Baptizing Middle-Earth

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

J R. R. Tolkien once wrote ruefully, “Being a cult figure in one’s own lifetime I am afraid is not at all pleasant.” His popularity still has its unpleasant side effects. The peculiar enthusiasms of many of his fans, the existence of fantasy as a lurid paperback genre, and the flavor of the recent movie adaptations have given The Lord of the Rings a frivolous or even Dungeons-and-Dragons image, in spite of Tolkien’s own seriousness both as a writer and as a Catholic. Ralph C. Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth seeks to counter this trend. Wood examines The Lord of the Rings “to trace the way it disclose... the principal claims of Christian faith.” He calls his project “not a scholarly study so much as a theological meditation on The Lord of the Rings .”

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Tolkien and the Gift of Mortality

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

When I started reading The Lord of the Rings as an undergraduate, I was half-embarrassed to be doing so. I might become one of those girls who left each other messages on the dorm message board in elvish runes and stayed up late discussing the geography of Middle Earth in fake English accents. Even after I had overcome my snobbery and discovered the book’s magnificence, literary pretensions still kept me away from the appendices: Detailed explanations of invented anthropology and linguistics—what could they be but the self-indulgent folly of an otherwise great writer? But when chance or boredom finally led me to leaf through them one day, I came upon what I still find the most exquisitely sorrowful moment in a book filled with exquisitely beautiful sorrow.

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Baptizing Middle-Earth

Tolkien and the Gift of Mortality