The Coming of A New Dawn

Once again the liturgical year goes through its cycle and we emerge from the desert and bareness of Lent to new life at Easter.  Rejoice and praise the Triumphant King, for we are an Easter people!

Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor,

for the Realm of Sauron is ended for ever,

and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard,

for your watch hath not been in vain,

and the Black gate is broken,

and your King hath passed through,

and he is victorious.

Sing and be glad, all ye children of the West,

for your King shall come again,

and he shall dwell among you

all the days of your life.

And the Tree that was withered shall be renewed,

and he shall plant it in the high places,

and the City shall be blessed.

-- J. R. R. Tolkien: The Return of the King

The Greatest Feast

Here are two quotes from Tolkien, which taken together illustrate a very profound theology of the Eucharist and wonderful food for thought in the Lenten season.  


"And yet this waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind.”  - Lord of the Rings, Book VI Chapter 3, Mount Doom.

"The only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals. Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children - from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn - open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. (It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand - after which [our] Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.)"-The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien.

On some hidden path

"Not all who wander are lost."-- J.R.R. Tolkien

Sit and Think

I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring that I shall never see.
For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago,
and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.

--J. R. R. Tolkien

Gift-nature of art

I have an on going (at this point about 5 year long) discussion about what art is with a friend. My current working definition is that art, at least good art (I know that phrase brings up an entirely new discussion, but for my purposes here I mean art that had the ability to speak to and touch some people beyond their own time), must do three things; it must draw on or respond to art that came before it, it must address or speak to issues of its own time, and it must contain something from the artist, a spark of their own creativity.

This last component however, implies that art is something more, that it transcends mere technical skill. As Tolkien puts it in "A Leaf by Niggle" it is a gift. The nature of the gift however is complex. It is a gift from Niggle to others; in a utilitarian sense his neighbor Parish uses the canvas to patch his roof. However, his painting also touches some people, changes them and how they see the world, and so is a gift to them as well. Yet the picture is a gift to Niggle as well. While he could not fully capture it, what he was painting was a vision of somewhere that touched him, a perfect place that to which he had never been. This place does eventually becomes real and provided healing for Niggle and his neighbor. Discussing the painting Parish says, "But it did not look like this then, not real." "No, it was only a glimpse then," said the man; "but you might have caught the glimpse, if you had ever thought it worth while to try." As a glimpse of somewhere else, of something else that surpasses the human experience, the picture was a gift to Niggle, changing him and how he viewed the world.

In Tolkien's work this sense of gift is not confined to art--the world itself is a gift and the people in it bound by gift giving,/gift receiving relationships. One of the most explicit is Galadriel's parting gifts to the fellowship. Everything she gives to the fellowship was made by her and her household and is something particular to her, things the fellowship could not have found elsewhere. The cloaks were made by her and her weavers, the light caught from her mirror, strands of her own hair--all of these are gifts which contain a bit of herself. Moreover, they were all given freely, they do not put the recipient into debt nor does she ever expect repayment, and by their nature they serve to help and at times free their owner.

So art in some way is meant to serve others and not advantage the artist, for it was a gift to him as well. I am not totally sure where to go with this thought, or exactly how it fits into my overall definition of art. That is part of what makes art so powerful-can can touch and effect us so strongly, yet it is difficult to articulate where this power comes from. As alluded to before, it mirrors the order of the world, which in creation contains something of its Maker and was intended as a free gift to humanity.

Stop looking start seeing

Terry Pratchett continually uses the trope that people see what they want to see. When confronted with something too big, or amazing, or terrible or out of the ordinary the human mind refuses to recognize it, or amends reality till it comes up with something acceptable. In Good Omens the characters ignore the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, for acknowledging them, even when they are right in front of their face is neither convenient nor comfortable. "No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don't want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side." It is what allows characters to function, to go about their day to day activities without going insane.

Fiction is the opposite of this panacea for life's madness found on Discworld. Good fiction is not escapism but the opposite. They use the wondrous, the fantastic, faerie land as an escape into reality. It holds a mirror up to our world, but a funhouse mirror that tweaks and twists what it shows making you pay attention to details never noticed before. As Chesterton notes in the Napoleon of Notting Hill, "Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time." This is what fiction is in danger of doing, of make us see the world instead of merely looking at it.

I know that I am returning to a topic I touched on shortly after the inception of this blog and I am sorry to be repetitive. But it is something I think about a lot, for the idea of "Classics" and a literary cannon have ingrained in me that some things are more noble reads while others are fluff. I do not believe this but every once and a while I have to justify my forays into the fantastic.

A defense of monsters

The chatter around the library for the past few weeks has been unarguably focused on Twilight: Was the movie any good? Who is the best character? Who would make a better boyfriend, Edward or Jacob?

The last question caused me to pause, one is a werewolf and one is a vampire so neither should make a good boyfriend. Oh wait, that's right, they are not really vampires or werewolves, Stephenie Meyers managed to strip them of what made these creatures monsters, the subject of horror movie-their uncontrollable nature, their complete otherness. This is most evident in the werewolves who did not have to change at the full moon, who could transform back and forth at will, and who retained all of their mental capabilities. While in the fourth book she at least has the decency to say they are not traditional werewolves but rather shape shifters, it still felt week. Despite both Jacob and Edward's frequent assertions that they were monsters neither Bella nor the readers bought it.

I began thinking then about the Harry Potter books, the last big fad in teen lit which transcended that genre and were popular with a broad spectrum of people. In that, at least, the monsters are monstrous--no one meeting a dementor, troll or Voldemort would expect compassion and they were not objects of infatuation. Yet in Harry Potter it is set up as a one-on-one struggle, not part of a larger problem. Voldemort is the evilest wizard and Harry the boy destined to kill him, an act which will restore order the the world and everything will be fine again.

Stories where the monsters stand out, where they are truly terrifying are those where defeating a monster does not eradicate evil but merely stems the tide until the next monster arises. At the beginning of the Dark Knight Gordon tells Batman that his taking the out the mob bosses did not save Gotham but opened the door to a new generation of criminals. In the Lord of the Rings the unspoken knowledge that Sauron was not the first dark lord and probably would not be the last is evident. For the characters in these stories this is no reason to stop resisting, but there is also no talk of chosen ones, just of a person standing against the monsters until it is someone else's turn.

Tolkien got at the heart of this mentality in his essay The Monsters and the Critics, "The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figures, the men of old, remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come."

Defanging monsters robs the struggles of everyday life of their virtue. The fact Beowulf still resonates with modern audiences, that the Lord of the Rings has not flagged in popularity since it was "discovered" in the 60's, and that superhero stories are becoming popular with a whole new generation means that the idea of an unending struggle against evil still speaks to people at least as much as stories where the main problem is finding a date to prom or staying on top of your clique. Leaving monsters monstrous sparks the imagination and gives people a guide for when the dragons come.

If everyone were hobbits. . .

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." - J. R. R. Tolkien