There is an outstanding book entitled “Shadows of Imagination”, that compares the work of C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkein and Charles Williams. It explains that Christian values are opposed to Heroic ones. The doctrine of forgiveness of sins prohibits revenge and the vendetta, concepts which are a part of all heroic poetry.

Tolkein’s world, like Beowulf, is the world of the Epic Hero. It is a dark battleground where there is no assurance that God has taken sides, and where evil must be combatted simply because it is part of the heroic code to do so. If The Rings can be taken as a parable of the modern world, it means to say that society’s struggle against evil is at best only temporary, and is achieved at tremendous cost.

The Rings, as a mythological world that mirrors our own, is most often compared to the Narnia Series written by C.S. Lewis. It has been said that C.S. Lewis’s work is more Christian than Tolkein’s because of the optimism of Lewis’s heros, especially in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”

Lewis applies the Christian doctrine of redeemable mankind and nature to his work, with salvation being his ultimate goal. As a result, Lewis’s Hero’s succeed in their quest and return home unharmed. Tolkien’s Hero’s, on the other hand, are maimed in body and disheartened in spirit. They never truly recover.

There is another factor that should be considered when attempting to understand what The Rings means in a Christian sense. There exist two major cultural variations of Christianity: The first may be thought of as Camelot Christianity. It recognizes class distinction, and places great emphaisis on honor, noblesse oblige, and military prowness. This is the kind of Christianity that America has always embraced. (And that the military depends on). The second form of Christianity is submissive piety, stemming directly from the gospel message. I think that Tolkein tends toward the first kind of Christianity, and Lewis toward the second.

So, here’s a question: Can Tokein’s mythology
serve as a model of greatness and valor in a time where it seems to have died? And if it can, in the name of what cause should modern men fight?

Mr. Auster is in for a real treat. I am a somewhat jealous of the thrill he will experience. I have read Lord of the Rings many times and even started reading it over again just last week. A truly virtuous, gripping story. In short, a traditionalist’s idea of a perfect work of art.

For Mr. Auster’s sake, it must be mentioned that Lord of the Rings is not an allegory, so don’t look for hidden messages. It is pure goodness expressed in writing. Tolkien’s Catholicism undoubtedly influenced him, but he always denied any allegorical content.

I will certainly like the books more than the movies. I just saw “Fellowship” for the second time, on video (the first time was in the theaters two years ago), and the over-the-top sensationalism profoundly mars it. Here’s one example of how the movie spoils the book. The scene in the book where Boromir tries to get the Ring from Frodo (which I had jumped ahead to) is deeply tragic and moving, as it forces Frodo into utter isolation and increases his burden all the more. The same scene in the movie is ridiculously overdone, with sensationalism and hyped-up thrills and fear and special effects replacing the tragic sense of the book.

By coincidence, Don Feder has a (somewhat overlong) article at today’s FrontPage on the traditionalist meaning of LOTR. While he makes some worthwhile points, Feder makes the typical conservative mistake of thinking that the movie is popular for the same reasons Feder himself likes it,
that it stands for the defense of the West against tyranny and terrorism. It doesn’t seem to occur to Feder that many fans of the movie may be liberal anti-war types and Bush-haters. It would have been better if Feder had said, “I like this movie because it represents traditional values,” rather than “The movie is popular because it represents traditional values.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11481

Don Feder, like many conservatives; are always looking to popular culture for any signs of approval, or shared values, and when they think they see such, they grab onto it against reason and experience. There are many ways to look at LOTR; and you can be sure the left sees Rings in a very different light than Feder sees it in.

I’ve combined Mr. Hagan’s excellent comment on Don Feder with my own, and posted it at Front Page.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/commentdetail.asp?ID=11481&commentID=227209

Modern culture is doing what it always does: eating the past, gaining temporary energy from it and converting what remains to waste. I like the films quite a lot, and the stories have been a part of me all my life. Tolkien himself was famously contemptuous of allegory, but at the same time referred to LOTR as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”. The movies are less so, seemingly deliberately less so from watching Peter Jackson’s commentary on them. The books themselves were coopted by hippie environmentalists in the 1960’s because of the Catholic theme of stewardship of nature opposed to industrial capitalism in them: the desecration of art by moderns sometimes proceeds at a slow pace, but it proceeds with the relentless comprehensiveness of a glacier. Tolkien’s lack of explicit allegory is a great strength in his stories; it makes them complete, avoids the anachronistic problem of forcing you to think “this is just a story, and X corresponds to Y” that plagues allegory. But it also makes them more easy to usurp for other purposes; and they are starting to become raw material - rich raw material, full of energy and life - for the mills of moderns and postmoderns like Jackson and his concubine.

I think this is the second mention I’ve seen to Jackson’s “concubine.” What is Matt referring to?

I liked the first two movies, though they can’t compare to the books. When watching I made a conscious decision not to make the comparison my yardstick, and ended up enjoying them a great deal.

On the link with traditionalism - it’s there. The books certainly have it, though in a very subtle form, and I didn’t really catch it on first reading, as a budding adolescent atheist. It’s a common reaction that there is no religion in LOTR, and it was mine on first reading. It’s mistaken. The remarks about the one (not their maker)who is guiding the Ring to Frodo and Bilbo and the ceremony before the meal taken by Faramir and the Rangers in TTT clearly indicate that the Western peoples share a belief in a transcendental moral order over Middle Earth. Look at the Hobbit’s calendar in the appendix to ROTK. The hobbit’s “Highday”, corresponding to our Sunday, is “the Day of the Valar”, the powers or Gods of the world. Tolkien did not stress this stuff in the body of the fiction, but he let it creep in by implication.

I think Mr Auster is right about the spirit in which millions of the viewers take the movies - but I don’t think it may matter that much in the long run. Even the movies show personal loyalty, a deep sense of the value of the past, the threat of corruption of the good, the possibility of redemption by the evil (even if it is at last rejected). All fine traditional values, and they end up with a good old fasioned monarchial restoration.

I spent most of my adult life as a far left liberal, even calling myself a radical at times. Hell, I worked for Jesse Jackson’s campaign in ‘88 and voted twice for Slick Willie, mouring that he was too conservative. And all that time Tolkien and Lewis were two of my favorite writers, with Chesterton and Belloc in their train. I reread them over and over and eventually
even a dolt such as myself had to consider why I was so powerfully attracted to writers who were so diametrically opposed to my consciously held beliefs. They certainly played a part, with many other influences, in turning me to the Right in the late ‘90’s.

Who knows what long term effect these movies will have on the Bush haters and liberals who view them now? And especially on their kids…

Peter Jackson has said that Tolkien’s Catholicism had no effect on the way he made the movies. I say, trust the tale, not the teller.

Well, I was wrong about Highday. It’s equivalent to Friday, not Sunday, but it is dedicated to the Valar.

See http://www.shire-reckoning.com/calendar.html

scroll down to “Days of the Week”.

And wouldn’t you know it, they quote the Faramir passage I mentioned:

“Before they ate, Faramir and all his men turned and faced west in a moment of silence. Faramir signed to Frodo and Sam that they should do likewise.

‘So we always do,’ he said, as they sat down: ‘we look towards Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be. Have you no such custom at meat?’”

Joseph writes:

“Eventually even a dolt such as myself had to consider why I was so powerfully attracted to writers who were so diametrically opposed to my consciously held beliefs.”

This reminds me of the literary critic Lionel Trilling, who realized to his discomfort that while he was a liberal, the authors he most admired, such as Yeats and Eliot, were anything but liberals. This led him to some mild questioning of liberalism, but in the end he remained a liberal, failing even to take a stand against the revolutionary outrages of the Sixties, because, he admitted at one point, they expressed his own inner discontents.

Matt wrote:

“Modern culture is doing what it always does: eating the past, gaining temporary energy from it and converting what remains to waste.”

This is a great image and insight. By contrast, the right relationship with the past would be to commune with it, to participate in it, thus bringing the past to life even as we are renewed by it.

Tolkien wrote the following about LOTR in 1955. “There are certain things and themes that move me specially. The inter-relations between the ‘noble’ and ‘simple’ (or common vulgar) for instance. The ennoblement of the ignoble I find specially moving.”

This is one of the central themes of LOTR. It’s traditionalist conservative in the sense that it requires a depiction of what is noble, though I don’t think that making the simple, peasant-like hobbits bear the larger part of nobility is especially traditionalist.

It’s been a long time since I read LOTR. Someone who has read it more recently might be able to tell me whether the character of Eowyn was presented in the film as she appeared in the book. In the film she came across as a kind of feminist “woman in the military” character.

The Australian actress who played her said “I think she’s a very modern character and unusual for stories like this, especially to have been written when she was, and by a man who you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of as a feminist.”

Hello everyone! Long-time lurker, first-time poster. Lawrence, Peter Jackson’s concubine is Fran Walsh, his long-time girlfriend, business partner and mother of his two children, Katie and Billie. The children have small roles in the first two pictures, as well.

You are right, the books are much better than the movies.

People may not like the Lord of the Rings because it expresses conservative values, but it seems that some people dislike Tolkien because they perceive LOTR as being “right wing.” There is a “rival” fantasy trilogy by one Tad Williams which reportedly is designed as a “politically correct” counterpart to LOTR. I cannot say for sure, since I some cannot work up the enthusiasm to look at it.

Matt’s quote of Tolkien (which I was unaware of) is consistent with the character Galadriel, who is very much like the Blessed Virgin. She is beautiful, powerful, and incorruptible. Though Tolkien did not intend explicit allegory, he was perhaps influenced here by the only perfect woman.

Recently on TV I saw a nonfictional story about Tolkien and LOTR. Tolkien supposedly wanted to abandon the story at some point, but his good friend C.S. Lewis (whom I also read and admire) encouraged him.

Aragorn was miscast in the movies. Aragorn is tall (“Longshanks”) and regal . Vigo Mort… is neither, not that he isn’t a good actor. Alan Jackman would have been the perfect choice.

In Viggo Mortensen’s performance as Aragorn, we see something that could only have happened in the post modern world: the epic hero as an unshaven, greasy-haired, low talker. (However, his acting, if not his hair, improved somewhat in The Two Towers.)

Re the hair, Stephen Hunter’s review in the 12/17/02 Washington Post captures it pretty well:

“Other than a distressing lack of quality hair care products, things are fine in Middle Earth…. And finally, the hair. I suppose if you’re shooting three movies back to back on the other side of the world and it’s one of the biggest gambles ever in the entertainment industry, a detail might have slipped your mind. In Jackson’s case, that little detail was shampoo. He either couldn’t afford it or he forgot all about it. The result is that you never saw so many greasy, tangled, thorny, wet, lusterless protein brambles as are on display in this movie. Viggo Mortensen, with a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou, leads the troop. A man named Viggo ought to do better than this.”

I understand Mr. Auster’s point regarding Aragorn’s unkempt appearance in the movies, but I had the impression that “Rangers from the North” are supposed to be rag-tag. When Aragorn accepts his role as king, his appearance seemed to change accordingly.

Yeah, but meanwhile, we have to sit through nine hours of giant close-ups of “a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou.” Surely a character’s unkemptness or hardbitten life could be suggested by less graphic means. :-)

To P. Murgos: Who is Alan Jackman — do you mean Alan Rickman or Hugh Jackman? Both actors are taller than Viggo Mortensen — Mortensen is 5’11” and Rickman and Jackman are both over 6’, according to imdb.com. I think that Mr. Mortensen was very good in the role, albeit his character was less sure of himself than book Aragorn. Actually, the first Aragorn hired was Stuart Townsend, but he left because of “creative differences.” Peter Jackson thought that he was too young for the role — Townsend is now 31 and Mortensen 45, portraying a man of 88 (those with Numenorean blood aged very slowly. Aragorn was around 208 years old when he died).

If you check out LOTR websites, you’ll find many comments regarding Aragorn’s oft-dishevelled appearance. In The Two Towers, after he fell into the river during the battle with the warg riders, I thought, “well, he’s finally taking a bath!” Many women find his scruffiness attractive. At the coronation scene in Return of the King, he appeared clean and even his beard seemed a bit fuller, neater and more kingly.

I hope I can be forgiven for making observations about a work of which I have so far read very little (namely the key parts of Fellowship including the conference in Rivendell and the last chapter, the first few chapter of Two Towers, and the appendix on the Numenorian kings), but I just have to say how amazed I am. There’s so much to say, but I’ll just limit myself to this.

The sheer _particularity_ of Tolkien’s created world gives it a density and texture that makes it alive. There is the specificity of the geography (a good map is an absolute requirement for the reader), and of the various races and their characteristics. Tolkien doesn’t set out to tell a myth. He sets out to tell something that has the specificity and concreteness of history. But the story he tells has such a density that it takes on the quality of myth. For example, when Aragorn and his companions have to make the choice whether to follow Frodo and Sam toward Mordor, or whether to head in the opposite direction and try to rescue Pippin and Merry from the Orcs, and they decide on the latter and head off on this exhausting chase across the Northern regions of Rohan toward Isengard, everything has this concrete specificity about it. Yet the whole “lay-out” of the story—including the actions and sufferings of the characters, the detailed geographical setting in which they move, the awful dread that continues to hover over them—has such a density and resonance that it takes on the quality of myth, of something that lives outside time. Tolkien has created a historical, particular world which is so real in its particularity that it becomes mythical. This is an amazing achievement. It is analogous to God’s own creation of the world.

I meant Hugh Jackman.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s achievement in imagining Middle Earth and then making it live for readers is almost unfathomable. There are other imagined worlds in literature, but I cannot think of another that is so specific, and so thoroughly endowed with its own history, languages and legends. While I believe that Tolkien’s Catholic faith informed his stories (he said so himself, in his letters), to me what is most remarkable in his writing is what Mr. Auster mentions: Tolkien’s uncanny ability to create a fictional world (his own term for it was “secondary creation”; primary creation of course being the world that God has made) and make it seem so concretely real.

I think the key to understanding how Tolkien was able to do what he did is to remember that Tolkien was steeped in story and language. He was fascinated by man’s ability to invent and tell tales, as he was fascinated by the languages we use to tell them. He spent his life as a professor of Old English and medieval literature. A lifelong student of epic and the craft of storytelling (especially in the English and Norse traditions), Tolkien had an extraordinary stock of stories to draw from as he created his secondary world. Although he was very familiar with Arthurian stories, especially the works of Chrétien de Troyes, as well as Dante, Ariosto and Tasso, his heart was with the Germanic North, especially the Anglo-Saxon England that fell to William of Normandy after Hastings. He also had that familiarity with classical languages and literature, as well as the Bible, that was de rigueur for an educated man of the more civilized time in which he grew up. In addition to his fund of sources, Tolkien had a tragic sense that derived from being orphaned and from witnessing (and taking part in, on the Western Front) the destruction in the Great War of the society that had produced him.

For those who are interested in Tolkien’s Middle Earth as a literary creation, a feat of story-telling, I would recommend reading what Tolkien had to say about literature and story-telling. There is a good collection of his literary essays available under the title “The Monsters and the Critics.” Most are adapted from lectures. While the book’s title comes from an essay about Beowulf criticism (well worth reading), I found the most helpful and interesting essay to be “On Fairy-Stories,” which sheds a lot of light on what Tolkien believed these stories and their uses were. Not always easy reading, but well worth it for anyone who wants to go beyond Middle Earth. Reading Tolkien on them has led me back to medieval works not read since college such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I think it would please Tolkien to know that his fiction has brought at least a few people back to reading the medieval poems and stories to which he devoted his career. HRS

There is a Lord of the Rings musical planned for the London stage, scheduled to open next year, I believe. No doubt if it is a success it will come to New York. Anyway, Hugh Jackman is not only an actor but a singer — He starred in a production of Oklahoma and is currently starring in a Bway musical called The Boy from Oz, a play featuring the music of Peter Allen (one of Liza Minnelli’s ex-husband’s) who died from Aids in 1992. Perhaps he might play Aragon in the stage version. I must say that he is a dish!

Here’s a blunt critical comment about the movies, from the thread at FrontPage that I’ve linked above:

“The books were interesting and a fun read. Once. But the movies aren’t. Too much violence (didn’t remember that much from the books—read them far ago), and too long (ever hear of editing?). And the on-screen characterizations—is Sam a fairy, or what? Ludicrous.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/commentdetail.asp?ID=11481&commentID=226671

Also, someone said at FP that the extended DVD editions of the movies are better than the theatrical releases. I had heard that an extended edition of all three movies together was going to be released on DVD in a few months. But the implication seems to be that the original DVDs of each movie are themselves extended editions. Is that so?

For the first two movies, they released the theatrical version DVD first (in August of 2002 and 2003), then released an extended version of both movies (in November of 2002 and 2003) about a month before the second and third movies came out. Hope that makes sense. It was a nice little marketing ploy to promote the movie and make money on merchandise.

And yes, the extended versions are far superior, in my opinion, to the theatrical version. The characters are better developed and they include scenes from the book that weren’t in the theatrical version. The extended DVDs also contain a huge documentary about the book(s) and the movies.

As a side note, they will proably be releasing special super duper duluxe box set editions of those movies until the sun becomes a red giant.

Thanks to Damon for the “real gen,” as Hemingway called it. (“Gen” is short for intelligence.)

I recently read on one of the websites that the extended edition of Return of the King will be some five or five and a half hours long. A great deal was edited out of the theatrical version — for example, Aragorn’s healing of Eowyn in the House of Healing (I saw a photo somewhere of the scene, so it was filmed) and the romance and marriage of Eowyn and Faramir.

Having read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and enjoyed them immensely, I still haven’t decided whether I will ever see these movies.

Modern movies, of which I’ve seen maybe 1/2 dozen or so in the past 15 years, are very disappointing compared to the pre-mid-60s classics, (which I watch regularly.) I never saw Titanic, or Matrix, or any of these others, have no public TV-channel access, don’t know who most of the actors/actresses today are, and feel no sense of deprivation. The modern special effects are nice but are a poor substitute for that special quality in the old moving pictures that the newer variety just doesn’t have. And what little I’ve seen of the modern acting seemed like trash compared to the old days.

So as I’ve been following this thread, partly I’ve been checking for evidence that I should see these films. The THREAD has been wonderful in itself, but I’m still not persuaded that these flicks would be worth the time or money. It’s not that I have a _principle_ against seeing modern movies; I just don’t find them worth the time when I could be reading another good book.

P.S. A word in appreciation also of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy! :-)

By the way, has anyone else heard the latest criticism of the LotR movies? Are you ready for this? — they’re ‘racist.’:

http://paris.indymedia.org/article.php3?id_article=13086

The article by Lloyd Hart which Mr. LeFevre linked actually gave me nausea — and I wasn’t even able to get through more than the first two paragraphs, so that’s a pretty powerful emetic effect. Of course such a screed can’t be taken seriously, so don’t anybody worry about it. But that’s the kind of sickening stuff you see in leftie Frog journals — they’ll put stuff in that’s guaranteed to make your skin crawl, no matter whether it’s written by a French leftist, an Anglo leftist as in this instance, or whoever. No one does Left as irritatingly as the Froggies. This particular example’s almost enough to make a guy become a staunch Bush fan. I mean, let’s be honest — this article is worse than the stuff you see in “The Nation.” The French have got to be the worldwide champions of detestable anti-U.S. leftism. When I lived in Europe (and avoided “Le Monde” like the plague, I might add — never touched the rag even though I was a Com-symp at the time, it was so anti-American) I was a member of the “Association Belgo-Chine,” a pro-Red-Chinese propaganda outfit (yes, I’ve come a long way since then), and I STILL couldn’t stomach the French leftists, they were so incredibly irritating, and know-nothings to boot.

What a delightful discussion! The movies are justified, if for no other reason, in bringing the trilogy to the attention of millions more readers, who may benefit from the education the books offer. I for one had more or less put the books away, mistakenly, with childish things, and thanks to Peter Jackson and crew I now enjoy them as a reservoir of the Good on a level with Dante.

Mr. Auster excuses himself for having read so little, but in his appreciation of the concreteness and emotional atmosphere of Middle Earth he has already reached an understanding of Tolkien’s achievement that might elude another for thirty years. Mr. Auster and Mr. Sutherland both comment on the source of Tolkien’s excellence from different perspectives. Tolkien’s learning, which Mr. Sutherland refers to, informs the work very deeply, and is invisible on the surface. There is none of the distracting “referentiality” that academics prize. The concreteness Mr. Auster speaks of is realized with a truly remarkable tact in the scope of description, so that imagery seems to pass through the reader’s consciousness at the pace and in the level of detail with which it is perceived by the characters to whom the narrator is close at a given time. The world seems complete at any given moment, not because there is an encyclopedic rendition of sensation, but because sensations are delineated on a scale congruent (in swiftness and detail) with the narration of the characters’ experience. My only recommendation to Mr. Auster would be to start at the beginning of the Hobbit and read through.

Mr. Lefevre should see the movies. The people involved deserve great credit for their mammoth undertaking, even if the fault-finding will go on forever. There are moments in the movies when good screenwriting, good directing, and superb acting come together to shed light on the books in ways that every viewer will benefit from. Not everyone brings such talent to bear on his own quiet reading! Some of the changes made for plot purposes, however, are disgusting slanders, such as the changes made to Faramir and the Ents. The extended versions are worth seeing for the extra material, some of which is more faithful to the spirit of the book, some less. Mr. Jackson is a remarkable editor in the first two parts, shaping the mass of material into well-paced presentations, and you learn from the extended versions that much of what he left out is better left unseen.

Eowyn wants to go to battle in the books as well as in the movie. That was not an innovation. It was an innovation for her to offer Aragorn some inedible stew she cooked herself, which we see in the extended Two Towers—an absurd slander. There is no reason a princess (even if Anglo-Saxon in basic culture) who is in sole charge of a royal household would be unable to cook a passable stew. In the movie version of the Return of the King she seems somewhat infirm of purpose in going to battle, and seems to fall a little short of her grim determination in the book. She adopts a nom de guerre in the book which is absent from the film.

I agree that Viggo Mortensen barely rises to the occasion demanded by Aragorn, but the slimy hair is not the problem. It is the lack of hidden majesty. Aragorn looks pretty sordid to the hobbits, but he is haughty, sharp-tongued, experienced, and shrewd. Mortensen is fleeing from his kingly destiny and is not convincing when he accepts it. Indeed, the film shortchanged Aragorn in that transition, leaving out his crucial encounter with Sauron.

Christopher Lee was flawless as Saruman; his familiarity with the book is probably one reason. Mortensen apparently knew nothing of the book when he arrived on the set. The absurd flopping wizards contest was not Mr. Lee’s fault.

Ian McKellen was great as Gandalf. Elijah Wood was usually good as Frodo, but it was not a good idea to make Frodo twenty-something instead of fifty, which he is in the book. Obviously that makes a huge difference. (Not Elijah’s fault.)

Cate Blanchett was fine as Galadriel; the preface to the Fellowship which she narrates is as good as anything else in the whole series. Liv Tyler deserves great credit for the beautiful strength she shows within her external softness. The reckless distortion of the plot that sends her towards the Gray Havens is (again) not her fault.

The score of the Two Towers is a very fine symphony by Howard Shore; the score of Fellowship is quite a good one. Both are worth listening to on their own.

We’ve listened to several chapters of Rob Inglis’s audio reading of the Fellowship. It is worthwhile to hear what an insightful, inventive actor can make of the text.

How much impact the movie and the books will have on the pervasive liberalism of the era remains to be seen. Extreme liberals love the Lord or the Rings. That should be no surprise—look how many Catholics are virtually Communists! They find in it what they wish to. Maybe some will be converted by the books or by the movie. Let’s hope so.

To come to a point, Aristotle sets out three definitive principles for political systems: virtue, freedom, and wealth. The world of the Lord of the Rings is one determined by virtue. The virtue of the common man—the hobbit—determines the fate of the world. When Americans learn to elevate virtue consistently to the fundamental principle of the political system, rather than an accidental feature of individuals, and elevate it over freedom and wealth, which are destructive without virtue, we will be on the road to recovery. Tolkien is a warm inn on that road.

Thanks to Bill for his awesome review of the films! I didn’t realize that Christopher Lee was in them — that’s a good reason by itself to see them. I’m almost convinced. ;-)

People in this thread who are looking for a book that at least is equal, or better than LOTR, would do well to check out “Duncton Wood” by the English author William Horwood. This is a six book series, with over 5,000 pages.

I’m not so sure that novels and movies should be compared directly since they are different, though closely related, media. However, I do it all the time and find that the book is almost always better. This is certainly true of The Lord of the Rings. I can’t really say if Mr. LeFavre should see the movies, but the following links may help. They are a direct comparison of the book(s) and the movies made by someone who apparently has more free time than even I have:
Fellowship:http://gary.appenzeller.net/FotRDifferences.html
Two Towers:http://gary.appenzeller.net/TTTDifferences.html
ROTK:http://gary.appenzeller.net/RotKDifferences.html

Mr. Auster may want to avoid these until he has read the book or seen all the movies, as it will give away most of the plot.

Of course, these point by point comparison can’t really tell you much about the emotional differences, such as the sensationalism that Mr. Auster noted above.

As a minor matter in a long and really terrific thread, I used the phrase “Peter Jackson’s concubine” to denote Fran Walsh (who had tremendous creative input on the films, especially the scripts, and has a lot of footage in the documentaries, etc) because I decline to use a politically correct term like “significant other,” “partner,” or some other such nonsense when she is, in fact, his concubine. That isn’t to say that the production of these films isn’t a tremendous accomplishment - I absolutely love them despite their not insignificant flaws. That may be due to my love for the story which precedes the films, but I love them nonetheless. I love the fact that they were made at all, and it is astonishing that Jackson and co (being fairly typical liberal moderns, at least judging from their own words in interviews and documentaries) managed to preserve so much of what Tolkien produced despite their utter misunderstanding of Tolkien’s wall of separation between religious allegory and LOTR. Also there were some true innovations (of the good, reinforcing sort) in the transition to film, such as the bugs and spiders running in terror from the Black Riders.

There are plenty of things to critique, but only one actually came close to ruining the movies for me: the childishness of Frodo and Sam’s very modern shallow relationship on the stairs of Cirith Ungol. The “real” Frodo and Sam are men (of short stature with furry toes): lifelong friends, humble, unflinchingly loyal to the death, and noble. Real male friends don’t act like teenage homosexuals “breaking up”. I was left with the impression that the filmmakers wouldn’t understand a lifelong loyal male friendship if it bit them on the nose. A close second is the fact that Frodo destroys the ring by pushing Gollum into the abyss: in the book the ring destroys itself in enforcing Gollum’s oath to Frodo, in which he promised on the Precious that if he failed to serve the master of the Precious he would be thrown into the cracks of Doom.

The criticisms cascade from there - they are legion. But the films are still among the very highest points of our cultural cellar, Hollywood. That Hollywood made these films at all is astonishing and worth celebrating.

Matt wrote: “Real male friends don’t act like teenage homosexuals “breaking up”. “

Yeah, I thought that scene was a little too weepy as well. Perhaps the actors (Wood and Astin) were advised by Ian McKellan (who plays Gandalf). McKellan did advise Astin to grab Wood’s hand in the Rivendell scene in Fellowship. Not that this is necessarily a homosexual thing to do, but McKellan’s rationale was to the effect that as a gay “man” he would know more about male friendship than those emotionally retarded breeders. How does being a homosexual give him special insight into male friendship, I wonder? Not that I expect him to be of the opinion that homosexuality is what happens when your relationship to those of the same gender is warped.
Not to take away from McKellan as an actor, whatever his other faults may be. He did a fantastic job as Gandalf.
Going back to Mortenson’s greasy haired portrayal of Aragorn, it seems to me that his demeanor and uncertainty is influenced by the seventies antihero who has become almost ubiqitous in contemporary cinema. One of the main themes of the book was heroism, and the postmodern uncertainty of Mortensen’s Aragorn undermines this in the movies, leaving the real heroism to the other characters. Perhaps in the extended DVD edition of Return of the King they’ll have a special “Queer Eye for the Heir Guy” in which Aragorn gets a makeover and a hot oil treatment. How’s that for postmodern?

Sorry for misspelling your name a few posts above, Mr. LeFevre.

Quite all right sir. And thank you for those links above. This has been a truly wonderful thread! :-)

Bill wrote:

“The world seems complete at any given moment, not because there is an encyclopedic rendition of sensation, but because sensations are delineated on a scale congruent (in swiftness and detail) with the narration of the characters’ experience.”

This is an excellent analysis of Tolkien’s narrative technique.

I will try to take Bill’s advice and stop my present reading and go back and start with The Hobbit as my bedtime reading. But I don’t know if I can get into a pure Hobbit world as much as the tragic world of Men and Dwarves and Elves.

On the movies, I don’t want to spoil anyone’s pleasure in them, but, especially regarding The Fellowship of the Ring, I found most of it horrendous, a non-stop assault on one’s senses by super-violence, super-terror, with only the briefest periods of respite. The movie doesn’t allow you to _enter into_ the world of the picture, rather it assaults you.

The other egregious aspect, which I’ve mentioned before, is the non-stop ultra-closeups. You hardly ever see a character’s figure or even his upper body, just his face, and often, as with Gandalf, the close-ups are so extreme that you only see a PART of his face (and with his gross tangled long grey hair covering his face it’s even worse, yecch). It’s as though the basic art of film making, of showing camera angles to unfold a relationship between characters when they are conversing together, has been lost, since when characters are talking together all Jackson shows is rapid cuts from one huge close-up of a face to another. It’s as though each character is standing there in complete isolation from the others, rather than relating together. This is typical of modern filmmaking and fiction which has trouble placing human beings in a social context; all we have is the SELF, represented by the isolated, twenty-foot-high face of the character.

Ditto the fight sequences. The art of showing the intelligible drama of a fight is foreign to Jackson (as to the director of Gladiator, whose technique was similarly messy and unfocussed). The fight scenes are so jumbled and chaotic that you don’t get a clear sense of the dramatic shape of the fights, it’s just a milling, frightful, over-the-top chaos consisting of one Spielbergian by-the-skin-of-their-teeth escape after another. The scenes of fights in the caves of Moria were the worst. It was also totally unbelievable how these fearsome Orcs and that other horrible huge creature charge our nine heroes (four of whom are diminutive Hobbits), and are effortlessly wiped out while our heroes are barely scratched. To me this was on a level of Rambo single-handedly wiping out the North Vietnamese army in Rambo II. I was completely disbelieving of these scenes.

All this is a shame. The elements of this great story were there, but Jackson is a product of the contemporary, ultra-sensate culture. If he had shortened or left out some of the horrid fight sequences, he could have left in more exposition and character development, which the movie sorely lacked.

Another major flaw in Fellowship was Jackson’s handling of the differential of size between the Hobbits and the others. Sometimes the Hobbits seem four feet tall in relation to the humans, sometimes two feet tall. With each scene, the size differential was different. This is quite disconcerting and hardly a sign of a master of special effects. (Yet certain scenes showing different size characters crossing in front of each other were quite marvelous; I wonder how he did that.)The problem was lessened in The Two Towers by Jackson’s hardly every showing the characters together. Maybe that’s why he placed such emphasis on close-ups, which avoided the necessity of showing them together. However, he does the same thing when it’s a conversation between two humans or between two Hobbits, so that can’t be the explanation.

Two Towers is significantly better, because it’s not all fears and sensations, but more focus on character and plot. But the ultra closeups are still very bad. He created these great costumes, but you barely see them because all you see is their faces. This makes no sense to me.

I did finally find Two Towers to be worth seeing despite its flaws, it grows on you, and has truly marvelous creations like Golum and the Ents. Also, Aragorn’s lines and his acting were significantly improved. But I can’t say the same for Fellowship of the Ring which to me was like an exhausting horror movie that won’t let up.

These elements of Fellowship that bothered me are entirely unnoticed by most fans.

I believe The Hobbit was intended as a children’s book. It’s a light read and doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with Lord of the Rings, although it does add to it. There is another book by Tolkien called the Silmarillion, about Middle Earth in the time of the Elves, and in which the Catholic theology is much more explicit.

Regarding the particularity of Tolkien’s created world of Middle-earth that we discussed earlier, doesn’t that help us see the Ring trilogy as an act of resistance against the disorders of our time, namely against the civic religion of modernity which reduces all of society to false universal abstractions and manageable processes? By creating an analogy to or simulacrum of God’s creation, that is, a world so real in its particularity that its very particularity becomes mythic and universal, isn’t Tolkien creating an image of true existence and true culture, as against the false culture of today, in which all true particularity is progressively wiped out by universalizing forces and formulae?

It also occurs to me that this opens the door to a fruitful comparison of movie and book. If the book can be seen as a traditionalist act of resistance against the disorders of modernity, to what extent can the same be said of the movie?

I cannot offer any original thoughts about Tolkien’s works, but I would suggest, for people unfamiliar with the broader field of fantasy, that those who like LOTR would probably enjoy the following works: Fletcher Pratt’s “The Well of the Unicorn” and Poul Anderson’s “The King of Ys” series.

The last movies I would want to see are the LOTR movies. First, I loved the books and cannot imagine that the proper pace and exposition could be accomplished unless each of the three movies consumed six hours or more, which is not feasible. Second, the greatness, as others have commented, comes partly from the level of detail and the stimulation of your imagination. While reading a book, you have to envision what it looks like to walk through Moria, through Lothlorien, etc. Besides the fact that otherworldly places such as Lothlorien can be described but not cinematically reproduced, the key point is that I am exercising my own imagination while reading the book. When I watch a movie, I am a consumer of the product of someone else’s imagination. It would be impossible not to sit there and say, “That is NOT how the Ents looked!”, etc.

This would not be a big problem in a movie version of a book that was primarily about character development and did not have an entire secondary creation such as Middle Earth. If someone makes a movie version of “Silas Marner”, I am not going to sit there and worry about whether I think the actor looks exactly the way I envisioned the old weaver when I was reading it, because that is incidental to the story. But, how my imagination responded to Tolkien’s writing is NOT incidental to the Lord of the Rings. It is central.

Finally, it is beyond credibility that our cultural sewer, Hollywood, could fail to abuse the book. I think that it depends on the esteem in which you hold the book itself. While it is not holy scripture, it is a beautiful work of art. To say that “OK, they try to turn Eowyn into some postmodern feminist who can fight but cannot cook a stew, and they make Frodo and Sam into a couple of ridiculous little faggots, and Aragorn has lost much of his hidden nobility, but STILL, you should see the movies because of the good things they did in certain scenes, etc.” is just nauseating to me. “Here’s a movie about the Bible. Sure, they turn David and Jonathan into homos, and Jesus screws around with a couple of female disciples, and there are historical inaccuracies and anachronistic projections of modern leftist political claptrap back into the book, but you really ought to see the movie because of the way they made certain things come alive with great cinematography.” Do we have such low expectations of Hollywood that we accept anything that is better than most of the junk they churn out?

That’s a really interesting comment by Mr. Coleman.

What a range of views we’ve had in this thread! It makes me think that Tolkien fans are like Jews: Two Tolkien fans, three opinions. :-)

Mr. Coleman, to answer your final question: yes.

I do agree, Mr. Auster, that Jackson is a little too fond of the close up, especially considering all the trouble his design team went through to capture the details of the different cultures of Middle Earth. However, this detail does come through (especially with the halls of the Rohirrim and the use of Elvish), which conveys very well (as best as a mainstream movie can, probably) the “particularity” of that world. As you said, it grows on you. Its funny that you should compare Fellowship to a horror movie, because Jackson used to be known as the “clown prince of horror”. Despite his overuse of closeups and dizzying jumpcutting, I thought the movies allowed one to move into that world quite easily. I also found the fight scenes exciting, but perhaps I am a vulgar person with jaded tastes.

Lawrence Auster wrote: “If the book can be seen as a traditionalist act of resistance against the disorders of modernity, to what extent can the same be said of the movie? “

In my meagre attempt at an answer, I would say quite a bit, although much less so than the books. It features themes of heroism, honor, dedication, loyalty, the immediacy of evil, faith in the ultimate triumph of good, and the hero of the story, Sam, is a simple yeoman farmer who just wants to get married and raise a family in his ancestral home. They even left in Gandalf’s reference to “The Secret Fire” (God). This is significant in a medium (mainstream cinema) which usually produces works that glorify casual sex, pointless violence, and the primacy of money and power. It may be true that most people won’t take to heart all these features of the movie, and view it as only a fun adventure, but the same can be said of the book.

Lawrence Auster wrote: “certain scenes showing different size characters crossing in front of each other were quite marvelous; I wonder how he did that”

Sometimes they used green screen, sometimes they used dwarves with masks on (I mean human ones), sometimes they used forced perspective in which the larger character is actually closer to the camera, and sometimes they used people in “Big Rigs” — a sort of oversized fake body on stilts (such as when somebody walks in front of Frodo in the Bar in Bree).

Mr. Coleman wrote:
“This would not be a big problem in a movie version of a book that was primarily about character development and did not have an entire secondary creation such as Middle Earth.”

It is interesting, but I see things as very much the opposite. The details in any character development story are important precisely because they are all that there is to that sort of story. Mess them up and you have lost everything. Tolkien’s books are a portal through which we see his sub-creation of Middle Earth, in all its glorious particularity. I know what to expect from liberal moderns, and I’ve lived with Middle Earth and its characters all my life; so I can effortlessly compensate for the distortions in the modernist lens unless there is actual overt graffiti scrawled on it (as in the Frodo-Sam “breakup” on the stairs of Cirith Ungol). I don’t think Eowyn was portrayed dishonestly; other than the bad stew in the special edition TTT all the errors are of omission. Moderns will always (ridiculously, but again easily filtered in the viewing) see Mary Queen of Scots as a modern feminist, Mary Magdalene as a modern feminist, etc. Feminists only mistake Eowyn for a feminist because she is strong, valiant, tragically heroic, and cold for most of the story - they cannot help but love her, so they have to think of her as one of them. The story of Eowyn’s misplaced loves, and her warming and healing, will never make the screen intact — but I never expected it to.

Mr. Coleman’s last point is certainly a good one. Yes, I think if one watches movies at all these are among the best; they are in my opinion a high point of the cultural sewer that is Hollywood, despite the fact that they are a version of Tolkien’s world seen through a distorted and smudged glass darkly.

I have very high hopes, perhaps too high, for Mel Gibson’s _The Passion_. It may be the first film, or certainly one of very few films, to merit the term high art. We shall see.

I see from my reading at the Encyclopedia of Arda website that the world (Arda) was flat prior to the destruction of Numedor and the removal of the Undying lands from this world, and was made spherical afterward.

It’s a strange idea, but (still on the basis of the same extremely limited knowledge of Tolkien I summed up above) here is what it suggests to me.

The flat world represents the cosmological stage of human development, in which men live in a cosmos full of gods, and human society is seen as an analog of the cosmos, as Voegelin discusses. At this stage, there is a direct connection between the divine cosmos and the world of men. This bridge between the mortal and the immortal is concretized in the physical presence in the world of Aman, the Undying Lands, which is where the Valar, the guardian spirits of the world, dwell, and also where Elves live and never die.

But when the Men of Numedor rebelled against the mortality that their ancestor Elros had chosen (even though their mortal lives had been extremely lengthy and happy), they violated the Ban of the Valar and sought to seize the Undying Lands by force so that they themselves could live forever in this world. This I interpret as a rebellion against the cosmological order. They were seeking to seize the divine and immortal for themselves rather than live as mortals in harmony with it. As a result of this greedy attack by men, the divine and immortal could no longer live directly in the world as before. So the world was made spherical, ceasing to be the flat earth which is the analogue and mirror of the heaven above it. Once the world became spherical, it was “de-divinized,” it began to exist in a realm of material forces rather than of gods. In a de-divinized world, man begins to experience the divine as transcendent rather than as a natural part of the cosmos. Meanwhile, as an intrinsic aspect of this transformation, the Undying Lands—the bridge between the world and the divine cosmos—were removed from the physical world. The Elves could still travel there, but only by a road that left the physical world. The Elves, quasi-immortal, still live in the world, but scattered and in far fewer numbers and in a much less prominent role than before, with the understanding that their days in this world are numbered and they will all soon leave the world for an immortal life completely outside this world. The world, as I interpret the story, will then be completely de-divinized and man will begin to experience divine truth as being wholly transcendent to this world. The Elves who are still present in Middle-earth in the Third Age thus represent the last dying traces of the Old Order, of the cosmological experience, the experience of a cosmos full of gods, before it fades away entirely and is replaced (in the Fourth Age, perhaps?) by a transcendent religion.

Matt, I have to say I find the character of Eowyn a bit disappointing. She made me think of Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman that “I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society … for this distinction … accounts for their (women) preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.”

It’s not that Tolkien was writing with the same motivation as Wollstonecraft. But nonetheless Eowyn is a woman who prefers the masculine heroic virtues to the feminine graceful ones. She says “I wish to ride to war like my brother Eomer, or better like Theoden the king, for he died and has both honour and peace” and “All your words are but to say: you are a woman and your part is in the house. But … I can ride and wield the blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.”

If you look on the web you can see how some women are responding to this. A woman called Rachel says, “The daughter of kings has impacted my life in a way … Eowyn may not have the grace of an Elf, but she has the courage of ten men and the heart of a lion … a fierce personality … Appeared to be a defenseless maiden, needed to be protected, but how wrong they are! Eowyn has always been my favorite character. What I admire most is her strength and her untamed spirit. She feels a need to fight!”

Personally, I’m sick of women fighting their way across the cinema and TV screens. For me, Eowyn was the one major irritant in what was otherwise an uplifting cinematic experience.

Mr. Richardson writes:
“Personally, I’m sick of women fighting their way across the cinema and TV screens.”

I can certainly agree with that!

I haven’t read the books in some time, but my recollection of Eowyn is that she is a beautiful but cold, damaged person when we are first introduced to her. Because of the negligent passivity of her uncle the king, and the loss of her parents, she has come to value her life very little. She is a great example of what happens to a strong woman when she is surrounded by male weakness (and in this sense she no doubt resonates with modern feminists well).

Her confrontation with the nazgul king is a major turning point. She gets what she always wanted - renown in battle, more than anyone else in the whole story - and it turns out to be nothing, only death and emptiness. It isn’t until the houses of healing (not in the movie) that she is made whole, and comes to value life, to become a whole woman. The lesson of Eowyn is exactly the lesson of feminism: a beautiful, strong, valiant and terrible woman who wants to be like a man actually gets what she wants. But she finds that in that is only death, darkness, and despair. Her triumph results in merely a new and stronger phase of her death-seeking nihilism. The a real man — really two men, Aragorn and Faramir - come along and heal her. Even such a terribly valiant and damaged creature can find healing.

I fully expect this to be badly botched in the special edition DVD; especially since the Faramir character has already been bothced into a my-Daddy-never-loved-me Freudian stereotype. In the book Faramir was the noblest, kindest, bravest and most just of all the male characters, so naturally in the movie he is the lowest of them.

And of course it already was botched in the theatrical version, where one moment we see Eowyn slay the Nazgul king and the next she is smiling at Aragorn’s coronation. Her despair in triumph, her complete emptiness at her final success in being like a man, is never even hinted at; and I am sure it won’t be in the SE either.

I don’t know what it would be like to see the movies without having the stories and characters already inside me. It was breathtaking, to me, to see Minas Tirith, Edoras, etc. The movies see Tolkien’s world through a modern lens, and that could drive me nuts if I let it even though it is exactly what I expect. But a dirty window can’t destroy the landscape, and looking through it can be a delight depending on what attitude I take. The graffiti on the window I can ignore to a point — indeed any traditionalist living in modern times needs to know both how to be acutely aware of it and how to ignore it, if he doesn’t want to go nuts.

Thanks Matt for helping to clear this up. And I couldn’t agree with you more about seeing past the graffiti on the window. There was a lot in the movie for a traditionalist to enjoy, and which I was grateful to experience.

The Hobbit is worth reading just to follow Tolkien’s footsteps in creating Middle Earth, though I agree with Damon that it is not essential. The Silmarillion is. It is a mighty work on its own, though less Catholic, it seems to me, than pagan Norse and Greek. The heroes are tragically flawed and doomed. The Christian elements, if any, are that men are promised an unknown life after death, unlike the other creatures, that we all suffer the consequences of sin, and that there is an original creative power who incorporates all good and evil into its providential (Neoplatonic?) song. The achievement of the Silmarillion is all the more remarkable in that (1) it was pasted together from piles of notes, and (2) it is successful in a totally different narrative mould from the trilogy, exhibiting Biblical and Icelandic concision.

I acknowledge Mr. Coleman’s disgust at my suggestion that the movies are worth seeing despite their faults; though the faults preclude an integrally good aesthetic experience, the excellences shed light on Tolkien’s vision and contribute to the continuing life of Tolkien’s work.

Bill wrote:
“It is a mighty work on its own, though less Catholic, it seems to me, than pagan Norse and Greek.”

I recall reading somewhere a Tolkien quote that may shed light on this. Forgive the paraphrase and lack of explicit reference, and take it for what it is worth:

Tolkien said (as I recall) that he objected to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories in part because an alternate Incarnation and an alternate form/name for Christ in a different world flirts (in his view) with heresy. Therefore in order to write his own vast epic he had to set it in a pagan world with pagan sensibilities pre-Incarnation (or in a world in which the Incarnation of God as a Man had not occurred, since any such world would contain the actual visible Church). So the “right” way to view the stories of Middle Earth is as taking place a long, long time ago in a context of the permanent natural law but prior to the coming of Christ; all as viewed through the lens of a very orthodox Catholic who went to daily Mass most of his life.

Matt wrote: “Therefore in order to write his own vast epic he had to set it in a pagan world with pagan sensibilities…”

I hadn’t heard this before, but if true it sounds like a phenomenal non-solution to an epic non-problem. ;-)

Since Aslan is a fictional character, it’s hard to see how the Narnia stories are “heretical” for including him!

Well, to be clear the daily-Mass-going Catholic to whom I refer is J.R.R. Tolkien.

Anyway, I am not sure that Tolkien’s famous disdain for allegory is misplaced (much as I appreciate the Narnia stories and Lewis’ Space Trilogy - Perelandra has to be among the best works of fiction ever). If one attempts to construct a world that mirrors this (post-Incarnational) world in its Christian details one is bound to get some details of _this_ mapping to _that_ wrong. In doing so one will in fact be teaching heresy. An author’s reluctance to create a story that is virtually guaranteed to teach heresy in at least some places - an allegory - seems commendable to me. I am not an author, but if I were I would side with Tolkien on the dangers of allegory.

I don’t see how the Aslan character in a fictional story designed to convey certain truths is blasphemous or heretical. Rather, I think it would depend on how the character was developed in any case. Tolkien’s characters still follow analogies to Biblical characters and themes, and I don’t see how changing the settings or blurring or spreading out the parallels would lessen any such concerns, even conceding said concerns as legitimate.

These are stories; let them be stories. They fall on a continuum — Pilgrim’s Progress is in there somewhere.

I suppose that some might argue that movies directly about Christ are inappropriate, since there is bound to be some variation over specific factual occurences no matter how closely one strives for faithfulness to the Text. But a movie’s a movie. The question is how does it present the Lord’s Person? If it’s Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar — these are plainly blasphemous. But I think Mel Gibson deserves the benefit of any doubt.

How the Lord, or the character corresponding to the Lord, is presented I think is the real issue, not so much the literary device used. I would be EXTREMELY cautious about using the Lord’s actual Person in a fictional context, but I think Ben-Hur did so in a reverent and appropriate manner.

That said, Matt and I are in 100% agreement on Perelandra!!

Mr. LeFevre wrote:
“These are stories; let them be stories.”

Well, I wasn’t passing judgement specifically on Lewis’ Aslan-Christ allegory; I was pointing out that his friend J.R.R. Tolkien did, and that the sensibility that made him do so ought not be dismissed lightly. Plato thought that the making of poetry and other lies should be restricted to certain carefully pre-screened and specially trained classes of people. There is a sensibility in there - one that ironically enough Lewis explores briefly in the discussions between Ransom, the Lady, and the Un-Man in _Perelandra_ - that needs to be revived. Censorship and the avoidance of certain kinds of dangerous talk is not a bad thing; it is a good thing that like all good things can be corrupted or misused.

I wouldn’t dismiss Tolkien lightly — not least because he was instrumental in C.S. Lewis accepting Christ.

I ran across only one link on a google search, from Christianity Today, (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/134/52.0.html)

“Tolkien also disliked the Narnia series, feeling it was both theologically heavy-handed and artistically slapdash.” But it also suggests that Tolkien pondered the Screwtape Letters. (And reiterates Matt’s statement about theological issues only being addressed by elites.)

Another little tidbit I didn’t realize: “Tolkien was a private man who, when he met Lewis, had written his mythic tales for a private audience. He had very little confidence that they could speak to a wider audience. But from the beginning of their relationship, Lewis encouraged his friend to finish and publish his stories. He delighted to hear Tolkien read chapters of his epic trilogy, as he completed them, at meetings of their Oxford reading group, the Inklings. And Tolkien was immensely encouraged by those meetings. It spurred him on.”

The Inklings meetings are legendary, but I didn’t know about Lewis’s role in pushing Tolkien to publish these works, (though there’s a suggestion to that effect in prefaces to some of Lewis’s books.)

But returning to Narnia, I think that their effect and reception over time has pretty well vindicated Lewis’s approach. They are classics and will remain so for years to come.

Some may find these of interest:
http://www.isi.org/forum/tolkien_vs_jackson/birzer1.html
http://www.isi.org/forum/tolkien_vs_jackson/birzer2.html
http://www.isi.org/forum/tolkien_vs_jackson/birzer3.html

I read part one of the article, then read more quickly parts two and three. He has some interesting things to say about Tolkien’s intent to use myth in re-awakening a sense of Christian life and the Western tradition.

He adores the movie of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” an opinion I completely disagree with.

Here is an interesting review of The Return of The King (the movie, that is): http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/108/52.0.html