Second Breakfast

I getting my weekly dose of Father Tony at Bilerico, I came across this gem.

My favorite quote is the last line. “Peace to Christians, especially the secretly queer ones.”

This is for me one of those special books that I re-read every few years, and as I grow older, with increasing delight.

For the uninitiated, “The Silmarillion” is a posthumously-published collection of the mythical and “historical” writings by Tolkien on Middle-Earth that were assembled an edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien with considerable assistance by Guy Gavriel Kay, now a fine and respected fantasy author in his own right.

The style and substance of this work are very different from The Lord of the Rings (LoTR), which reads like a modern novel and is a long, singular work with a coherent internal structure. In contrast, The Silmarillion is a collection of shorter works, some of which come from Tolkien’s earliest writings on his invented world. The literary style ranges from the mythic to at least somewhat historical and archaic, and the scope spans the creation of the world, the earliest ages of Arda (that is, Middle-Earth), though the end of the Third Age with the destruction of the Ring and the passage of all of the ringbearers into the West.

The title of the work comes from the longest story in the collection, which chronicles the “War of the Jewels”, which are the events of the First Age of the world that center around the Silmarils, three legendary jewels of great beauty and power. The Silmarils were created by Feanor, a not-distant ancestor of Galadriel who figures so importantly in the events of LoTR, to capture the light of the Two Trees, which illumined the world before the Sun and Moon were created. The Trees are killed by Morgoth (a good stand-in for Satan, and the primary mover of evil in Middle Earth’s early history), who steals the jewels for good measure. Feanor and his kin swear a terrible oath of vengeance, and the repercussions of this act, as well as the betrayals and hurts that follow, shape the lives of the peoples of Middle-Earth.

The events of The Silmarillion take place in lands that lay to the west of those shown on the maps in LoTR, as the conclusion of the War renders such destruction that the very earth is wrought asunder, and many lands sink into the sea. Morgoth is ultimately overthrown, but at a terrible price, and the world is ultimately diminished.

The “point” of this writing is ultimately about language, and the place and character names in Tolkien’s invented elvish, dwarvish, and human languages are dense. In a very real way, the stories were themselves written to give a place and context in which the languages could have life. In his Letters Tolkien underscores this point several times — he invented the languages first, and the stories later so that the languages could be spoken by “real” people. “No one believes me, but it’s true,” he wrote. As a reader, this can be a bit intimidating, but the book includes a good set of reference materials at the back.

The Silmarillion includes some of the most important stories in Tolkien’s legendarium, including the Narn i Hin Hurin (”Tale of the Children of Hurin”, recently republished in a slightly amended and expanded separate volume), the Fall of Gondolin, and the tale of Beren and Luthien. Many of these events prefigure and are the backdrop to the later events in the Lord of the Rings, and for a reader who loves and is familiar with that book, part of what can be deeply satisfying about this work is the myriad connections that draw these stories together. We learn of Galadriel’s origins for example, and come to understand more deeply the meaning of Frodo’s offer of the Ring to her. We learn about Aragorn’s ancestry, and how Sauron’s manipulations lead to the downfall of Numenor and the Aragorn’s ancestor’s exile to Middle Earth.

Tolkien’s own Catholic philosophy and Northern European sensibilities are prominent in this writing. The general theme is a sense of diminishment and decay, from an idyllic and edenic origin, through the working of evil (both supernatural and very human), to a fallen future. Sauron, who is seen as the “lord of evil” in LoTR, is shown to be merely the chiefest lieutenant of Morgoth before his overthrow. The One Ring, while very powerful, is an echo of much more powerful devices. Aragorn, Galadriel, and Elrond, while powerful in their own right, are either themselves diminished from their past potency, or scions of more powerful ancestors. Tolkien’s gaze is always backwards, and the world is always sliding, slowly or quickly, into ruin and decay. This is the ultimate antidote to modernism.

This volume is but the first in a series of books that trace the development of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth legends, and there is a shocking amount of unpublished material (in various states of completeness and quality) from Tolkien’s papers that his son Christopher has been faithfully editing and publishing over the years. I am simply in awe of the amount of output that Tolkien produced, in addition to his important scholarly translations and other contributions.

I still remember the first time I encountered this book, and the sheer and strange beauty of it entranced me then. In some ways these myths have embedded themselves as deeply in my consciousness as much as, say, the Greek myths. Tolkien’s aims were in part to create a mythos for Britain, which has no “native” mythology of its own. Having a long familiarity now with these stories and languages, I continue to find a deep well of both aesthetic and spiritual pleasure to draw from. While these works are demanding of the reader, I think the rewards can be quite profound.

Today we observe an important fictional event, and an ancient feast in the Christian church.

In Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, March 25th, 3019 T.A. (Third Age, also 1419 in Shire Reckoning) is the date of the destruction of the One Ring, and the defeat of Sauron and the downfall of Barad-dûr. I know this because I’m a total geek (albeit one with an imprecise memory). One year later Frodo and his friends returned home to the Shire, and year after that Sam and Rosie celebrated the birth of their daughter, Eleanor.  You’ll find these and other useful and entertaining facts at theonering.net.

March 25th is also the celebration of the Feast of the Annunciation, in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, is informed by the Archangel Gabriel that she is to bear the Messiah.  Mary’s response of obedience and praise to God is known as the Magnificat, or the Song of Mary:

My soul doth magnify the Lord.

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. [Luke 1:46-55]

The timing of this feast conveniently aligns with nine calendar months before December 25th, when the Church celebrates the nativity of Jesus.

We will celebrate tonight with a feast of our own, and raise our glasses both to Frodo and Mary, whose obedience and faithfulness helped to liberate their people.

According to this Theological Worldview quiz, I’m an “emergent/postmodern”.

I’m not even sure what those words mean together. I’m also wondering which answer I gave got me points in the fundie category.  To be fair, I didn’t think through some of these questions that intensely.

The interesting part will be to see how different my husband’s Calvinist theology is from mine.

A postmodern joke from Disinfotainment:

How many deconstructionists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Even the framing of this question makes a grid of patriarchal assumptions that reveals a slavish devotion to phallocentric ideas - such as, technical accomplishment has inherent value, knowledge can be attained and quantities of labor can be determined empirically, all of which makes a discourse which further marginalizes the already disenfranchised.

Props to Heather R. at Holy Vignettes for pointing out the quiz. She’s got a kick-ass sermon there on the 9th chapter of John that’s definitely worth checking out.

We’ve become slightly-addicted to Lost at our house recently. Well, my husband has become addicted, and I’ve been traveling so much over the past month that it is really interfering with his ability to get his fix.

I like Lost, to be sure. I like it much better than a somewhat similar long-arc drama on Fox, Prison Break. PB started out well enough (and there’s some reward of eye-candy), but there’s no emotional pay-off. Its just one bad thing after another. After a while I felt so tense anticipating the next bad thing that I just gave up.

So we’re into Season 2 of Lost, and there’s an important reunion of two characters, and some real emotional payoff.

Me: See, that’s what I like about Lost versus Prison Break. There’s a payoff for all of this struggle. There are real moments of redemption for all of this struggle.

Alan: Wow, you’re such a slave to narrative.

Me: I’m a Christian, honey. We’re all about narrative.

Alan: QED.

Hopefully the amazing work and life stress issues will calm down a bit and and I write a bit about what I’m reading.