The Fellowship of the Ring Revisited

I began this blog December 4 with a post about Tolkein's LOTR, and not long after I began rereading The Fellowship of the Ring for only the third time in my life. The story now seems more engaging, richer, than ever before. It's a pity I've waited so long between readings (1966, 2001, 2007), but you will notice that at least they are becoming more frequent as the years pass.

In chapter 2, "The Shadow of the Past," Gandalf tells Frodo the dark history of the One Great Ring of Power and reveals to him that the Ring must be destroyed and that "you were meant to have it." Frodo protests his inadequacy for the task by asking the why questions: "Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?"

Gandalf replies, "Such questions cannot be answered." And he tells Frodo not to suppose that it was for his great merit but that since he has, indeed, been chosen for the quest, he must use such virtues as he has. Frodo still resists undertaking the quest and innocently, yet dangerously, tempts Gandalf by saying, "Will you not take the ring?"

Realizing that he could not resist the temptation to wield the evil Ring for good, Gandalf vehemently refuses Frodo's offer and concludes, "The decision lies with you."

Smoking his pipe in silence, Gandalf awaits Frodo's reply. At last Frodo hesitantly decides to undertake the perilous quest although it "would mean exile, a flight from danger into danger drawing it after me." Frodo supposes that he must go alone, but Sam Gamgee, by his eavesdropping on their conversation, inadvertently yet willingly volunteers to go with Frodo. Thus, the Fellowship of the Ring was born and its first three members selected.

These highlights of Chapter 2 are here written to tempt their readers to reread (or read) the chapter, the book, the trilogy for yourselves.

About the Incarnation

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. . . (John 1:1, 14a).

That the Creator would take on the form of the creature is, to me, the most astounding revelation in the Bible. This good news of the birth of Immanuel ("God with us") is far more surprising than the good news of the Resurrection. Given that Jesus was the God-man, how could death hope to hold him? But given that man is sinful, who could hope that God would take on himself the very form of sinful man to rescue him? Yet that is what God did in Jesus Christ our Lord.

And for this gift, Christians are humbly grateful as we celebrate Christ's First Advent and eagerly await his Second Advent.

The Golden Compass

At our focus group dinner this afternoon, someone asked me about The Golden Compass. And while I have been following commentaries on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy at least since Alan Jacobs and Ken Myers discussed their misgivings about it on Mars Hill Audio Journal after the first volume came out, I haven't read it. So I'll limit my comments to noting that his fantasy world is an anti-Narnia. In Alan Jacobs biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian, Jacobs quotes this summary of Lewis's message in Narnia as Pullman sees it:

Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it. . . . those of us who detest the supernaturalism, the reactionary sneering, the misogyny, the racism, and the sheer dishonesty of his narrative method will still be arguing against him [even after Lewis's imagined canonization] (p 307).

For detailed comments from someone who has read the book, check out Tom Gilson's blog at http://www.thinkingchristian.net/?p=1111. This page will lead you to recent blog entries on The Golden Compass.

J. K. Rowling’s Books of Virtues: Sunny Stories Brighten Baby’s Bedtime Bigtime

Somebody said that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine." And unlike some of our prescription medicines, a laugh is very unlikely to kill you. So I think it's about time to repeat this humorous take on the very serious subject of childrens' fantasy literature. This original satire of J. K. Rowling's Harrry Potter books first appeared on my blog of December 12, 2007. This satire had been read-tested by one high school senior who loves Harry and has read all the books, some more than once. She liked the satire and didn't realize that I take a dim view of Harry until I told her after she read the satire. This piece is copyrighted so if you download it for your personal use, you may not use it for profit and you may not modify the text in any way. (c) 2007 David Haddon

Hermione Protects Her Muggle Parents
Do any of you uptight, anti-magical parents dare to deprive your young children of their Natural Right to a vicarious enrollment in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry by not buying them the Harry Potter books? If so, just consider Hermione Granger’s touching solicitude for the welfare of her parents described in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Deathly Hallows).

At 17 an adult in the wizard world, she wants to join her pals Ron Weasley and Harry in the hazardous quest to destroy the magical objects or horcruxes that are Dark Lord Voldemort’s means to immortality. Deeply concerned that joining Harry and Ron in the battle against Voldemort might endanger her muggle (non-wizard and hence defenseless against magic) parents, Hermione thoughtfully induces in Mom and Pop Granger the magical equivalent of Alzheimers, then puts entirely new identities into their empty minds, and finally sends them off good as new to England’s old penal colony of Australia. With a daughter like that, you’d surely never need to worry about winding up in a nursing home prematurely!

Euthanasia Anyone?
Or about staying in one indefinitely! For incredible as it may seem, Mistress of Ceremonies Rowling obliges her world-weary senior readers by inserting the classic arguments for euthanasia into the closing pages of Deathly Hallows (pp 682-83). There Albus Dumbledore (the greatest of the good wizards) convinces Snape (the bravest of the good wizards according to Harry) to kill him by asking him “to help an old man avoid pain and humiliation. . . . because death is coming for me” with great certainty. Here and elsewhere Rowling marshals about half a dozen other arguments to justify this murder-suicide pact, but its execution certainly secures Rowling’s claim to having boldly gone where no man has gone before in a popular children’s fantasy, certainly not the likes of J. R. R. Tolkein or C. S. Lewis (her fantasy’s purported resemblance to theirs having been just a teeny bit exaggerated).

Rowling Lights Up Youngsters’ Lives
But the really great thing about Rowling’s Harry Potter books is their down-home cheeriness. As Hilda Ravensfoot described the series, “These books of virtues combine the atmosphere of the spellbook with the effulgence of a sunrise. They are a veritable festival of lights, growing in brilliance with each new volume” (Literate Witch Online, September 31, 2005). Since the ever growing cheerfulness of Rowling’s books is the only point on which all the reviewers and critics agree, it is surely the real reason why her series is so popular.

Kids just love to see Harry bubbling over with high spirits all the time—whenever he’s not being ostracized by the other students, desperately lying to Professor Severus Snape to keep from being kicked out of school for his rule breaking, or badly bummed out about his dark fate. And Hermione’s always so sweet—except when Rita Skeeter writes a new column about her and Harry, Ron puts his foot in it (which is pretty often) or Harry tries to patch things up between them.

Then there’s all those beautiful silver and white unicorns in the Enchanted Forest—dead —because one of the dark wizards liked to slurp up their blood every night as a health drink smoothie. But no one ever messes with those sweet, cuddly thestrals, the fanged and carnivorous, carrion eating, black skeletal horses with blank white eyes and batwings that only someone who has witnessed a death can even see.

Given the sky high rates of depression and suicide among American teenagers, a little inspiration and uplift like this surely can’t hurt. And isn’t that just what Rowling said she was going to do, show young people real goodness, how to live, love, laugh and be happy, all that joie de vivre. I mean who wants to read a dark fantasy about the same kind of thing you see every night on the evening news, especially since 9/11?

Speaking of joie de vivre, surely that’s what those black-hooded, light extinguishing dementors who clamp their jaws on your mouth— and suck out your soul—are all about. Just thinking about them’ll put the joy way down in your soul so deep you can hardly stand it. Just the ticket for the ’tweens!

And how about those happy campers called the Inferi: Corpses “that have been bewitched to do a dark wizard’s bidding.” Harry first gets to meet one when a slimy white hand comes out of the dark, icy water to grasp his wrist. Then he sees “an army of the dead rising from the black water.” A small group of them grab him from behind with their “thin, fleshless arms cold as death” to carry him into the water to share their fate . . .

To top things off, there’s good old Nagini, Voldemort’s big, black pet snake and alter ego. In the last book, she finally kills Severus Snape but first gets to eat poor Professor of Muggles Studies Charity Burbage for “dinner.” Charity’s magically suspended and still living body revolving over the Death-Eaters’ conference table is the image that dominates the first chapter of this book and sets just the right atmosphere for Rowling’s last wild romp with our kids.

Rowling Reels to a Rollicking, Shakespeherean Rhythm of Rigor Mortis
Medieval painter-moralist Hans Holbein’s Danse Macabre has absolutely nothing on Rowling’s, oh, so appropriately named Deathly Hallows! Wikipedia’s death count for the book includes 19 identified characters (excluding Harry’s owl Hedwig) plus about 50 unnamed witches and wizards, mostly Voldemort followers and loyal Hogwarts students killed in the Battle of Hogwarts. Thus, in Rowling’s last fantastic, fatal fantasia with Harry, she forges fatalities fit for a favorable face-off with Shakespeare’s fiercest feuds. “O O O O that Shakespeherean rag!”

Rowling also reveals that stunning Snape-Dumbledore murder-suicide pact previously concealed but already executed in the previous book. Only the “good” wizards make such death pacts in Harry Potter so don’t blame poor old Voldemort who, all on his own, had to suffer seven deaths not even counted as such by Wikipedia, one for each of his soul fragments. With a little help from Harry, Voldemort did finally kill himself, but—unlike the good wizards—he didn’t really mean to do it.

Well, you get the idea: “Lullaby and good night, And may baby sleep tight . . .

Is there more than one way to discover truth?

The Secularism that came to dominate public life in the United States and Western Europe in the 20th Century excluded religion from the public square and claimed that only the methods of science offered verifiable knowledge for questions of public policy. But this attitude is Scientism, not science, and is subject to the same philosophical critique that demolished Logical Positivism: The empirical methods of science cannot verify the claim that these methods are the only source of truth.

Indeed, in Conjectures and Refutations, Karl Popper showed that the limitations of inductive logic guarantee that empirical science cannot verify its theories about reality and therefore makes fundamental progress only by experiments that falsify an existing theory. Nevertheless, unlike Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Popper was not an instrumentalist denying the possibility of relating the equations of science to underlying realities. He agreed with Einstein that the purpose of science was to discover such truth about reality and that it may well do so. But certainly when it comes to the microcosm and the macrocosm, it is impossible ever to verify a theory based on empirical data. Thus, a proper philosophy of science puts appropriate limitations on the claims to be made for it. Nevertheless, science remains a means to discover truth about some kinds of reality.

I believe that literature, history, philosophy, and revelation as well as science are all valid ways of exploring and learning knowledge about different aspects of reality. Thus, I affirm all of these ways of knowing. My interests are primarily in literature, theology and philosophy, but science impinges on these in its study of the macrocosm in Astronomy and Cosmology and in its study of the microcosm in Quantum Mechanics. So all of these subjects will be on the table for this blog.

Transcendence in J. R. R. Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings"

Tolkein's fantasy world in The Lord of the Rings lacks direct references to God and contasts sharply with C. S. Lewis's Narnia by Middle Earth's lack of a personal figure representing God as Aslan does in Narnia. But Tolkein's overarching mythology of Middle Earth set forth in The Silmarillion names the Creator of Middle Earth and its creatures Eru, the One, who in Arda, the earth, is called Iluvatar. This story further parallels the Biblical account of creation in Genesis with the rebellion and fall of Melkor, the greatest of the angelic spirits called the Valar, a story obviously modeled on the rebellion of Lucifer against God. And both Gandalf the Grey (not really a wizard, but a Valar) and elven King Elrond, two of the wisest and most powerful beings working for good in Middle Earth during its Third Age, tell us that a higher power is secretly working to thwart the Dark Lord Sauron of Mordor.

Moreover, other good characters recognize a transcendent ethic that contrasts sharply with the relativism of good and evil of contemporary imaginative works such as the Star Wars science fiction movies and Joanne Rowling's fantasy world of Harry Potter and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Consider, for example, Gene Edward Veith's citation from The Two Towers (the second volume of Tolkein's trilogy) in "Still Ringing True," World Magazine, 2001:

"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 GoldenWood as in his own house."

Have you readers of Tolkein's trilogy noted other examples of this absolute morality that transcends time and place and is common to elves, men and the other rational creatures of Middle Earth? Or of other evidences of Providence in Middle Earth besides Gandalf's reassurance of Frodo that a power other than that of Sauron had brought the One Ring to Frodo and besides King Elrond's affirmation that the apparently chance gathering of representatives of the races of Middle Earth at his palace was not an accident but was ordained? If so, please post them.