The wisdom of poetic cosmology is that it gives us a complete experience of the hierarchies of order within creation, ranging from the celestial to the corporeal. We ourselves can see the poetic wisdom about song and creation operative, for example, in the book of Genesis. This is possible if we read the poetry of [...]
Those who have read The Lord of the Rings will know about the palantiri, the seeing stones which we look into at our peril. Anyone who looks into one of these stones does not see a complete lie. On the contrary, what he sees might be true. The problem is not that he is seeing [...]
Since the appearance of John Garth’s excellent Tolkien and the Great War in 2003, a number of scholars and writers have explored the role and influence of war on the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and other members of the Inklings. In reviewing Mr. Garth’s book when it came out, I noted that the [...]
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) “Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect and with his usual affectation, it is nonetheless true [...]
I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair. I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be [...]
I became infected with this most deadly disease when I was ten years old. The 1966 World Book Encyclopedia Yearbook arrived, and working my way through it I came across the obituary of T.S. Eliot. There he was in his “five piece suit” gazing at the camera in that lugubriously quizzical way he had. I [...]
On my many travels giving talks on topics related to Christian literature, I am often asked why the Christian Literary Revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has come to an end. Why are there no writers of the caliber of Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot, Greene, Waugh, Tolkien or Lewis today? Or, to cross [...]
The great G.K. Chesterton had a huge impact on my embrace of Christian orthodoxy. It would, in fact, be no exaggeration to say that his was the greatest single influence, under grace, on my conversion. I was, therefore, highly gratified to discover, during the research for my book Literary Converts, that Chesterton also had a [...]
While anyone who knows anything about C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, or Owen Barfield knows of the existence of the Inklings, the group remains nearly impossible to define. Even the members of the group could not identify exactly what it was or what it meant. By the mid 1940s, Lewis defined it as a [...]
Once upon a time a professor of philology, (that is to say, a lover of language), was daydreaming in his university rooms when he scribbled on the back of an anonymous exam paper, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…” Thus was begun a true story—one of the greatest of the true [...]
This weekend, I completed The Silmarillion. Not my first time. In fact, I have read The Silmarillion so many times since the fall of 1977, I have no idea what number of reading I’m actually on. Eight times? Nine? Ten? It was the first J.R.R. Tolkien I had ever encountered, even before The Hobbit or [...]
Tolkien and the Silmarillion, by Clyde S. Kilby (Harold Shaw, 1976) Unless you’re familiar with the excellent Wade Center, the chances are good you’ve never heard of Clyde S. Kilby (1902-1986), a professor of English at Wheaton College from 1935 until his retirement in 1981. Yet, every reader of The Imaginative Conservative should know this man [...]
The Fall of Arthur, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. by Christopher Tolkien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2013). For those of us who have had a life-long passion for and of all things Tolkien, his unpublished poem “The Fall of Arthur” has always been a loving mystery for us. What could it be? How epic? Does [...]
It is difficult to overstate the influence of G.K. Chesterton. Apart from the numerous converts who have come to Christianity, at least in part, because of an encounter with his writings, two of the bestselling books of all time were written, at least in part, under Chesterton’s benign patronage. The Lord of the Rings and [...]