My brother sent the Fr. Barron video about Bob Dylan in China - which is interesting. Browsing around in this series, which I had never before heard whisper of, was this commentary on Tolkien's LOTR.
For those of us who have read a lot of commentary about Tolkien and analysis of his work, the comments seemed rather over-obvious to me at first. Everybody knows that. Yet I recall that only a subset of Tolkien's readers read anything of biography, much less analysis. I can't think of a person I know in the face-to-face world who is much up on that. The many folks I have encountered who engage in discussions about the theology underlying LOTR are all people I know of, not people I know.
So, if you only like to have a bit of that sort of thing, not getting deeply involved in long essays or analysis, this is a good introduction.
I knew that Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and apparently instrumental in C.S. Lewis's conversion. It's funny that C.S. Lewis couldn't create an imaginary world without a living, present, speaking God, an incarnation, and an afterlife. In contrast, Tolkien's imaginary world is full of individuals who face ultimate tests of right and wrong, but the Creator is distant and mysterious, even more so than the Old Testament Jehovah. Tolkien comes across as a Deist. In his attitude toward the immortal soul, he is more like a Sadducee.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Here's part 2:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSPbmWIPAN0