Christian History articles from May 2003

Christian History archives from May 2003

Windows on the life and work of J.R.R. Tolkien. (Did You Know?).(anecdotes about the author, "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings")
May 1, 2003... Tolkien: "I am in fact a Hobbit" In 1958, Tolkien wrote the following in a letter to a fan, Deborah Webster: "I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain...

He gave us back myth and with it, truth. (From the Editor).(J.R.R. Tolkien)(Editorial)
May 1, 2003... By the 1960s, "miracle" had been co-opted to sell mayonnaise, "spirit" came from bottles or pep bands, and "Passion" referred only to the national obsession with sex. Into this materialistic, secularized decade came a wondrous visitor: J. R....

Meeting professor Tolkien: an American professor spent a summer with Tolkien, he remembers the man, his faith, and his writings.(J.R.R. Tolkien )
May 1, 2003... I first met J. R. R. Tolkien late on the afternoon of September 1, 1964. His fame was then rapidly on the rise and he had been forced to escape his public whenever he could. Visitors were more or less constantly at his door and his telephone...

Tolkien: man behind the myth: at odds with his age, he created another.(J.R.R. Tolkien)(Biography)
May 1, 2003... In January 3, 2003, J.R.R. Tolkien would have celebrated his eleventy-first birthday, a most momentous occasion, the same birthday on which Bilbo departed the Shire for Rivendell. What would this venerable Oxford don have thought about...

"Most married man": after nearly losing her to another, Tolkien adored his beloved Edith.(J.R.R. Tolkien)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... When Tolkien set out to create his mythological Elvish race, he drew inspiration from a muse dear to his heart. Edith Bratt (pictured here at age 19 when she first met Tolkien) shared the same grief--both had lost their mothers in their...

A feeling for language: without philology, Middle-earth would never have existed. But what is philology?(philology in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings")
May 1, 2003... Tolkien was for thirty-five years (1925-59) a professor of English. But that phrase did not mean then what it means now. In the first place the title "Professor" meant the holder of a Chair, a distinction achieved by few faculty members. More...

A niggling art: through a character named Niggle, Tolkien revealed his own creative process.(J.R.R. Tolkien; excerpt from "Tolkien and the Silmarillion")(Excerpt)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2003... The three books of The Lord of the Rings contain over a half million words. Its manuscript, when Tolkien sold it to Marquette University in 1957, stood in a stack seven feet high. Before, around, and beyond his famous trilogy, Tolkien wove a...

The Christian humanists: Tolkien joined these authors in countering the decadence of a dark century.(J.R.R. Tolkien)
May 1, 2003... No author works alone--even an author who creates a new world out of his own imagination. Born in 1892, J. R. R. Tolkien came of age in a dark, secular time. He responded in terms common to a group of English Christian writers--mostly...

One truth, many tales: how did Tolkien's approach to writing for a secularizing world compare with those of his Christian contemporaries?(J.R.R. Tolkien )(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2003... Tolkien and his Christian literary peers wrote for people who did not know the faith, or did not like it, or did not think it important--"a public which knows no History, no Classics, no Theology, and has almost forgotten its Bible," Dorothy...

Sacramental imagination: Catholicism anchored Tolkien's life and suffused his writings.(J.R.R. Tolkien)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2003... Tolkien claimed that all of his work was massively influenced--nay determined--by his Catholicism. Questions crowd in straightaway: "I've read the trilogy and The Silmarillion ten times, and I never saw anything Catholic in it." Or, "How...

The life & times of J.R.R. Tolkien. (A Christian History Timeline).(Chronology)(Biography)
May 1, 2003... 1892 Born on January 3 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his father worked for Lloyd's Bank 1896 Death of father, Arthur Tolkien. Family moves near Sarehole Mill, outside Birmingham 1900 Enters King Edward VI School, Birmingham...

Good & evil in Middle-earth: the characters are mythic, but the epic sweeps across a Christian moral landscape.("The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2003... J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is a profoundly Christian book. Like the anonymous seventh-century author of Beowulf whose work he had mastered, Tolkien infuses his pre-Christian epic fantasy with Christian convictions and concerns....

The Inklings: Tolkien relished his weekly meetings with this club of remarkable friends. (The Gallery).(J.R.R. Tolkien)
May 1, 2003... Thursday evenings in Lewis's Magdalen College rooms and Tuesdays for lunch at the Eagle and Child public house, Tolkien joined C. S. Lewis and a revolving cast of others in a beloved ritual. Over tea--or ale--and pipes, these Oxford...

Tollers & Jack: Tolkien and Lewis made an odd couple, but they contributed profoundly to each other's work.(J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis)
May 1, 2003... No harm in him: only needs a smack or two." So wrote C. S. Lewis ("Jack" to his friends) in his diary, on the night he first met J. R. R. Tolkien ("Tollers"). The comment hints at the undercurrent of tension that would run beneath the...

Hobbits & Englishmen: his were small people surmounting impossible odds.(J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings" trilogy; excerpt from "Tolkien: A Biography")(Excerpt)
May 1, 2003... Why should [Tolkien] choose to specialise in early English? Something exciting happened when he first realised that a large proportion of the poetry and prose of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval England was written in the dialect that had been...

Father of epic fantasy: scores of authors have paid Tolkien the highest homage--imitation.(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2003... When The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954-55, nothing like it had ever been seen. This epic tale in its elaborately devised world sent shock waves through the publishing world. It was, in the words of Tolkien biographer Tom Shippey, "a...

An unexpected party: like Bilbo discovering one dwarf after another at his door, Tolkien found himself, in the 1960s, hosting a growing American fan club.
May 1, 2003... The sudden boom in the popularity of The Lord of the Rings in the mid-1960s began with the simple fact that it became available in paperback. An unauthorized American edition arising from a seeming loophole in the book's copyright...

The "idol" speaks; Tolkien had mixed reactions to his newfound fame.
May 1, 2003... Writing to his colleague Norman Davis, he referred to the widespread enthusiasm for his books as "my deplorable cultus"; and to a reporter who asked him if he was pleased by the enthusiasm of the young Americans he replied: "Art moves them...

Understanding Tolkien: from light romps to profound reads, a bumper crop of books tells us more about the maker of Middle-earth. (Resources).(J.R.R. Tolkien)(Bibliography)
May 1, 2003... Books on the man The standard Tolkien biography is Humphrey Carpenter's authorized Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1977). Both this book and Carpenter's The Inklings (George Allen & Unwin, 1978) provide intimate, detailed portraits of...

Oxbridge Millennium Conference: a two week program in Cambridge and Oxford on the current challenges to Judeo-Christian culture, including a week-long focus on the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton.(Calendar)
May 1, 2003... Cambridge University: August 11-16. The conference begins in Cambridge University's New Hall College, where leading academics will make a diagnostic of the crisis of our time. Covering core topics in economics, law, politics, the media, and...