[Estel the Descender]

Quote from Master Underhill: 'I don’t think that acknowledging Tolkien’s Catholicism and its effects on his work poses any more danger of “appropriation” than acknowledging Tolkien’s Englishness and its effects on his work. I can acknowledge the work’s essential Englishness without feeling excluded from it because I’m an American. Take away the Englishness, and can you have LotR? If you take away the Catholicism, can you have it?' Bravo! I like this argument.

In the discussion, 'Trilogy and Bible' Kalessin wrote on page 3, argument 2,' The 'essential Christianity' of Tolkien argument is no different to the 'essential Blackness' of any Black writer, or the 'essential Feminism' of any Female writer. Anything by Maya Angelou therefore becomes a piece of Black Women's writing first - and poetry second. This is a spurious, postmodern, cultural studies-style approach that deconstructs every artistic object into political and cultural reference points. And as far as Tolkien's Christianity itself goes, Anglican sensibility in pre- and post-war England was very - I mean VERY - different from any current American church movement. You can't have the Christian overlay on LoTR (intentional or otherwise) without all the other cultural aspects. In the end you may as well not bother reading the book.' In this sense I agree with him.
So many people have belittled great literature because they were written by Christians, so why can't Christians write something that isn't specifically targeted to a Christian audience? Just as the concept 'fairy tales' in Victorian England was supposed to be for children and not for 'mature' readers did not appeal to Tolkien himself, neither should the label 'Christian' limit the works to Christian readers. Just as a good fairy tale will be good reading for adults as well as for children, a work by a Christian author should be good reading for Christian and non-Christian alike.

However, I agree with you when you wrote what I just quoted above. Can one separate the Englishness of Shakespheare from him or make Tolsoy less Russian. I think that is why a lot of Christians are very selective of their reading: they know that each book may, intentionally or unintentionally, promote the philosophy of the author. I think that this is in some ways true. C.S. Lewis was after all converted first to Theism and then to Christianity through the fairy tale 'Phantastes' by George Macdonald (even though that fairy tale was not intended as a tool for convertion but as a story first).

And please let us not lump all 'Christians' into one bundle. Lewis was an evengelical, Tolkien was a Catholic (Roman). Evangelicals are basically Protestant. It seems strange to me that a 'true' evangelical would try to 'appropriate' the LotR mythos: they would do better by using 'The Chronicles of Narnia'. The differences in worldview between these two forms of Christianity are far reaching and can be seen in the books of both Lewis and Tolkien (whether you like it or not Kalessin [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img] ). The prayer to Varda, for instance, is too much like (not equivalent!) to the 'Hail Mary'. 'A tiro nin. . .' to 'Pray for us. . .'

Suppose the LotR was written by a non-Christian, say, a Taoist or a believer in Asgard. In the former a complete victory over 'evil' will not be there: instead, the morality will be about the balance of good and evil, Yin/Yang. (By this definition even Star Wars is Judeo-Christian in its fight against the 'Dark Side'). An Asgardian will preach a pessimism where evil triumphs over good in the great twighlight of the gods.

Tolkien wrote something about morality in 'fairy tales' in his now famous essay On Fairy Stories, 'The stories of Beatrix Potter lie near the borders of Faerie, but outside it, I [Tolkien] think, for the most part. Their nearness is due largely to their strong moral element: by which I mean their inherent morality, not any allegorical significatio'. So, according to Tolkien himself, it is possible to have a certain morality in a story without moralising (which is the purpose of allegory anyway).

Now, as for postmodernism's characteristic #3, 'Relativism: the absence of objective standards of truth'. Tolkien was definitely not a postmodernist in this sense. Like Lewis, they upheld reason. THIS OF COURSE MEANS THAT FOR THEM OBJECTIVE TRUTH WAS REPRESENTATIVE OF ULTIMATE TRUTH. The dislike of relativism probably fueled his aversion to allegory. Note my previous quote of Tolkien in a previous entry above. #3, 'An opposition to certain classical artistic techniques such as narrative -- telling a story in an ordered sequence closed off at the end -- and representation -- attempting to depict reality.' Tolkien wanted to depict reality, even if it is (in his words) a 'secondary reality'. Kalessin's words against 'deconstruction' says about the same.

. . . Okay, that's enough for now [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img] .