"The Lord of the Rings" is not an allegorical story, nor should it be treated as such, but that does not mean that the story cannot be used to contemplate and plumb the depths of humanity and its relation to the divine. That J.R.R. Tolkien had a great dislike for his works being called “allegories” [...]
Please never forget, we Catholics have a great legacy. We’ve been promoting liberal education since the days of St. Paul. Some of our greatest saints were liberally educated, and promoting all that is good and true and beautiful has been one of our greatest causes. The author recently delivered the address below to the Roman [...]
"The link between father and son is not only of the perishable flesh: it must have something of 'aeternitas' about it," J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son. "There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together [...]
Might certainly does not make right, but it does not make wrong either. There are times to reject the allure of power, especially when it involves dominating others, and there are times when the right course is to take up arms and fight unreservedly against the forces of darkness. Indeed, Tolkien suggests, there are times [...]
Not surprisingly, J.R.R. Tolkien never finished "The Notion Club Papers," but they present a critical insight into his own view of the Inklings—not only mythologizing, but celebrating, them. Dear Reader, the following—a discussion of Tolkien’s unfinished novel, The Notion Club Papers, comes from chapter six of my forthcoming book, Tolkien and the Inklings: Men of [...]
In “The Lord of the Rings,” the One Ring and the One Sin are symbolic similitudes. As the One Ring is “unmade” on Mount Doom, so the One Sin is “unmade” on the hill of Golgotha, the place of the skull. Therefore, if the Ring is synonymous with sin in general and Original Sin in [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien is not only the greatest mythmaker of the 20th century, he is our equivalent of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Just as we read "The Divine Comedy" and come to understand the late Middle Ages, so will someone, five hundred years from now, read Tolkien to understand our era. I’ve had the opportunity to [...]
The Great War destroyed much the Inklings had held true, personally and culturally. Each lost friends, and each felt the guilt that any survivor of a war feels. Many of them refused to talk about their own experiences, for good or ill. J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps, provides the best example. Though not the best-known Inkling, Adam [...]
What is this fear of spiders? There is a natural fear of venomous creatures, but the spider’s venom is not the only threat. She spins a web. She entraps her prey. She wraps them tightly to eat them later. As the ghost in Hamlet cries about his own venomous murder: “O Horrible, O horrible, most [...]
Thomas Honegger Born in Zürich (Switzerland) in 1965, Dr. Thomas Honegger is a specialist in Medieval Germanic languages and a noted Tolkien scholar. After completing all levels of academic training at the University of Zürich, where in 1996 he earned his doctorate with a thesis entitled Animals in Medieval English Literature, he worked [...]
The way of humility leads, via the rolling road of wonder, to the heaven-haven of the reward. The way of pride leads, via the thorny path of prejudice, to a hell of one’s own devising. “For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!” In Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord of the [...]
Western Civilization is undeniably in decline and indeed its very existence is in doubt. Yet these thoughts ought not to drag conservatives down into a morass of defeatism. Though the hour is late, a remnant must run to the barricades and shield itself and whatever is left of Western Civilization from the barbarians at the [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien poured his heart and deepest sense of what “right” reality meant into his subcreative work. His world of Middle Earth is based on monarchy, tradition, obscure and yet profoundly meaningful rituals involving sacred and elevated languages. It is peopled by kings and peasants, wizards and sorcerers. Its economy is distributist. The men of [...]
In a world and at a time when men have discarded the idea of intellectual truth, it is through the soul and in the imagination that they can, and must, be reached. In a recent address to the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, Cardinal Raymond Burke called for a return to Summorum Pontificum and greater access [...]