Tag: J. R. R. Tolkien
Tolkien and the Golden Age of Fantasy
By Thomas Sieberhagen For this is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is. –John-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not...
The Abolition of Troy Chatham
Plough has recently published one of the better versions of a critique of Wendell Berry that is fairly common and fairly tiresome. The author, Tamara Hill Murphy, has a great many kind things to say about Berry but then says...
Misreading Tolkien and Misreading Scripture: Responding to O’Keefe and Reno
I am reading John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno’s Sanctified Vision for the independent study on hermeneutics and theological method I am doing this summer. I have found the book fairly helpful overall, and think the authors are right...
Tolkien’s Holy Fools
At one point in The Lord of the Rings Gandalf, the great wizard-hero of the story, is asked by another character what hope there is that Frodo and Sam would fulfill their quest and destroy Sauron’s ring of power. “There never...
What I Saw in the Shire–JRR Tolkien and the Love of Little Things
Note: It’s March 25 which is the day that the Ring of Power was cast into Mount Doom in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. About 10 years ago, a group of Tolkien fans decided to commemorate the day...
The Politics of Tolkien
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone George RR Martin had this to say about the differences between his work and that of JRR Tolkien. “A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across...
A distant, glorious echo: Tolkien and typology
In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien boldy declares his dislike of allegory and notes that, whatever critics and readers have suggested, the novel is most certainly not an allegory. Nonetheless, Christian readers...
Jackson and Tolkien: Hollywood’s Infatuation With Angst
Matt’s piece on The Lord of the Rings a few weeks ago nicely summed up one of the major ways in which Peter Jackson’s view of the world diverges from Tolkien’s: its profoundly different moral vision. But Jackson’s storytelling sense...
What’s Wrong with the Hobbits? Jackson’s Malformed Moral Universe
Jeffrey Weiss thinks that Peter Jackson doesn’t understand the moral universe of J.R.R. Tolkien. That’s a thesis that I wholeheartedly endorse. But not quite in the same way that Weiss does, or at least not with the same bit of...
Ray Bradbury, J.R. R. Tolkien, and the Benefits of Nostalgia
In an excellent piece on Ray Bradbury’s nostalgia, Andy Rau tosses off this fascinating but undeveloped parenthetical: “Of the various Christian fantasists of the 20th century, I think only J.R.R. Tolkien matches Bradbury’s sad but determined nostalgia for what we’ve...