One reason I like Tolkien’s mythology so much is its approach to the relationship between freedom and evil. Generally, when a Christian thinker is asked why evil occurs and is allowed to influence the world, the answer comes down to “freedom.” Tolkien, on the other hand, strongly associates compulsion and slavery with evil, and freedom with goodness and righteousness. Much better. In the common view, people can’t be truly free unless they have a genuine opportunity to do evil as well as good. I don’t really understand this approach. It’s… Read more The Lord of The Rings and The Book of Job →
“… such an expression as ‘prophets old’ may, and probably will, ‘mean’ something quite different from ‘old prophets’. -Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction In contemporary English we almost never place an… Read more Prophets Old and Mountains Cold →
For this poem, I’m sending us back to youtube for a musical version. Many people say that Tolkien was not a good poet. They love what he did for the fantasy novel genre, but he should have just realized he wasn’t a poet. People say the same thing about C. S. Lewis, interestingly enough. Both Lewis and Tolkien, however, were consciously pursuing the same aesthetic aims in their novels and in their poetry (something like a continuation, a new flowering, even a maturation, of the Romantic movement in literature.) Those… Read more Poetry Survey Series Post Nine: The Lay of Beren and Luthien by J. R. R. Tolkien →
Slow Literature 