired many of the virtues that developed in Shire-life, but also deeply believed that as long as they remained in their uncultured state, they remained small-minded, small-souled and self-satisfied. Those hobbits attracted to Bilbo’s stories and poems of Elves and dragons, Frodo in particular, knew that the wider world held beauties (and dangers) vastly greater than anything that had ever occurred in the Shire. And they wanted to come to know that world.

Tolkien and the Hope of Christian Humanism

[Dear TIC Reader, below is an essay I wrote on Tolkien but never published.  It's deeply influenced by Stratford Caldecott, Winston Elliott, and Phil Nielsen.  I've decided to publish it now because Paul E. Kerry has just released an excellent edited collection on Christianity in THE LORD OF THE RINGS entitled THE RING AND THE CROSS (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2011).  A piece I wrote for Paul, "The 'Last Battle' as Johannine Ragnorak: Tolkien and the Universal," appears as the concluding piece of THE RING AND THE CROSS.  My chapter originated as a talk I gave in between performances of "The Ring" at the Seattle Opera in August 2005, comparing Tolkien's understanding of northern mythology with Richard Wagner's.  I hope you enjoy the following.]

*****

Myth connects us to those of the past and to those of the future. Through myth, we grasp the continuity of all of God’s Creations, of all of the soldiers in the Army of Christ: those who came before Him to prepare the way, those who fought beside Him during his 33 years on earth, and those who came and come after Him to do His Will against the Enemy, even unto death. “Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world,” Chesterton wrote in 1925 in the chapter on myth in The Everlasting Man. “To touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.” Myth then, leads us to beauty, which leads us to truth. Truth leads us to the Good of the One, the Creator of time, space, and all things, who sent His only Son to redeem the world.

“Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours,” Samwise says in The Lord of the Rings, as he and Frodo reluctantly follow Gollum to the stairs of Cirith Ungol, entering Mordor. Sam, looking at the light of the Phial from Galadriel, realizes that the quest to destroy the Ring is a continuation of the story of The Silmarillion, a story that took place thousands of years prior to his own War of the Ring. “You’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s still going.”

St. Augustine and (hopefully, someday, "St.") J.R.R. Tolkien

[This article, in a slightly different form, originally appeared in Joseph Pearce's St. Austin Review.  Before that, it was a talk delivered on January 3, 2003, Tolkien's 111st birthday, at the IIC in Philadelphia.  I am posting it today to celebrate Professor Tolkien's 119th birthday.  From my very biased standpoint, I think all Imaginative Conservatives should look to Tolkien for inspiration.  Deeply conservative, Christian, and, above all others, brilliantly creative, Professor Tolkien spent his life challenging the evils of his day, through the elements of story, faerie, poetry, and myth.]

*****

In 1958, at a Dutch bash held in his honor, Tolkien told his audience: "I look East, West, North, South, and I do not see Sauron.  But I see that Saruman has many descendants.  We Hobbits have against them no magic weapons.  Yet, my gentle hobbits, I give you this toast: To the Hobbits.  May they outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees."[1]  To Tolkien in 1958, the world must have appeared as though it were trapped in deepest and darkest winter.  Clyde Kilby, an English professor from Wheaton College, worked with Tolkien in the summer of 1966.  “Tolkien was an Old Western Man who was staggered at the present direction of civilization,” Kilby recorded after a summer of conversations with Tolkien.  “Even our much vaunted talk of equality he felt debased by our attempts to ‘mechanize and formalize it.’”[2]  Like many Englishmen, he feared a world divided in two, in which the smaller peoples would be swallowed.  Only fifteen years earlier, in reaction to the Teheran Conference, Tolkien had written: “I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations  to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny and intolerance!”  One would be blind to miss Tolkien’s disgust.  “I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you).  The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets.  It is getting to be one blasted little provincial suburb.”  Soon, he feared, America would spread its “sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production” throughout the world.[3]  Neither “ism”—corporate consumer capitalism or communism, both radical forms of materialism—seemed particularly attractive to Tolkien, a man who loved England (but not Great Britain!) and who loved monarchy according to medieval conventions, while hating statism in any form.

Putrill, J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion

By Brad Birzer

Though I’ve never had the good fortune to meet Richard Purtill, I assume he must be a deeply fascinating man.  In the 1950s, he traveled to England and met Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, perhaps two of the most important figures in the twentieth-century Roman Catholic intellectual renaissance.  These two did much to promote the works of some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth-century: Christopher Dawson, E.I. Watkin, Jacques Maritain, C.C. Martindale, and C.S. Lewis.  Of his encounter with the Sheeds, Purtill wrote

The chief characteristics of Sheed and Ward Catholicism were a deep love of the church, which did not preclude a keen awareness of the church’s failings, a keen intellectual interest in the teachings of the church, and a great ability to enjoy the life of faith and the life of reason.  Some of the best discussions I have had and some of the most uproariously good times were with the members of the Catholic Evidence Guild, which was in many ways an extension of the Sheed and Ward apostolate. (Purtill, “Chesterton, the Wards, the Sheeds, and the Catholic Revival,” in THE RIDDLE OF JOY, 23).

One gets jealous of the man’s experiences and encounters just reading this brief passage.  It seems an experience almost equal to Clyde Kilby’s summer of 1966 working with Tolkien, or Father C.J. McNaspy’s few years in the late 1940s studying with Christopher Dawson, or Father Peter Milward having met all of the Oxford greats in the 1950s.