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The Hobbit Hole VIII: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1112736/posts



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The Hobbit Hole VII - But not yet weary are our feet...

Posted on 03/15/2004 1:45:41 PM PST by HairOfTheDog

Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!

But not yet weary are our feet...

New verse:

Upon the hearth the fire is red,
Beneath the roof there is a bed;
But not yet weary are our feet,
Still round the corner we may meet
A sudden tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone.
Tree and flower and leaf and grass,
Let them pass! Let them pass!
Hill and water under sky,
Pass them by! Pass them by!

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,
Let them go! Let them go!
Sand and stone and pool and dell,
Fare you well! Fare you well!

Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Then world behind and home ahead,
We’ll wander back to home and bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade!
Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,
And then to bed! And then to bed!

See also: http://freeper.the-hobbit-hole.net

Web page for our moot reports and troop support information!


TOPICS: The Hobbit Hole
KEYWORDS: corincomehomesoon; frodoismine; greatexpectations; ilovehairofthedog; newpupforosage; spamisbanned; weddingmootisnear; wherearethekeywords
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To: msdrby
The plot thickens!!!
1,841 posted on 03/19/2004 8:28:39 PM PST by RMDupree (HHD: Deep roots are not reached by the frost.)
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To: g'nad
at one point one of the kids wailed "how many more?"... "till I get tired" I growled... *sniff* brought back memries... push-ups, bends and thrusts, the werks...

ROFL! Reminds me of a type of push-up a friend of mine who was in SF made up for his martial arts students. He gave it some randomly made-up name--I forget what, something like "Midlothian". So of course someone at a seminar asked him, "What's a Midlothian push-up?" Then he made them do one--involved a combination of squat-thrusts, crawling around, etc.--took about 20 minutes to do one rep. . .He said he made that up on purpose in case anyone complained the regular exercises were either too easy or too hard :)

1,842 posted on 03/19/2004 8:30:17 PM PST by Fedora
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To: RMDupree
This is a summary of The Magician's Nephew:

Digory and Polly discover a secret passage that links their houses, and are tricked into vanishing out of this world and into the World of Charn, where they wake up the evil Queen Jadis. There, they witness the creation of the Land of Narnia, as it is sung into being by the Great Lion, Aslan.

http://www.narnia.com/chronicles/books/index.htm

Sounds to me alot like the creation story from the Silmarillion. Hmmm.
1,843 posted on 03/19/2004 8:32:51 PM PST by msdrby (US Veterans: All give some, but some give all.)
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To: RMDupree
How very twisted!!

They musta had too much pipeweed that day!--shudder!

DooooOOOoooooOOOmmmm!--ROFLMBO! And I guess that guy was actually a famous folk singer before that?--what on earth did he sing?

1,844 posted on 03/19/2004 8:33:18 PM PST by Fedora
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To: All
Fiddler is ending and my eyes are starting to water, so I'm gonna call it a night folks!

Hasta manana! Good night!

1,845 posted on 03/19/2004 8:33:23 PM PST by RMDupree (HHD: Deep roots are not reached by the frost.)
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To: msdrby
There are a lot of things that reflect each other between the works of those two authors.

But I seriously doubt the "Minstrel of Gondor" was ever imagined by either of them!

1,846 posted on 03/19/2004 8:35:01 PM PST by RMDupree (HHD: Deep roots are not reached by the frost.)
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To: Fedora
I don't know what he sang before that, but I guarantee he never sang afterwards!!

I've never heard such an annoying tremelo in my life! Sheesh!

Nighty night!
1,847 posted on 03/19/2004 8:36:05 PM PST by RMDupree (HHD: Deep roots are not reached by the frost.)
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To: msdrby
Interesting! Never noticed that--but I do seem to remember something to the effect that after Lewis heard Tolkien read The Hobbit, he suggested they each write a story along similar lines. Lewis came up with Lion; Tolkien came up with LotR.
1,848 posted on 03/19/2004 8:37:27 PM PST by Fedora
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To: RMDupree
'night and sleep well.
1,849 posted on 03/19/2004 8:37:48 PM PST by msdrby (US Veterans: All give some, but some give all.)
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To: RMDupree
But I seriously doubt the "Minstrel of Gondor" was ever imagined by either of them!

At first I thought Rankin-Bass made the Minstrel up, but upon my last rereading I noticed he actually is in RotK--I'm sure Tolkien didn't imagine him with that voice, though!

1,850 posted on 03/19/2004 8:41:13 PM PST by Fedora
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To: Fedora
I also think a comparison/contrast would be interesting. BUT, these days, I am not sure that either series would be allowed to be studied in the public school classroom. Add to that, CS Lewis's series was written to a different audience than Tolkien's LOTR. I see other similarities in them as well, and feel that they are essentially the same story, with different themes.
1,851 posted on 03/19/2004 8:42:15 PM PST by msdrby (US Veterans: All give some, but some give all.)
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To: RMDupree
Nighty night!

G'night!

1,852 posted on 03/19/2004 8:42:30 PM PST by Fedora
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To: msdrby
There was an author who did a comparative study of Tolkien, Lewis, and Charles Williams, I believe--trying to remember the guy's name. . .
1,853 posted on 03/19/2004 8:45:56 PM PST by Fedora
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To: Fedora
The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends by Humphrey Carpenter.
1,854 posted on 03/19/2004 8:47:55 PM PST by msdrby (US Veterans: All give some, but some give all.)
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To: msdrby
This isn't the book I was thinking of, but this looks interesting, too, on that subject:

Christian History Corner: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a Legendary Friendship

Christian History Corner: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a Legendary Friendship

A new book reveals how these two famous friends conspired to bring myth and legend—and Truth—to modern readers.

By Chris Armstrong | posted 08/29/2003

Our world would be poorer without two other worlds: Narnia and Middle-earth. Yet if two young professors had not met at an otherwise ordinary Oxford faculty meeting in 1926, those wondrous lands would still be unknown to us.

British author Colin Duriez, who wrote the article "Tollers and Jack" in issue #78 of Christian History, explains why this is so in his forthcoming book Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (Hidden Spring). Duriez tells the story of how these two brilliant authors met, discovered their common love for mythical tales, and pledged to bring such stories into the mainstream of public reading taste.

Tolkien and Lewis shared the belief that through myth and legend—for centuries the mode many cultures had used to communicate their deepest truths—a taste of the Christian gospel's "True Myth" could be smuggled past the barriers and biases of secularized readers.

Christian History managing editor Chris Armstrong reached Colin this week at his home in Leicester, England.

You have said that if it hadn't been for the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the world would likely never have seen The Narnia Chronicles and The Lord of the Rings. What was it about "fairy stories" that led these two men to want to rehabilitate them for a modern audience—adults as well as children?

They had both personal and professional reasons for this interest. Personally, they had both read and enjoyed such stories as they were growing up, in collections by the brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, and others. Lewis had also heard Celtic myths—his nurse had told him some of the folk tales of Ireland.

Professionally, they studied and taught the literatures of medieval romance and, in Tolkien's case, the background of Norse myth. And they realized that it was only quite recently that such stories had become marginalized as "children's stories." Through much of history these were tales told and enjoyed by grown-ups. Even strong warriors enjoyed them, rejoicing in their triumphant moments, weeping at tragic turns of events. These stories told them important things about life—about who they were and what the world was like, and about the realm of the divine.

It dawned on both men that there was a need to create a readership again for these books—especially an adult readership. Lewis's space trilogy came out of this same impulse to write the sort of stories that he and Tolkien liked to read. He felt he could say things in science fiction that he couldn't say in other ways. And Tolkien had been expressing this sense already for years when the two men met—ever since World War One he had been writing hundreds of pages of a cycle of myth and legend from the early ages of Middle-earth. This, it would later turn out, would provide the "pre-history" for The Lord of the Rings, some of which was published after his death in The Silmarillion.

Early in their relationship, in 1936, after Tolkien had written the children's story The Hobbit, the two men had a momentous conversation about their desire to bring such stories to a wider audience. They actually decided to divide the territory—Lewis would take "space travel," Tolkien "time travel." Tolkien never got around to finishing his time-travel story, concentrating instead on his more "adult" trilogy, in which he placed hobbits in the context of his Silmarillion stories. But Lewis did write his space books: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

Lewis seems to have had the more forceful personality of the two. Yet you show that Tolkien had a deep influence on Lewis. What did he teach Lewis?

Lewis, although he used a very rational, knock-down technique in his rhetorical approach to philosophical questions, was a deeply imaginative man who regarded his imaginative self as his most basic self. Before he met Tolkien, he became friends with Owen Barfield, and the two of them had long conversations about the imagination.

But as a brilliant young man who had decided that the Christian faith of his up-bringing was intellectually untenable, Lewis had no way of bringing together that imaginative side of his nature with his rational side. His rational side told him that while stories might serve to amuse, they couldn't very well teach you about the things that really mattered.

What Tolkien did was help Lewis see how the two sides, reason and imagination, could be integrated. During the two men's night conversation on the Addison Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College, Tolkien showed Lewis how the two sides could be reconciled in the Gospel narratives. The Gospels had all the qualities of great human storytelling. But they portrayed a true event—God the storyteller entered his own story, in the flesh, and brought a joyous conclusion from a tragic situation. Suddenly Lewis could see that the nourishment he had always received from great myths and fantasy stories was a taste of that greatest, truest story—of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

So Tolkien brought the imagination right into the center of Lewis's life. And then, through a gradual process, with the example of Tolkien's Silmarillion tales and Lord of the Rings before him, Lewis learned how to communicate Christian faith in imaginative writing. The results were Narnia, the space trilogy, The Great Divorce, and so forth.

What about Lewis's impact on Tolkien?

Tolkien was a private man who, when he met Lewis, had written his mythic tales for a private audience. He had very little confidence that they could speak to a wider audience. But from the beginning of their relationship, Lewis encouraged his friend to finish and publish his stories. He delighted to hear Tolkien read chapters of his epic trilogy, as he completed them, at meetings of their Oxford reading group, the Inklings. And Tolkien was immensely encouraged by those meetings. It spurred him on.

There were some instances in which Lewis gave Tolkien something to think about. In his space trilogy, Lewis introduced the concept of Hnau, the embodiment of personality and rationality in animal and vegetable beings. This seems to have influenced the creation of the Ents in Lord of the Rings.

There is also evidence that Tolkien pondered a lot on the Screwtape Letters. For the most part, however, Tolkien was extremely annoyed at Lewis's popularizing of theology. He thought theology should be left to the professionals. Tolkien also disliked the Narnia series, feeling it was both theologically heavy-handed and artistically slapdash—an unfair judgment of what were among the most beautifully crafted of Lewis's works, and probably the most likely to survive the next hundred years as "classics."

You have said that Lewis and Tolkien shared three interrelated commitments—to "romanticism, reason, and Christianity." Can you elaborate?

The two friends were interested in the literature of the romantic period because many of the poems and stories attempted to convey the supernatural, the "otherworldly"—and thus provided a window into spiritual things. Lewis explored romantic themes like joy and longing, and Tolkien emphasized the nature of people as storytelling beings who by telling stories reflect the creative powers of God. But they both rejected an "instinctive" approach to the imagination. Many romantic writers were interested in a kind of nature mysticism. They looked within themselves and at the world around them and sought flashes of insight into "the nature of things"—illuminations of truth that could not be explained, reasoned, or systematized. But Lewis and Tolkien insisted that the reason and the imagination must be integrated. In any understanding of truth, the whole person must be involved.

This is where their third shared commitment came into play—this sense of wholeness was a Christian approach, distant from the neo-pagan mysticism of some romantics, the "Pan worship" of the early twentieth century. Indeed, Tolkien worried increasingly towards the end of his life that people were missing the Christian balance of his work, and were taking it almost as the basis of a new paganism. You could argue in fact that one reason Tolkien didn't finish the Silmarillion was his concern to make his imaginative creations consonant with Christianity. Obviously not wanting to make them into allegory or preachment, he was concerned his literary insights be clearly consistent with Christianity.

Chris Armstrong is managing editor of Christian History magazine. More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church's past, is available at ChristianHistory.net. Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine are also available.

1,855 posted on 03/19/2004 8:52:42 PM PST by Fedora
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To: msdrby
Hmmm--maybe I'm mixing Carpenter up with the other author I'm trying to remember--I know Carpenter and it wasn't Carpenter I'm trying to remember--maybe the book I'm tryng to remember only covered Tolkien and Lewis but not Williams--it was a scholar at U-Illinois Wheaton who wrote about Christian themes in Tolkien and Lewis, and the book used to be sold by Christian Book Distributors. Was a small thin volume and I think it discussed Messianic imagery in LotR, among other things.
1,856 posted on 03/19/2004 8:56:45 PM PST by Fedora
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To: Fedora
Good article! you should post it as a thread.
1,857 posted on 03/19/2004 8:57:04 PM PST by msdrby (US Veterans: All give some, but some give all.)
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To: Fedora
Tolkien never got around to finishing his time-travel story, concentrating instead on his more "adult" trilogy, in which he placed hobbits in the context of his Silmarillion stories.

Christopher Tolkien, in Volume 5 of "The History of Middle-earth" (The Lost Road and Other Writings) showed that while JRRT's time travel story "The Lost Road" was never finished, the ideas he came up with for the story became the basis of the legend of Numenoreans.

1,858 posted on 03/19/2004 9:01:09 PM PST by Bear_in_RoseBear (Cough.)
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To: Bear_in_RoseBear
Gah, too much Benedryl...

"... became the basis for the legend of the Numenoreans."
1,859 posted on 03/19/2004 9:03:39 PM PST by Bear_in_RoseBear (Cough.)
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To: msdrby
Maybe:

Mark R. Hillegas and Peter Kreeft, Shadows of Imagination The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams

? Either that or something else by Kreeft, I think.

1,860 posted on 03/19/2004 9:04:51 PM PST by Fedora
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