How could one possibly identify with the utterly pathetic and self-centred Gollum? The only answer, I came to understand with a sickening sense of resignation, is that those who identify with Gollum are those whose own identity has been gollumized by their slavery to the power of the real-life Ring which rules their lives. One [...]
Michael Jahosky argues in his new book that J.R.R. Tolkien engaged in the telling of a parable, and that the great author wanted to create Christian art and mythology, not Christian propaganda. The Good News of the Return of the King by Michael T. Jahosky (230 pages, Wipf and Stock, 2020) Scholar Michael T. Jahosky [...]
I was still puzzled by the mystery of why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had permitted me, an unknown writer, to visit him for an interview when he had spurned the advances of many better-known authors. The mystery was solved by his wife, Natalya, soon after she had welcomed me. In my previous essay, we concluded with my [...]
In the character of Gollum, J.R.R. Tolkien perfectly portrays a being distorted by depraved desire and dominated by a magnificently evil obsession. However, as I was re-reading the "The Lord of the Rings," I began to wonder about the origins of this pathetic creature. For summertime reading I have returned to an old favorite: the [...]
What is it about J.R.R Tolkien that speaks so powerfully? What are the roots of his enchanting genius? In my editorial for the new Tolkien theme issue of the St. Austin Review, I state that the very word “Tolkien” has great power of enchantment. Seeing it, or hearing it spoken, brings to life strange and [...]
For J.R.R. Tolkien, mythology touches the deepest part of our souls, and invites us to explore the beauty of creation and to discover and participate in the sacramental nature of life. The mythology and purpose guiding his works was nothing less than the return to Christendom. J.R.R. Tolkien, I believe, was one of the most [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien proclaimed that fairy—like all mythology—is an expression of our deepest longings and fears. Fairy itself, far from being supernatural, is the most natural of worlds, and reminds us of the deepest truths of existence. For J.R.R. Tolkien, Fairy was a world parallel to ours, embodying many of the rules and norms and ideas [...]
Coming when it did in J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing career, “On Fairy Stories” reveals more about the mind and soul of the man than any other non-fiction work he produced in his lifetime. Not too long after Tolkien had published The Hobbit—to much critical acclaim—and was just beginning a sequel to it, the Faculty of Arts [...]
Christopher Tolkien, in “The Return of the Shadow,” breaks down J.R.R. Tolkien’s drafts of the sequel to “The Hobbit” into three phases. In the third phase, the situations around the characters do grow tellingly darker, with drastic implications for the story that could shake the foundations even of the Blessed Realm, the land of the [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien intended the new book, which would later develop into “The Lord of the Rings,” to be a simple sequel to “The Hobbit.” Yet somehow the sequel was growing more adult, and Tolkien admitted it reflected the “darkness of the present days” in the shadow of the Second World War. On September 21, 1937, [...]
In his short story, “Leaf by Niggle,” J.R.R. Tolkien provides a much more colourful and comforting purgatorial vision than that afforded by Dante. Niggle, a personification of the Artist, recognizes the landscape as the perfect, living form of which his painting was but a shadow or a foreshadowing. J.R.R. Tolkien expressed a dislike for formal [...]
We must respect the difficulty and danger of the jobs of those who protect us and stop willfully blinding ourselves to the unpleasant realities around us. Let us defend, support, and celebrate our police and our military; without them, our world would be a far more perilous place. This semester, I am happily exercising one [...]
What, exactly, is Faerie? While not quite the realm of the supernatural, it is the realm of grace (and its enemies), and it can be, even in its greatest beauty, dangerous in the extreme. It is also, by its very nature, sacramental, tangible, and incarnational. On March 8, 1939, just five months shy of the [...]
An endearing story about fathers and sons—and almost certainly an autobiographical understanding of J.R.R. Tolkien himself and his own, mostly imagined father, as well as Tolkien and his son Christopher—”The Lost Road” begins with a son, Alboin, asking his father, Oswin, about the origin of his name. Though Tolkien had already written and published The [...]