Thursday, July 10, 2008

"J. K. Rowling: Sovereign Fantasy-World Creator," to be in "Touchstone," Nov. 2008

Free at last! Thank God! I'm free at last! Yesterday I got my editor's acknowledgement of receipt of my revised 2226-word ms for Touchstone's forum on Harry Potter to be published in November, the month the next Harry Potter movie comes out. As I understand the forum, my con article will be submitted to a couple of critics for their responses to it.

Over the past 8 years that I have been studying and writing about my bete noire, Harry, I have compiled a massive basis of observations for my criticism, including my notebook with detailed notes on my reading of each of the seven volumes of the series. And I have written thousands of words of detailed commentary. For all of that, I have published only four articles on Rowling's work, three in The American Spectator Online (July ?, 2005; Aug. 15, 17, 2007) and Celebrate Life (Nov/Dec 2007). The mainstream Christian journals have taken the Christianity Today line that these books are a "book of virtues." And even First Things and Touchstone have published favorable reviews on the little wizard.

I have distilled my 5000-word 2007 ms to meet an editorial requirement of about 2000 words. So, instead of my natural approach of building detail on detail, I have cut the details to fit and made my strongest argument on the basis of the contrast between Rowling's Post-Christian imagination and relativist morality and the profoundly Christian vision and transcendent (absolute) morality of Tolkein and Lewis. I think that the necessity of brevity will prove a virtue in this essay.

The lynchpin of my essay, then, is the following words of Aragorn to Eomer in the fields of Rohan when Eomer disputed his passage with Legolas and Gimli on their mission to rescue Pippin and Merry:

"Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house" (The Two Towers, Ballentine pb, 1965, 50, cited by Gene Edward Veith, “Still Ringing True,” World Magazine, 2001).

Do pray for Joanne Rowling and her many readers, that God may grant them his grace.