Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reading

Reader’s report: ‘The Return of the King’: The Scouring of the Shire

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‘We’re not allowed to,’ said Robin.

‘If I hear not allowed much oftener,’ said Sam, ‘I’m going to get angry.’

Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings, final installment from The Return of the King.

I have come to the end of the story. For each reader of The Lord of the Rings hereafter, I expect, one of the final impressions of reading the saga must be the Scouring of the Shire, made conspicuous by its absence from the Peter Jackson movies.

I’m not going to look back and check, but I’ll bet the last time I did this pilgrimage on this blog, I remarked on this very subject. I can see why, for dramatic reasons, a filmmaker might leave the Scouring out the story. It makes for a substantial anticlimax, which might detract from the eucatastrophe of the defeat of Sauron.

But I have an idea there might be other reasons.

Moviemakers today, it would be redundant to say, are generally leftists. The Scouring is highly problematic for leftists, particularly in these times. The same people who read the books as Hippies in the ‘60s, and cheered when Merry, Pippin, and Sam tear down all the signs posted by the Chief’s men, are now Woke leftists. There’s nothing Woke leftists today love more than lots of cautionary signs – No Smoking, No Firearms, No Automobiles (Tolkien wouldn’t have minded that one), No Pets, Please Recycle, Masks Must Be Worn.

There’s a quotation making the rounds in which Tolkien says that his political views tend toward Anarchism. He didn’t mean 19th Century, bomb-throwing Anarchism, of course. Those guys assassinated kings, and Tolkien loved kings. He meant something more like what we call Libertarianism today (I’m not a Libertarian myself, so I have my own issues here). The fans of the movies, who often believe (I suspect) that it’s all about environmentalism, probably don’t enjoy reading about the hobbits tearing signs down and smoking all over the place (in the movie they suggest that pipeweed is really marijuana, but they’re wrong). But Tolkien’s environmentalism is different from that of today’s left. The professor loved trees, but he didn’t love wilderness as such. In the time of the King, he writes:

…the evil things will be driven out of the waste-lands. Indeed the waste in time will be waste no longer, and there will be people and fields where once there was wilderness.

Tolkien’s ideal world is a world of villages, solidly middle-class and bourgeois.

One other point is even more delicate. The Shire needs scouring because Saruman has filled it with foreigners. Men of low character who bully the hobbits and have no respect for their property or traditions.

For today’s England, and for most of the West, that’s a subject best left alone.

Fiction

Who Do You Really Want for President?

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Modern Age asked several people who they want for president, “any character from any book, film, play, television program, poem, or folk tale” or anyone else. If you’re still looking for an outside candidate, you could consider one of these.

  • George Bailey, an American ideal, “a supporter of small business, an advocate for those working hard to enter the middle class, and a fierce defender of free and competitive markets against monopolizing power.”
  • Frodo Baggins, “a natural aristocrat” who eschewed power when he had it wheld.
  • Monty Bodkin. “He kisses babies with the best of them, and he knows his way around an office, having once helped edit the journal Tiny Tots.”
  • Lettice Douffet. “’Language alone frees one!’ Douffet declaims, and what is in more need of repair than our regal English language, reduced as it is to epithets, expletives, and texted LOLs?”
  • Hazel. “He’s not the biggest or the smartest rabbit in his warren, but he’s the best leader.”

I confess I may have voted too early.

Fiction, Reading, Religion

Reader’s report: ‘the Return of the King’: Happy endings

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And he sang to them, now in the elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.

Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings, now reading The Return of the King.

I’ve gotten through the hardest part. The ring is destroyed, Sauron is fallen; his followers are scattered and defeated. The great evil has passed, and the world begins to heal under the wise power of the King and the White Wizard.

Tolkien’s essay on Fairy Stories emphasizes the importance of the Eucatastrophe – the surprising happy ending. The eucatastrophe doesn’t work unless the dramatic tension is intense. All must seem lost. Any hope that remains must be no hope at all. “We must do without hope,” as one of the characters says. Only after the good side has lost hope and continues fighting merely out of a stubborn determination to die on the right side, if the right must fall – only then can you have a real eucatastrophe.

It seems to me that most writers – and I am certainly one of them – are a little shy about happy endings. We know how to pile up the obstacles; we know how to frustrate our heroes and test them past the point of despair. But when – beyond all expectation – they triumph in the end, we’re not sure what to do with the victory. Mustn’t do an end zone dance, after all.

Tolkien does an end zone dance. He knows that the drama doesn’t exist for its own sake. It exists for the sake of the happy ending, just as the saga of humanity itself exists only for the sake of Christ’s Kingdom. The Return of the King should be read side by side with the Book of Revelation.

He describes in loving detail how friends are reunited, the wounded are healed, the land is cleansed, the pollution is washed away, and justice is restored. He understands that after the sufferings his characters (and the reader, vicariously) have endured, they well deserve a reward.

I need to bear this in mind as I work on my latest Erling book. My current story actually involves a happy ending with historical warrant. I need to be less shy about rejoicing and vindication.

Like most modern people, I know more about depression than rejoicing. More about ambivalence than victory. I need to look to the Word of God to guide me in subcreation.

Fiction, Reading

Reader’s report: ‘The Return of the King’: Healing hands

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Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings. Now reading The Return of the King.

It’s a moving scene in the book, and moving in the movie too – the scene with the “healing hands of the king.”

“For it is said in old lore: The hands of the king are the hands of a healer. And so the rightful king could ever be known.’

Then Aragorn exercises his healing arts on Eowyn and Merry and Faramir. It’s beautiful in itself, and an evocative image of Christ as King and Healer. Lovely.

I don’t know where Tolkien first came across the idea of the king having healing hands, but I’m pretty sure I know one place where he read about it – Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskringla. But in Snorri it’s a far darker story. Snorri generally shows conventional reverence for Olaf Haraldsson as the patron saint of Norway. But his treatment can be ambivalent, and it’s at this point in Olaf’s saga, not long before his exile to Russia, that Olaf loses the sympathy of a lot of readers. Historically, it certain lost him some allies.

The situation is this: Thorir Olvesson, a young man with important family connections, is getting married, and King Olaf and his entourage are invited. The hospitality is splendid. Food and drink are plentiful, and everyone is having a good time. But one of Olaf’s men whispers to him that Thorir, the bridegroom, has been bribed by King Canute of England/Denmark to murder the king.

From Lee Hollander’s translation:

When the king sat at table and the men had drunk for a while and were very merry, while Thorir went about, serving the people, the king had Thorir called before him. He came up to the king’s table and rested his elbows on it.

“How old a man are you, Thorir?” asked the king.

“I am eighteen years old,” he replied.

The king said, “A big man you are for your age, Thorir, and a fine fellow.” Then the king put his hand around Thorir’s right arm and stroked it above the elbow.

Thorir, said, “Gently, sire! I have a boil on my arm.” The king held on to his arm and felt something hard underneath.

The king said, “Haven’t you heard that I am a healer? Let me see that boil.” Then Thorir saw that it would not do to conceal it any longer and took off the ring and showed it to the king. The king asked whether it was a gift from King Knut. Thorir said he would not deny it.

The king had Thorir seized and put in chains.  Then Kalf [Arnesson] came forward and asked for mercy, offering money for him. Many supported him and offered compensation. The king was so furious that no one dared to address him. He declared that Thorir was to have the same sentence [of death] which Thorir had intended for him, and had him killed afterwards. But that deed created the greatest ill-will….

Fiction, Reading

Reader’s report: ‘The Return of the King’: Concerning tombs

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Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings. I’m on The Return of the King now.

Reading impressions: I was struck, as most readers will forever be now, I suppose, by the differences between the movies and the books. I know this, and yet it always sort of surprises me. The impression I always get from the movies (and of course it’s much easier to watch the movies than read the trilogy) is that the movies are pretty faithful, except for a few obvious changes. The role of Arwen is the most famous. The omission of Tom Bombadil is another. And we could go on and on, in orders of relative importance.

But in fact, the movies are very different from the books. The general plot lines are largely the same, though the order of presentation has often been shuffled. But there are actually few scenes in the films that are presented substantially as Tolkien described them. Compression and economy have had their effects everywhere. Most of the dialogue is new, too. We notice the direct quotations when they come, and quote them in Facebook memes. But they’re actually relatively rare. Most of the dialogue is new – streamlined paraphrases of Tolkien’s general sense.

Every fan of the movies should read the books at least once.

Of course, they won’t.

Looking at the story through the eyes of a Viking buff, one thing struck me in my recent reading. When Denethor commands that Faramir be carried into the kings’ tombs, the entrance is described like this:

Turning westward they came at length to a door in the rearward wall of the sixth circle. Fen Hollen it was called, for it was kept ever shut save at times of funeral, and only the Lord of the City might use that way, or those who bore the token of the tombs and tended the houses of the dead.

In other words, bodies were not carried in through the main entrance, but through a separate, smaller, door. I’m probably reaching, but this reminded me of a Norse custom known from the sagas. We’re told that when someone died in a house, the corpse was not carried out through the main door. Instead a hole was broken into a side wall, and the corpse carried out that way. Then the hole would be repaired. The idea was that if the dead person were to “walk again,” they would try to get back in the way they left, and be unable to find that door. This would protect the residents.

The two things are different, in that one involves carrying corpses in, and the other involved carrying them out. Still, I thought it might have been in the back of the Professor’s mind.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Quiet Man,’ by Caimh McDonnell

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The midday heat was quite something. It hit Bunny like a punch in the solar plexus. Nevada temperatures were the kind you only experienced in Ireland when they were cooking instructions.

The Bunny McGarry Stateside series (a spin-off of Caimh McDonnell’s Dublin Trilogy) rolls along with a brand-new entry, The Quiet Man. And sorry, this story has no connection to the famous John Ford movie, except for the presence of a heavy-drinking, pugnacious Irishman.

The background, if you haven’t read the previous books, is a little complicated. Bunny McGarry, former Dublin police detective, is now officially dead. He has come to the US on a private quest to locate Simone, the love of his life. She disappeared entirely some years ago in order to escape some dangerous people who were looking for her. But now Bunny has learned of a credible threat to her safety of which she needs to be warned. To locate her, he has formed an alliance with the Sisters of the Saint, an unofficial order of “nuns” who are not necessarily religious (or celibate), but who have banded together to fight evil. Sort of a female A-Team with a mother superior. One of their members may know where Simone is, but she and another sister have been kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel. The cartel’s price for their release is that the Sisters find a way to spring one of their members (the titular Quiet Man) from a super-high security prison in Nevada.

Got that?

Bunny, always game, agrees to get himself arrested, and the Sisters’ resident internet hacker manages to get him placed in The Quiet Man’s cell. The Quiet Man is a mysterious prisoner, very large and strong, who never leaves the cell without a Hannibal Lecter mask, and to whom everyone is forbidden to speak. All Bunny has to do is persuade him to come along when the Sisters disrupt prison security. And, incidentally, stay alive while being threatened by various prison gangs, an old enemy who unexpectedly appears, and a homicidal chief guard. And, oh yes, survive in a place where they think a biscuit is what Bunny calls a scone.

I didn’t think The Quiet Man was quite as funny as the previous books (which may be only a trick of memory), but it was an engaging light thriller, and there were a lot of amusing moments and a neat resolution. I recommend it, if you can handle the rough language and “earthy” humor.

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Lord of the Rings’: Incompatibility

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Blogging my way through The Two Towers:

To some extent Ronald and Edith [Tolkien] lived separate lives at Northmoor Road [Oxford], sleeping in separate bedrooms and keeping different hours…. She and Ronald did not always talk about the same things to the same people, and as they grew older each went his and her own way in this respect, Ronald discoursing on an English place-name apparently oblivious that the same visitor was simultaneously being addressed by Edith on the subject of a grandchild’s measles. But this was something that regular guests learnt to cope with. (J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, Humphrey Carpenter.)

‘But our hearts did not go on growing in the same way: the Ents gave their love to things that they met in the world, and the Entwives gave their thought to other things, for the Ents loved the great trees, and the wild woods, and the slopes of the high hills…. But the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser trees, and to the meads in the sunshine beyond the feet of the forests…. ‘ (Treebeard, in The Two Towers)

Just a parallel that struck me, from Tolkien’s life and his books. It’s not for me to say much about the Professor’s domestic life (which was full of love by all accounts, though a little eccentric). Just to point out a similarity.

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Lord of the Rings’: Diversity

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Blogging my way through The Two Towers:

Another theme in these books that strikes me is the vision of what – at the risk of political correctness – I might call “diversity.”

The Fellowship of the Ring is, self-consciously, a diverse group. It includes members of several of the more-or-less human “races” not dominated by Sauron – Men, and Elves, and Hobbits. No doubt this mirrors Tolkien’s experience with classes and Imperial ethnicities (not to mention Allies) during the Great War. The feeling (it must have seemed very strange in those times) of thinking, “Here I am, crouched in a trench with men I might have despised or even fought against in the past. But we’re all at war for a single cause now, and I find much to love and admire in them.”

No doubt it would have occurred to a thoughtful mind that one could conceivably come to feel the same way about the enemy, under different circumstances.

But it wouldn’t only have been the war. The fabled Inklings group was itself (to an extent) a disparate gathering. Not radically disparate, but to Tolkien, as a member of a religious minority, the chasm between Catholic and Protestant was always significant. I don’t recall that any of the Inklings was an atheist or agnostic, but Owen Barfield was a Theosophist (though he eventually became a communicant Anglican).

Which reminds me of the issue of “Jack” Lewis’s Anglicanism, always a sore point with Tolkien. After the famous night in 1931 when he and Hugo Dyson convinced Lewis that mythology might be a kind of inchoate prophecy from Heaven (leading to his Christian conversion), Tolkien hoped Jack would join him in his Roman faith. But Jack remained at bottom a Belfast Protestant, though he learned to appreciate certain beauties in his friend’s church.

And when I read of Gimli and Legolas, tentatively finding common ground in which an Elf might go so far as to visit caverns, in order (perhaps) to discover the beauties a Dwarf sees there, and the Dwarf condescends to travel in a forest with the Elf for the same reason, we may be peering into the heart of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s friendship.

Authors, Fiction

‘New’ C. S. Lewis recordings

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“Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” (Proverbs 25:25, ESV)

There is good news, folks, even now, especially if you’re a C. S. Lewis fan.

There are “new” recordings of C. S. Lewis reading his own work and Chaucer, available from the Rabbit Room Store. That’s surprising in itself, but the source of the recordings is even more remarkable.

In August of 1960, C. S. Lewis’s wife Joy Davidman had been dead for about a month. At that time her ex-husband, William Gresham, traveled to England to see his sons, Douglas and David. It must have been an awkward reunion. Bill Gresham tried hard to get custody of his sons, but “Jack” Lewis strenuously opposed him, winning custody for himself. (According to Joy Davidman’s biographer, she may have exaggerated her stories of Bill’s neglect and abuse. However, it is indisputable that he was an alcoholic.)

However he felt, Bill was gracious enough to ask Jack to read some of his work into the new tape recorder he’d brought along. Jack did so, reading excerpts from Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, and then reading (or reciting) part of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in flawless Middle English.

I haven’t bought my copy yet, mostly out of laziness, but I’m going to. I can’t complain about the price – three bucks for the whole caboodle.

Proceeds go to benefit the Marion E. Wade Center, which owns the rights.

Fiction, Reading

Reading report: The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien: The name of Erling

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Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings.

I’m well into The Two Towers now. An anxious nation will be gratified to know that I Have Thoughts.

I noticed – for the first time, I think – the name of the ancient warrior who – we are told – founded the Kingdom of Rohan. His name was Eorl the Young.

This is where I did a little linguistic analysis, based on my fair knowledge of Norwegian and my sketchy grasp of Old Norse.

I figured Eorl must be etymologically related to the Norse word, Jarl, which means a ruler. I was pretty sure that the Norse cognate when used in personal names was “Erl.” I had looked up the meaning of Erling (for obvious reasons) and learned that the name means “young ruler.”

That makes sense, because the “ing” suffix is common in sagas to indicate “the younger,” as in “junior.” Thus the sons of Arne Arnmodsson (whom I mentioned a few days ago in my post on my novel writing) were known as the Arnmodings.

My guesses were verified by the author of this web site, assuming he knows what he’s talking about.

Therefore, when you encounter the name Eorl the Young in TLOTR, think “Erling.”

Did Tolkien have Erling Skjalgsson in mind when he named the character? I have no evidence for that. But I like to think so. Because what I like is extremely important.