VERY THOROUGH THINKING
Subject: The Essay
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2002
From: Regina

Pastor Wright

I read your essays on Tolkien, and I am glad I read them all before I responded. Your argument is actually very subtle and easily misunderstood (I read all your reader's feedback BEFORE your essay, so I can see it has been). I am not entirely sure, but it seems to me you are struggling with a problem similar to the problem of a friend of mine's. She was a pro-life activist who was analyzing LOTR for its strategies against evil. She concluded that Tolkien, and LOTR typifies an ineffective "resistance" mentality against evil (which, she would say, many pro-lifers typify). Many of the conclusions reached were similar to yours. I was able to change her mind -- I don't claim to be able to change yours, but I can tell you what I shared with her.

Now, it is apparently true from Tolkien's biographies that the learned professor did have a melancholy temperament, that he had seen gruesome atrocities during the Battle of the Somme in WWI that made him more pessimistic and prone to depression, and that he admired Anglo-Saxon and Germanic literature in which a kind of stoic pessimism is often present. However, as you have noted, he was a Christian. He was also a daily communicant (that is: went to church services daily, a mark of the most devout kind of Catholic, since one can only receive Communion daily if one practices holy living and makes regular confession -- the evangelical equivalent is roughly a person who reads the Bible daily, spends an hour in prayer daily, and attends services both Sundays and Wednesday nights while practicing virtue, loving God, and walking in holiness). As a Catholic convert in a rather anti-Catholic England and a naturally shy person, he was not inclined to exuberant expressions of his faith -- most of the time he was fairly private -- but evidence from letters to family and records of private conversations tend to show that he could be articulate and passionate about the things he felt the most strongly about when the occasion arose. He wasn't the type of Christian who would preach to the crowds but he would "share his faith" with those persons he came across privately who had questions about Christ. Fortunately for the Christian world, one of those persons was C. S. Lewis.

Lewis, who WAS an exuberant person, could and did preach to crowds. He is easy for we American Christians to identify with and relate to. Tolkien is less easy to pin down. He seldom, if ever, used any of the buzzwords Christians pick up on, and the language he used was that of the pre-Vatican II Thomistically-trained Catholic, not the evangelical. I would argue it would be a mistake to interpret his faith as "strained" or "impoverished," when it seems to me that his faith was easy to miss or misunderstand.

However, as you rightly noted, it is near to impossible to judge a person's faith. Let us turn to examining his works, primarily LOTR.

In the teeth of what I wrote above, I would contend that the LOTR is NOT foundationally a work that exhibits a lack of faith in the Christian revelation. Tolkien, with his intense but private faith and his rigorous theological training, bolstered by a lifetime of reflection on the Christian mysteries, was extremely careful that his mythologies meshed perfectly with Catholic theology and Christian belief.

He KNEW that the world could not be saved by a race of hobbits or Numenoreans, but that the world HAD in fact been saved by a race of insignificant desert nomads half a world away -- specifically, by the poor son of a carpenter of the Jewish race. It was his faith in that hope -- the only hope of mankind -- that impelled him to ensure that nothing in his mythology impinged on the uniqueness of both the Jewish revelation and the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The men in Middle Earth are pre-Christian and possibly also pre-Mosaic, even pre-Abrahamic. Certainly if there is knowledge of the One True God in this world, the privileged people who know Him are far away from the story. The men of Middle Earth are "the Gentiles without any ultimate hope," to paraphrase St. Paul.

Thus Elrond admits that all the elves can do is "fight the long defeat." Gandalf says he is Gandalf the White "but Black is greater still." No angel can destroy Satan's hold on earth. Only Eru the One can do that. And in pre-Judaic mentality, what devout mortal would dare to imagine the Holy One Himself becoming flesh? The Moslems still consider this thought a blasphemy.

There is no salvation in the Elves, or the hobbits. There is salvation, but in these dark ages before Christ, there is no real ultimate hope.

Still, there are mysterious glimmerings of Something More. In hindsight, we see these things as God allowing a foreshadowing of His plan in the hearts of men, so that when the Truth was preached to them, they would recognize it. There are the stories of the gods that die and rise again, whose death somehow brings life, in every culture. In Anglo-Saxon poetry there is the mysterious figure of Earendil, the morning-star, who had some mysterious and forgotten role in pagan literature.

Thus all the characters in Tolkien's mythology can do is prefigure. Aragorn *in some ways* can prefigure Christ. Gandalf *in some ways* can prefigure Christ. So can Frodo *in some ways.* But after enduring a symbolic Way of the Cross, Frodo fails at the Cracks of Doom because he is NOT God, but only a creature, and the strength of mere creatures cannot save the world. It is by the mystery of Mercy, a quality pre-historic Anglo Saxons (whom Middle Earth men are modeled on) would not have understood, that the Ring is destroyed.

Tolkien's discipline was the study of pre-Christian English literature, the literature of the pagans which had been handed down by Christian authors who studied it and found embedded in it hints of that blessed hope, things which found their way there by some mysterious providence of God, foreshadowings of what was to come. This fascinated Tolkien. As he told Lewis the night of their famous conversation which led to Lewis's conversion, myths are embedded with truth, truths half-realized. "But they are all lies, even though lies breathed through silver," Lewis the agnostic told Tolkien. "No," said Tolkien the Christian. "Christianity is the story of a myth that is true." (Joseph Pearce in his book Tolkien: Man and Myth treats this whole question very well.)

Why did Tolkien feel the need to "create" a new mythology? He had on hand the fragments of poetry and literature from early civilizations, including fascinating fragments about Earendil and similar stories. He knew that very little Anglo-Saxon literature had survived -- unlike the Scandanavians, who had many tales. He had also been fascinated by the mystery of Atlantis, which he had dreamt about repeatedly since childhood. At some point, he conceived of an attempt to "fill in the gaps" of Anglo-Saxon literature using figures from the pieces still extant -- faery stories, monsters, St. George's dragon, and so on. As a Christian living in what he knew was a rapidly-growing-post-Christian society, he might well have wondered if the hope of previous pagans might have any resonance with the modern pagans. I think he began the mythology (which from his point of view originally did not include the LOTR or the Hobbit) out of sheer fascination with the subject matter. Through the years, he systematically revised the tales to make them mesh with Christian theology of creation and salvation, and the Christian understanding of the nature of good and evil. Thus the "gods" became in the published Silmarillion more like Angels who don't really create but co-create (or "sub-create") under God, just as Tolkien himself was sub-creating his mythology. (I believe Tolkien created the term "sub-creation" which is in itself an expression of Christian humility.)

Somewhere along the line, he created the Hobbits, first just to amuse his children. In the Hobbit, the terms Middle Earth, istari, Lotholorien, Gondor, and other familiar places and names from LOTR are not used. It is set in a much more generic fairytale setting, and only later did it begin to get more serious. Hence the hobbits themselves, as you mention, are almost completely anachronistic. They have umbrellas, teatime, and tobacco, they have bound books, waistcoat pockets, handkerchiefs, and watches. Gandalf even asks for tomatoes in the first edition of the Hobbit! Why is this? It was because in the beginning, Tolkien wasn't intending the Hobbit to be set in "his" pre-historic Middle Earth, but in simple storyland fairy tale. It was only when the publishers insisted on a sequel to the Hobbit and he started writing another tale about Bilbo and his journeys, that the tale became "bigger and broader and longer" as Tolkien writes in the introduction to LOTR, and grew to encompass part of his elvish histories. The anachronims of the hobbits annoyed him intensely (it also bothered him that he had thoughtlessly given the dwarves names out of the Icelandic sagas, which messed up his internal system of names) and he toned them down as much as he could. He excised the tomatoes, converted tobacco to pipeweed, potatoes to taters, and did away with as many Latinisms and obvious inconsistences as he could. And he also ensured that the "modern" technology of the hobbits was limited to the Shire and goes so far as to have Aragorn forbid men to dwell there (ie: and learn their ways) at the end of the book. No one in Gondor has teatime, or wears a waistcoat. (I am referring to the authorized biography, Tom Shippey's books, and Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle Earth volumes for the above information, btw). The hobbits "dwindle" and avoid men in later days, not only because of the plot, but also because Tolkien realized that he had to do away with these historical anachronisms for the story to remain believable!

All of this to demonstrate that Tolkien, while not setting out to write a tale to convert modern pagans, wrote his tale in such a way that he "made way" for the Christian revelation. He set the scene in the real world, the "real" historical world where "God created the world and found it good," "the serpent tempted and man ate" and "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." It is perhaps fitting that early Christian writers speculated that Earendil, who figures so prominently in the Silmarillion, was a figure of John the Baptist, "preparing the way of the Lord." In the same way, Tolkien's trilogy is a similar "preparation for the Gospel" that has, in a mysterious twist of Providence, sowing seeds of truth in the hearts of many of the modern pagans who read it (one of them, my husband, now credits Tolkien with converting him). Tolkien points out to many that the state of the world is wretched (without God), and that there is a beauty and a sadness in fallen creation whose remedy "is beyond the circles of the world."

I hope the above succeeds in answering some of the points you raised that (at the time I visited the site) no one else had addressed. If I have missed anything, please let me know.

In our Savior, the Morning Star
Peace and good
Regina Doman

Response: Regina, I wouldn't say that you have missed anything at all. At the same time, I'm afraid we still disagree to an extent. You have eloquently stated the "chaff versus the corn" problem that Finrod and Andreth discuss in Morgoth's Ring. You, I think, tend to fall in the camp which chooses to celebrate the corn without really identifying the chaff, or the problems that the chaff present. I, on another hand, think that the chaff is more important to discuss and identify, not because the vision presented is an ineffective means of dealing with evil; rather, because Tolkien's world becomes far too seductive a distraction from "The Greatest Story Ever Told."  Given the great pains that Tolkien took to revise his creation subsequent to the publication of LOTR, I am confident that the author himself was greatly concerned with the chaff as well. (You are mistaken, though, in asserting that Tolkien was "extremely careful that his mythologies meshed perfectly with Catholic theology and Christian belief." Most of his efforts in this area came about after his public celebrity, not while his creation remained mostly private; and as Cristopher Tolkien points out, this was an effort never fully realized.)  -Greg

OUTSTANDING INSIGHT
Subject: The Essay
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002
From: Aric

wow! genius.

it's been obvious to me for a long time that tolkien was writing myth, not fiction --- but the whole T-document concept and subsequent critique is really amazing. i loved the textual criticism discussion. whatever tolkien's intentions were for this "remythologizing," i've noted a couple things about its effect on myself and other readers.

first is the way that LOTR evokes a sense of nostalgic longing for things past. (i believe lewis referred to this quality as "romanticism.") though his 4th age seems to point toward modernism, tolkien himself seemed almost anti-progress, anti-technology. the mechanistic innovations of "sharky" in the shire are physical manifestations of evil. i read that tolkien was originally quite shy of using the recently invented cassette recorder until he heard the results of it. even then, his first recording of his own voice was a recitation of the Lord's prayer in gothic, as if to exorcise the machine of any evil presence. (sorry, i don't remember my sources real well--- i think that was from a biography by humphries?) i have seen that LOTR (the books) typically stirs up a longing for what is good and pure, and perhaps for the supernatural in people. it will remain to be seen whether the movies have the same result.

secondly but related, is the number of people that say LOTR (the books again) has changed their lives. in a survey a few years back (done by parade magazine, i think), the Lord of the Rings was in the top 10 books that people claimed had changed their lives. God knows, it changed my life. it's kind of odd how a piece of literature inspired me to study linguistics which in turn resulted in me committing my life to foreign missions. strange fruit for a not-particularly-Christian book. obviously, there were a lot of other factors in the mix, too. but if it wasn't for LOTR, my life would have followed a very different path.

thanks for sharing your insights.

Response: Thanks for your input, and your kind words! -Greg

A GODSEND
Subject: The Fellowship of the Ring
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002
From: Shadowdog

I love Lord of the Rings! It has a lot of spiritual meaning to me! It got me praying everynight for diferent things. I bet God ment for this movie to happen!

Response: Wow! That's quite an effect! I bet you'll start seeing God working in all kinds of ways in your life. -Greg

ABOUT THAT OTHER STUFF
Subject: The Essay
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002
From: Joe Admire

Dear Greg,

I've read your extensive essay on LotR and the comments on the bulletin board with great interest. With all due respect to everyone who's taking part in this discussion, I feel that not enough attention has been paid to the opinions of the author himself, Professor Tolkien.

As it happens, Tolkien wrote very extensively during his lifetime on "background" issues relating to his "subcreative" (his term) world, especially in letters to family members, his publishers, friends and ordinary fans, many of which are republished in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by his son, Christopher). There are far too many relevant passages to be able to cite here in the short space of an email message, so I will simply encourage you (if you have not already read the book) and all other fans in the strongest possible terms to seek it out; it should be available at most public libraries, and I believe it can also be obtained through Amazon.com's used-book services (if it's out of print).

Tolkien, of course, wrote much, much more on Middle-earth than what was officially published during his lifetime. We all know about The Silmarillion, but not as many people may know about Unfinished Tales, which was published several years later and fills in important gaps, and it's likely that only the most devoted fans are familiar with the sprawling series The History of Middle-earth, which is essentially a gigantic compendium of all of the Professor's surviving drafts and notes on Middle-earth, again, edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. These books aren't nearly as easy to read, especially in the early volumes, as the better-known volumes; for one thing, the material in them is almost always fragmentary to one degree or another, requiring extensive editorial interpolation and footnoting, and for another, the style and manner of writing changes dramatically from the earliest writings to the latest. Even so, any Tolkien fan who is seriously interested in the process of how the Professor came to "sub-create" Middle-earth must read these books. The names are as follows:

• Volume I - The Book of Lost Tales, Part I
• Volume II - The Book of Lost Tales, Part II
• Volume III - The Lays of Beleriand
• Volume IV - The Shaping of Middle-earth
• Volume V - The Lost Road
• Volume VI - The Return of the Shadow Volume
• VII - The Treason of Isengard Volume
• VIII - The War of the Ring Volume
• IX - Sauron Defeated Volume
• X - Morgoth's Ring Volume
• XI - The War of the Jewels Volume
• XII - The Peoples of Middle-earth

All these books are available via Amazon.com in hardback or paperback, or at local public libraries.

In the context of religion, I would particularly call everyone's attention to Volume X, Morgoth's Ring , and particularly to the long essay, in conversational form, therein titled "The Debate of Finrod and Andreth". This extraordinary writing represents the closest Tolkien ever came to explicitly introducing Christian theology into his sub-creative world.

Even though this document was never published in the "canonical" works (although it was originally intended as an appendix to The Silmarillion ), I feel that it represents some of Tolkien's most important writing on the subject of religious belief in his "secondary world", and gives the lie to the proposition that no one in that world looked forward to a Christian, or more properly proto-Christian, view of world and personal redemption.

In continuing to read on into the commentary on the bulletin board, I come across the following passage in which you replied to The Fish's letter of December 31st:

Though Tolkien longs for a day when the Divine Economy has more than enough to go around, I think he sees the Fourth Age (which I read as our own age) as one in which the Economy is depressed.

In fact, Professor Tolkien did not, in his own words, see the Fourth Age as our own age. As he explains in his Letters he saw our world as really being more in the "Sixth" or even "Seventh" age, though he never went into detail about what the dividing points between those ages might be. However, ever since reading that passage, I have thought of the Fourth Age as actually being not merely pre-Christian, even pre-Judaic, but antediluvian - which is to say, before the Flood. What periods the hypothetical Fifth and Sixth and/or Seventh Ages might cover is left as an exercise for the reader, though I have my own ideas.

-Joe-

Response: Finally, I've been caught. Truth be told, Joe, my coverage of the movies on HJ is a deliberate attempt to point folk toward the only work that is truly "Classically Christian," that is, The Bible. I'm afraid that I cannot in good conscience recommend that Tolkien fans invest the time and energy in consumption of the vast bookshelf published as The History of Middle Earth. Why? Because I truly do not find it nearly illuminating enough to warrant the effort -- if one believes that time is short, and that what we do on a daily basis truly matters.

I am currently working on a book that will spell all this out in greater detail, but will just briefly point out, to those inclined to pursue Joe's suggestion, that The Debate was a very late addition to the tradition (1959 at the earliest), and therefore does not figure in the world of Tolkien's published fiction. Further, the theology that it presents is no more explicit than the theology to be found in Genesis or Isaiah. As I have remarked in my essay, a theology that merely points to a Messiah without identifying Him is not Judeo-Christian, it's pre-Christian. The Debate does not make Tolkien's mythology any more Christian than Judaism or Zoroastrianism.  Now, this is not to say that it's inferior ; I merely think it's important to be theologically truthful.

I have commented extensively elsewhere on the "Fourth Age" debate. You should well know, Joe, from your own research, that Tolkien often contradicted himself on the subject of the timing and locale for his mythology. Why? Because it was greatly unsettled in his own mind: he knew what he had actually written (a review of The Hobbit might be in order), and he knew the theology was problematic. Hence we are left to judge for ourselves, as readers, what Age was intended. Tell me, in viewing Peter Jackson's movie, or any previous visualization of Tolkien's work -- or Tolkien's own drawings and paintings -- can you really tell me that the Third Age is all that far removed from Victorian England?  Understanding the Flat Earth / Round Earth dilemma that Tolkien struggled with through the Fifties and Sixties is enough to address the "changing of the lands."  Understanding the Third Age as antediluvian is just as problematic. -Greg

GOOD WORK
Subject: Tolkien Essay
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002
From: Sam Holliday

Mr. Wright,

I enjoyed reading your essay on spirituality in the Tolkien corpus. However, I was very much hoping to find references and documentation included. Without these, it is difficult to interact with the essay on a level other than simply giving my preferences and suppositions.

You mention in your response to comments that you are open to other Tolkien sources. Are you familiar with the following?

• Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
• William Ready, The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Inquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1968).
• Colin Duriez, The J. R. R. Tolkien Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to His Life, Writings, and World of Middle-Earth (Grand Rapids: Baker House, 1992).

Of these, only the Letters edited by Carpenter are actually primary source material, and I have found them vastly illuminating in my study of Tolkien's spirituality. Carpenter's biography is also extremely helpful.

You mention in your essay the popular misconception that Lewis influenced Tolkien. I agree that such would be a misconception. In fact, the opposite would be more accurate, according to the Letters and to Carpenter (I apologize for not having the page references available). It is widely known that Lewis was an atheist well into adulthood. It is not widely known that Tolkien played a part in convincing Lewis to leave atheism and embrace theism.

Thank you for your time.

Response: The essay originated as a college thesis, and was extensively reworked for publication on HJ. David Bruce felt that it needed to be less formal and academic in tone. I'm afraid the effort has been only partially successful, so that many, like you, would prefer that footnotes and bibliography be included. For me, the key sources for understanding the impact of Tolkien's published work are the books themselves: LOTR, The Hobbit, The Tolkien Reader, the Letters, and the version of the Silmarillion that Christopher Tolkien published after his father's death. This is the domain of my essay.

Now, what Tokien intended and what he actually did are two different things, because, like the rest of us, he's human. To really get at what he felt were the deficiencies of his creation, one needs to undertake the difficult task of digesting Unfinished Tales and the now 12-Volume History of Middle-Earth series. That is not the domain of my essay, but will be addressed in a forthcoming book; and not surprisingly, it's easy to see that Tolkien was very concerned about the spiritual weaknesses of his creation, and how inconsistent it was with both modern cosmology and orthodox theology. Fortunately, the intense media attention generated by the movies is bringing a lot more attention to the spiritual influence Tolkien had on Lewis, among many others. Tolkien even aided in the English translation of the Jerusalem Bible . -Greg

THE POWER OF MYTH
Subject: The Fellowship of the Ring
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002
From: Michael Foster

I saw Lord of the Rings, and I enjoyed it, but as the fiery debate rages over whether such movies are "Christian," I asked myself one question - Why did I like it? I believe that question is satisfied with the power of myth. Fantasy, by nature, has the means by which to touch on deep levels. It is this "stirring" of emotion that ignites my imagination and allows me to experience reality a little differently. As an example, the The Lord of the Rings presented the age old "good vs evil" concept in a way that is difficult to describe in words. Let's just say that it intensified and clarified my understanding. The same can be said for the theme of "self-sacrafice" threaded throughout the movie.

I know that many people didn't like the movie, and some went as far as to take a righteous stance against it. I can only assume that these people fear the mystical experience, and, out of an ultimate desire for security, they opt for the safety of the world in which they are familiar. As a result, they lash out against anyone and anything that presents a threat.

Contrary to popular belief, myths and fantasies are not merely an escape from an overwhelming reality, but rather they offer insight into the truth within reality.

I am looking forward to the next two movies. I hope they will maintain the overall tone and accuracy of the books.

Michael Foster

Response: I think your words would have been very welcome in the very discussion that Tolkien and Lewis had the night that Lewis forsook atheism. At the same time, I would caution you to assume too much. There are many Christians who see the power of myth as negative in light of its inherent inferiority to the power of the Gospel. Myth may contain glimmers of the truth, but it is the Gospel that is the power of God for salvation. Both myth and the Gospel have their proper place in God's scheme! -Greg

FAR TOO INTENSE FOR CHILDREN
Subject: The Fellowship of the Ring
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002
From: Roberta Morey

How this movie got a PG-13 rating is beyond me! It was horrifying and certainly not something I would take any children to. But because of the rating many children have probably seen it.

When I read a book, and I enjoy fantasy too, my imagination conjures up the characters and places. The film helped a lot in picturing for me the main characters and places. But WHY did the enemy need to be so horrible. My own imagination wouldn't have gone this far at all. It is hard to see any good message in the film when keeping my hand over my eyes so I wouldn't have to look.

Roberta Morey (age 67)

Response: You're not alone, Roberta. The last time I went to see the movie, a very young boy, perhaps 6, was seated next to my wife, and there were times when the poor kid was literally apoplectic! And I remember being terrified by the forest fire in Bambi... On the other hand, there seem to be a great many kids who AREN'T terrified by the darkness in the movie. Perhaps that's not a commendation for our culture... -Greg

EXPECTATIONS FULFILLED
Subject: The Fellowship of the Ring
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002
From: "Reid Clark"

For my wife and I, this was the best movie we've ever seen. We are both avid LOTR buffs and committed Christians. We have seen it three times and are really thankful that the movie has been made. Can't wait to see the other two.

Response: Unfortunately, you MUST wait to see the other two, Reid! In the mean time, perhaps HJ can satisfy your appetite. Check out our monthly feature! -Greg

BRILLIANT BRILLIANCE
Subject: The Fellowship of the Ring
Date: Thu 31 Jan,2002
From: "Nick Stamp"

I THOUGHT LORD OF THE RINGS WAS BRILLIANT!!!!! i've seen it three times and i just can't get enough of it.

Response: Well, then, I suggest you see it again! -Greg

A PARABLE FOR TODAY? 
Subject: The Fellowship of The Ring
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002
From: Jeannette

It's really good.  Very accurate and well planned.  I think it's awesome: it's rare I go crazy over a movie!  And I think Tolkien is one of the best book writers on earth!  Is he a Christian?  There seems to be serious and real values seen in the story that are true.  Evil is such a small thing, yet is causes so much trouble because of it's power, and it's something that needs to be destroyed.  Evil is everywhere, and in the story, there is so much violence and combat.  It's great!  But it really depicts the evil flooding the world.  I really see a lot of depth to the story, and was displayed very well on the screen!  I just wonder how many people see that deep.  Can you see true values that Tolkien might be trying to get across?

I think The Lord of the Rings may be Tolkien's attempt to put some real religion back into the world.  Like Jesus told many parables with meaning. People could have listened and loved the story and completely missed the whole point. But if it was 'meant to be' for that person, they would see meaning behind Jesus' little stories and believe Him.  But that was Jesus who spoke, and when He spoke, you'd have  known He had the utmost authority. Even the 'religious' people of those days (eg. Pharasees) were  amazed.  Too bad they didn't like it that He made them look 'bad.'

Tolkien might be trying to make his own little parable, but since he is not Jesus, could have missed a few important points.  It's just a theory, but I think I am pretty close! 

Response: There is an immense power in words, and in parables particularly.  You show wisdom in pointing out the difficulty with humans attempting to use parables to express spiritual truth.  -Greg

THAT DARNED ESSAY!
Subject: Wrong, wrong, wrong
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002
From: Ric

Although I only scanned your essay, I was dissappointed that you assumed that C.S. Lewis was the influence on Tolkiens faith, if there was one. History tells us, as does Lewis, that Tolkien was the one who led Lewis to Christ and mentored his vision of creating parables of Christian theology. That changes your equation.

Response: Well, I hope if you had read the essay, you'd have seen the notes clarifying that this is not my assumption, and in fact an assumption I'm trying to debunk.  Thanks for your interest in truth, though, and I'll try some more revisions there to clarify my meaning.  -Greg

UNRESTRAINED PRAISE
Subject: The Fellowship of the Ring
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002
From: "Donerleg"

I cant type into an email what I feel about these books. Lets say that I believe the Lord brought them to me when I really needed them. I am so greatful that someone with vision has brought them to the screen so that when I went to the movie by myself the day they opened, it was perfect from my standpoint. I did not look for blunders. I only basked in the beauty and marveled that it was exactly how I pictured it when I read the books. I personally feel that the director was God lead whether he knows it or not.

Response: Isn't it funny how some people can see the books and film literally as a Godsend, while others see them as the curse of the devil?  I'm glad they had a positive effect on you.  -Greg

WORKED UP?  WHO ARE YOU CALLING WORKED UP?
Subject: Relax!
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002
From: "Mollie Spaulding" 

Response: You are right in observing the inconsistency in contemporary paranoia about magic in entertainment.  I think it's the fact that grotesque amounts of money are now being generated by the public interest in this stuff, and that seems to get a lot of attention...  In addition to God's grace, we can also be thankful for his Spirit which can deliver us from our weaknesses, whatever they might be!  -Greg