Nazgul and the Perversion of Spiritual Senses (original) (raw)
The gift of Iluvatar: Tolkien's theological vision
2004
This article explores some of the principal theological themes underlying Tolkien’s fiction through reference to Tolkien’s own comments and observations expressed in his letters, lectures and other creative works. It is my contention in this article that Tolkien’s work is explicitly theological and makes an important contribution to contemporary Christian theological discussion, especially with regards to the vocation of Christians and their role in the salvation of the world.
The Gift of Ilùvater: Tolkien’s Theological Vision
Australian Ejournal of Theology, 2004
This article explores some of the principal theological themes underlying Tolkien’s fiction through reference to Tolkien’s own comments and observations expressed in his letters, lectures and other creative works. It is my contention in this article that Tolkien’s work is explicitly theological and makes an important contribution to contemporary Christian theological discussion, especially with regards to the vocation of Christians and their role in the salvation of the world
A Further Step into the Theological Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien
2024
Guglielmo Spirito When he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not "Who are you?" but "So it was you all the time" … C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape letters
A Wind from the West: The Role of the Holy Spirit in Tolkien's Middle-Earth
Explorations of Tolkien's latent theology abound, but very little focused scholarship proposes to discuss how Tolkien's legendari-um portrays an understanding of the Holy Spirit, especially in light of Tolkien's Roman Catholicism. This essay explores three major features of Tolkien's work that provide insight into this ghostly person of the Trinity. The Silmarillion provides detailed insight as to the exact identity of the " Flame Imperishable, " while its characters demonstrate the indwelling of this Flame. St. Paul explains the gifts of the Holy Spirit in his first letter to the Corinthians and Tolkien seems to mimic many of these gifts in the characters of the nine members of the Fellowship. Lastly, the Great Eagles represent the workings of the Holy Spirit, both as servants of Manwë and as agents of eucatastrophe.
Christianity & Literature, 2003
Persistent in Tolkien criticism is the question of to what extent, if any, Tolkien's Middle-earth fiction expresses his personal Christian commitment. Some readers love the Middle-earth stories but are disappointed that Tolkien is not more explicitly Christian in these works; others love them and object to the idea of there being anything Christian in them; yet others perceive clear indications of the author's faith to the degree appropriate in an imagined world that apparently predates the recorded history of our world. In Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: The Spiritual Dimension in the Works of!. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Garbowski approaches the question obliquely and, though drawing heavily on previous studies, makes a significant new contribution. Garbowski's focus is on the "spiritual dimension;' which he defines as not specifically Christian nor even necessarily religious, but he is quite clear that Tolkien's Christian world view is what enabled him to give his reader, of any creed or none, an enrichment or recovery of perception and an ethical imperative. Garbowski is concerned equally with the substance of Tolkien's spiritual vision and the artistry by which it was developed; indeed, he considers Tolkien's conception of the artist and his spiritual vision to be inseparable. He looks to two European thinkers for his theoretical framework. The psychologist Victor Frankl identified a "will to meaning" (not a "drive") as the quintessential mark of the human and thereby offered a "hermeneutics of affirmation" (12), more hope-filled than the determinism of Freud and more in tune with the transcendent than the self-affirmation advocated by Maslow. His is "one of the few schools of psychology that does [sic] justice to the religious aspect of an artist's work" (16). The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin provides the concept of "dialogism," an insistence that the artist avoid solipsism and take cognizance of the Other, allowing both characters and audience their own contributions to the ultimate work of art. By approaching his project in this way, Garbowski implicitly addresses as well a second recurrent issue in Tolkien criticism: can anything this popular merit being taken seriously as art? Like a fair number of previous critics, Garbowski does take Tolkien's work seriously, and again the work meets the challenge. So much for the in-group narrowness of the literary establishment that could not accept the verdict of the famous Waterstone survey calling The Lord of the Rings the book of the century. In Frankl and Bakhtin, then, Garbowski finds a high valuation on self-transcendence, which for him is central to both ethics and aesthetics. And he finds this value abundantly illustrated in Tolkien, not only in his characters such as Frodo or (negatively) Melkor but also in his approach to artistic creation. Tolkien's "fecund" imagination is of less concern to Garbowski than "the search for meaning he was engaged in, and which he stimulates in the reader" (18). Moreover, in many ways his work as
2014 The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction‐based Religion (full text)
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the organisation and development of the spiritual Tolkien milieu, a largely online-situated network of individuals and groups that draw on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary mythology for spiritual inspiration. It is the first academic treatment of Tolkien spirituality and one of the first mono¬graphs on fiction-based religion, a type of religion that uses fiction as authori¬ta¬tive texts. Adopting a semiotic approach to religion, the book raises questions about the persuasive power of narrative, about religious blending, and about rationalisation of beliefs. How can some readers come to believe that supernatural agents from fictional narratives are real? How do fiction-based religions emerge when their authoritative texts lack important religious building-blocks, such as descriptions of rituals? And how do adherents of fiction-based religions legitimise their beliefs, given the fact that their religion is based on fiction? In short, with Tolkien religion as a case the dissertation aims to uncover the semio¬tic structures and processes involved in the construction and maintenance of fiction-based religion, and the social structures that sup¬port the plausibility of such religion.
Gods in Tolkien's Epic: Classical Patterns of Divine Interaction
Tolkien and the Classical World (ed. Hamish Williams, Walking Tree Publisher), 2021
This chapter focuses on patterns of divine interaction in Tolkien’s works and their possible classical ancestry. Tolkien himself compared the Valar to the gods of “traditional” “higher” mythology (albeit with differences) and in the Cottage of Lost play he suggested that gods of classical mythology are indeed the Valar themselves, although mediated by the misleading representations of human beings. These correspondences do not only concern the Valar’s identity and natural association (as well known), but also encompass their activity within the narratives, and in particular the ways they interact with non-divine (and especially elvish and human) characters. While keeping in mind Tolkien’s warning against focusing on the ox’s bones rather than the soup, the chapter will thus investigate, through comparative analysis, the classical ancestry of Tolkien’s patterns of divine interactions, and discuss how this source material has been “put to new uses”: the ultimate aim is to reflect on the differences between Tolkien’s secondary theology and that of his classical sources, and how these relate with the different narrative framework of Tolkien’s legendarium.
Tolkien's Theological Myth: Reflecting on good, evil and creation in Tolkien's mythos
This dissertation examines themes of good and evil in Tolkien’s mythos through its god, Ilúvatar, and its moral agents, ranging from the Valar and Maiar down to the elven, human, dwarven and hobbit characters, focusing on the subject through the lens of creation. The conflict between good and evil is important to investigate because for Tolkien stories were impossible without a fall. In a letter to Milton Waldman he wrote that ‘[t]here cannot be any story without a fall – all stories are ultimately about the fall – at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.’ If stories are ultimately about the fall, then they are about the interplay of good and evil. Secondly, as Verlyn Flieger observes, ‘[Tolkien’s] fall is made to occur in the very act of creation so that the world thus set in motion is not, as in the familiar Judeo-Christian story of Genesis “good” until marred by human error but faulty and imperfect from the beginning.’ Therefore, the conflict between good and evil must be examined with regards to creation and creating. As Tolkien himself wrote, ‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously at first but consciously in the revision.’ Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to engage with a reading of Tolkien’s mythological canon as ruminating on the nature of evil from a distinctly Catholic theological perspective, examining mainly The Silmarillion and The Lord of The Rings. This is done rather than take the Boethian approach taken by academics such as Tom Shippey. Furthermore, this piece seeks to expand the terminology around Tolkien's ideas of Creation and Sub-creation by adding the neologism 'Counter-creation' to describe the action of evil, in order to fill a void that Tolkien indicated felt existed within the English language.
2019
At first glance, the worlds (sub)created by Tolkien and Martin may seem to have a number of crucial features in common. Both are meticulously crafted, with various, often deeply incompatible, layers of cultural identity and ethics (Gondor vs Mordor, Starks vs Lannisters etc.). Likewise, despite sometimes markedly different approaches in their worldbuilding strategies, the writers' indebtedness to medieval literature, history and values has been repeatedly examined by many a scholar, providing fertile grounds for cross-cultural explorations and evaluations. There are, however, certain vital, perhaps even fundamental, issues where the worlds of The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire are as distinct from one another as the proverbial chalk and cheese. One such issue clearly discernible to every Christian (or, at least, Christian-raised) reader of Tolkien-is the intriguing spiritual disparity between the characters living in Middle-earth and those that inhabit Martin's Westeros. The world of the former is almost practically devoid of any explicit manifestations of the divine (at the time of its first publication the readers were not yet aware of the (pre) existence of Eru Illúvatar), yet, at the same time, it is suffused with numerous Christian values and underpinnings which cannot be ignored if one seeks to get a fuller (and thus more meaningful) picture of Tolkien's fiction. The latter, on the other hand, appears to be resplendent with all sorts of gods-greater and lesser, "real" and imaginary, more or less merciful and forgiving-yet in the long run it fails (in most cases it seems to fail all along the line) to even partly comply with the Christian (or, as for that matter, any religion-based) ethics, perhaps in some ways implying that all religions (or theologically-based systems of beliefs) are equal, and therefore equally false (or, at least, uncertain) in their nature and moral direction. The following paper seeks to examine some of these differences, juxtaposing Tolkien's Catholic worldview with that of evidently agnostic (or even atheist) Martin. D espite the fact that, over the past two decades or so, the genre of fantasy has enjoyed a substantial resurgence of interest amongst the readers, 1 and, consequently, captured the critical attention of literary scholars, thus leading 1 Here, the word 'readers' encompasses, by extension, both the people who read fantasy novels and short stories and those who come into contact with the genre by means their various cinematic and televisual adaptations (as well as, less frequently, the original productions in the fantasy field).
Review of Tolkien Studies 11 (2014)
Review of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. Volume XI (2014). 342 pages. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. Edited by Michael D.C. Drout, Verlyn Flieger and David Bratman. (forthcoming in Hither Shore 12)