Tasty Filling

Did Tolkien invent Lembas merely to fill in a hole in his plot - "How in the world did Sam and Frodo carry enough food to travel all that way?"

[edit: fixed spelling of "Lembas"]

Iluvator Shrugged?

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

John Rogers - Kung Fu Monkey

ht:Paul Krugman

Tolkien Question...

Did J. R. R. Tolkien envision a Fifth Age?

[Note to self: Always check Wikipedia first]

There and Back Again

Just finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time. Once again I am left with the same impression: Don't mess with Rosie Cotton.

It also finally penetrated my thick skull that the one who goes "there and back again" is not Bilbo or Frodo. It's Sam! He says so right there in the last sentence, "Well, I'm back." Duh!

That's Better

I remember finishing my reading of the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of John before it and starting the Epistles of Paul. Man, what a breath of fresh air! After the unflinching repetitiveness of the former two, the later retained a real, human voice. There was Paul of Tarsus speaking across the intervening millennia. This was a flesh and blood man with all his glories and faults (more than many are wiling to acknowledge.)

That is exactly how I felt while reading A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis. After hacking my way through seven Narnia books and with indigestible bits of Mere Christianity still clogging my brain, I felt I had finally met the man whom J. R. R. Tolkien had befriended all those years ago. Lewis produces pleasant turns of phrase. He wrestles with alternating bouts of despair, guilt and hope. Gone is the didactic and turgid prose of those other works. Present are a humility and openness. Even when Lewis comes full circle and re-engages a God who in some ways is just as catachismic as the one who seemed to abandon him in his greatest need, he does so without bombast and expecting to find that he has been mistaken in every one of his conclusions when he finally meets his Savior face to face.

Perhaps a re-read of Mere Christianity or one of Lewis' other apologist works would leave a kinder having seen the all-too-human man behind them. I think, however, that I am going to leave Dr Lewis for now as I encountered him in his last work - with a higher regard.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I read somewhere on the net that C. S. Lewis was “a first rate literary critic, a second rate fantasy writer and a third rate theologian.” In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Theology starts moving up the rail. Theology recedes further in to the background in Lewis’ third volume. More’s the pity. Another commenter has posited that Lewis had missed the previous 100 years of biblical criticism when he started his apologetic career. As evidenced by his Narnia series, he didn’t keep up with modern literary technique either.

By the fifth outing in the series (they were, of course, written out of order), I have become somewhat accustomed to the patronizing quality of Lewis’ writing. Perhaps I am not as familiar with children’s literature from the 1950’s (outside of Dick and Jane) but his way of addressing the reader seems to be archaic by at least a generation. Even the Hobbit, published in 1937 and noticeably written as a children’s book, does not wallow in the syrupy nostalgia as do the Narnia books. The closest analog with which I am familiar is Winnie the Pooh (1926). Furthermore, Lewis seems trapped between the nursery and Oxford. On the one hand he harps on about how familiar the good reader is with stories about dragons and dwarves but juxtaposes this against the Eustace character who serves as a caricature of everything that Lewis finds foolishly modern. Kind of awkward to explain to a young Winnie the Pooh fan.

All this was present in the previous Narnia books but The Voyage of the Dawn Treader introduces yet another archaicism. When I think of some of the books I read as a young person, some (i.e. Isaac Asimov and Tolkien) written in the 1950’s or before, I remember stories with overarching story lines and well crafted plots. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we get a series of unconnected events, each one trying to dazzle us with bizarreness alone: the one-legged Dufflepods. Ramandu, the vacationing star (think astronomy, not Hollywood), the pool that turns objects to gold. Perhaps Lewis is consciously or unconsciously casting the story in the style of Danté’s Inferno. In any case, it made for dreary reading in this context.

As to the Theology of this book, I was not so surprised. Perhaps I have become as accustomed to thoughts on faith as to his style. Leaving aside Aslan’s Land which has no real theological content of interest, I groaned at the very end when a Lamb appeared to the children and offered them fish cooked over a fire and then appeared as their beloved Aslan! This story is weird enough in the Gospel of John. What is a child supposed to make of it? The claim that Lucy and Edmund have become too old for Narnia and must learn to find Aslan in their own world was pretty mild stuff. It came across as an acknowledgment that the nursery must be left behind. I can take that, may be even apply it to my own midlife wanderings. The most interesting theological motif, one that has appeared before in Lewis’ stories, is Aslan’s statement to Lucy when she causes him to appear via a magical spell, “Surely you think I would obey my own laws.” (paraphrased). If God/Christ is to be constrained by his own laws, then miracles such as the Virgin Birth become impossible. This is a whopper of a theological blunder and should be unsustainable by a serious religious thinker, at least one touted as the greatest Christian Apologist of the 20^th Century. Alas.

I intended this post as a micro-review but apparently I had more to say than I had at first thought. As stated before, I intend to see Narnia through to the bitter end, or Last Battle. The later written volumes (The Horse and His Boy, The Magicians Nephew) were better than the earlier efforts so The Silver Chair may not be such a disappointment.