I didn’t hear this news when it hit years ago: “The Beatles had approached J.R.R. Tolkien about doing a film version of Lord of the Rings starring the Fab Four.”
Lennon wanted to play Gollum; McCartney, Frodo; Ringo, Sam; and Harrison, Gandalf. Tolkien said, “Over my dead body,” or something like that. Too bad Nimoy didn’t have to ask him for permission to sing about Bilbo in the 70s.
An intriguing premise: On his way to conquer England by way of York in 1066, King Harald Hardrada of Norway secretly buried a great treasure in a ruined Saxon church. Some time later, the church was rebuilt without the treasure being discovered. Only now, in the post-Christian present when the church is falling down again, a priest accidentally finds the secret vault where the treasure lies. Once he informs the authorities, his church becomes the target, first of ordinary thieves, and then of right-wing, racist political extremists. So a Norwegian agent is assigned to infiltrate the conspiracy and sabotage it.
Hardrada’s Hoard could have been a pretty entertaining book. And I enjoyed it enough to finish it. But overall I found it unsatisfactory, for a couple reasons.
First of all, the numerous historical misrepresentations. The authors clearly did some research in preparing this book – their image of the Vikings is better, for instance, than that of the History Channel series – but they make a lot of pretty serious mistakes. They think Vikings used two-handed swords. They tell us with straight faces that King Harald’s queen and two daughters died in battle with him at Stamford Bridge (in fact the queen, a delicate Russian princess, stayed home in Norway with the girls). They tell us there was a spell of cold climate in Scandinavia during the Viking Age (the precise opposite of the truth). They seem to think Harald and his men were heathen (they were Christian). They think the 1950s Kirk Douglas movie popularized the idea of winged helmets for Vikings (the image goes back much further, and there are no winged helmets in that movie). They think Vikings sported Norman hair styles.
My second problem is that the sex scenes are far more explicit than called for.
And last but not least, the final resolution is both improbable and unsatisfactory.
Didn’t work for me.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed on this day in 1945.
A while back, Hunter Baker enthused over his exploration of the free-church idea in Germany. Baker observes, “A regenerate church is not a private church,” and so must engage the state while remaining independent from it.
Here’s a short piece on Bonhoeffer’s last twelve hours.
Michael Hollerich reviews a biography of Bonhoeffer, getting into many of the ideas presented in Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Protestantism in particular could not surrender the claim to be a Volkskirche, a true national church and the spiritual custodian of the German people. This was the preoccupation, even among Confessing Christians, that ultimately disenchanted Bonhoeffer and led to his visionary anticipation of an outcast church on the margins of society. We can appreciate the measure of that disenchantment if we remember that he had taken membership in the Confessing Church so seriously that he once said that whoever knowingly separated himself from the Church separated himself from salvation—for which he was roundly denounced for “Catholic” thinking.
As with most things, the man had something there.
Gary Saul Morson describes “The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina,” starting with this idea about drama and happiness.
Often quoted but rarely understood, the first sentence of Anna Karenina—“All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—offers a paradoxical insight into what is truly important in human lives. What exactly does this sentence mean?
In War and Peace and in a variant of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy quotes a French proverb: “Happy people have no history.” Where there are dramatic events, where there is material for an interesting story, there is unhappiness. The old curse—“May you live in interesting times!”—suggests that the more narratable a life is, the worse it is.
With happy lives and happy families, there is no drama to relate. What are you going to say: They woke up, breakfasted, didn’t quarrel, went to work, dined pleasantly, and didn’t quarrel again?
Happy families resemble each other because there is no story to tell about them. But unhappy families all have stories, and each story is different.
I was writing about this idea yesterday. Patience and tolerance are demonstrated in undramatic ways. People don’t make flamboyant displays of tolerance unless they are passive-aggressively attempting to communicate something else. Real tolerance comes in what isn’t said, what isn’t confronted. The person who listens to you, stays with you through the dull times, and makes you feel loved is the patient one.
A while back, a video guy told me about working on a TV project which was essentially Jon & Kate Plus 8 with an African-American family. They recorded several situations with this family, but the project never came together because the parents were loving and self-controlled and their kids were well-mannered and disciplined. Whenever a child started to get out of line, a parent would take him aside and correct him. Problem solved = no drama. Who wants to watch a loving family handle their problems respectfully?
Take a look at this culture shock from 1954. It’s Camel News Caravan, brought to you by the makers of Camel cigarettes–so mild and smooth.
This video came to my attention while reading Frank Rich’s article on whether the TV news anchorman is a relevant job anymore. Though anchormen are popular, he cites “60 Minutes” as a successful news program without a steady anchor.
Alex Carp chips in. “What is going to come back, in my view, is the importance of sector expertise, on-scene reporting, and enterprise journalism. I saw a poster in Times Square the other day for the new season of HBO’s Vice magazine show. You know what the tagline is? ‘We go there.’ It’s a sad day when a newsmagazine can use ‘we go there’ as a distinctive selling point.”
Gene Edward Veith writes on the horrific murders of Kenyan university students here. What impresses me most about the story, and the larger story of Christian persecution in the Islamic world, is how, despite all the coverage, nobody seems to have any plans to do anything about it. Expressions of outrage seem to be the limit.
I think I see a reason for this. Nobody really cares, because these Christians occupy no conceptual place in the mind of the world. Or at least in the mind of the world’s opinion makers.
In contemporary thought, there are two religious alternatives for third world people. They can belong to indigenous religions, such as animism, or they can be Muslims.
In the eyes of the world, Christianity is a religion for white westerners only. Anyone not white or western, in this view, should not be a Christian. If they are Christian, they are somehow “inauthentic.” Uncle Toms. Race traitors. In a sense they deserve anything that is done to them.
They are non-persons in the eyes of the world.
But “precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Psalm 116:15).
Christ Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.
This sounded like fun. A crossover of two very popular and very different fiction series.
It’s well known that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was a genuine British intelligence agent during World War II.
It’s probably less well known, but hardly a secret, that J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of The Lord of the Rings, was offered a book deal in Germany previous to World War II, on the condition that he sign a statement to the effect that he had no Jewish blood. He turned the offer down in a letter which is a masterpiece of elegant dismissiveness.
So what if Tolkien had not sent a letter? What if he had actually gone to Berlin on a secret espionage job, assigned to him by the agent Ian Fleming?
That’s the premise of No Dawn for Men. Lots of possibilities here. How would Fleming and Tolkien have gotten along? What would they have said to each other, thought of each other?
Alas, this book does little to illuminate those questions. There is one scene where the two authors talk a bit about their basic values, but it doesn’t really lead anywhere. Fleming and Tolkien follow essentially separate paths through the story, Fleming acting like Bond and Tolkien like… oh, Bilbo Baggins perhaps, though a bit wiser, in a narrative with supernatural elements. He’s even given genuine underground-dwelling dwarves to travel with, which does not add to the credibility of the story.
The two plot threads occupy the page space like oil and water. The whole thing didn’t work very well, in my opinion.
Not awful, but nothing to seek out.
A law professor talked privately to Rod Dreher about his fears for the future in the context of religious freedom bullying.
“In California right now, judges can’t belong to the Boy Scouts now. Who knows if in the future, lawyers won’t be able to belong to churches that are considered hate groups?” he said. “It’s certainly true that a lot of law firms will not now hire people who worked on cases defending those on the traditional marriage side. It’s going to close some professional doors. I certainly wouldn’t write about this stuff in my work, not if I wanted to have a chance at tenure. There’s a question among Christian law professors right now: do you write about these issues and risk tenure? This really does distort your scholarship. Christianity could make a distinct contribution to legal discussions, but it’s simply too risky to say what you really think.”
The emerging climate on campus of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and the construal of discourse as a form of violence is driving Christian professors further into the closet, the professor said.
“If I said something that was construed as attacking a gay student, I could have my life made miserable with a year or two of litigation — and if I didn’t have tenure, there could be a chance that my career would be ruined,” he said. “Even if you have tenure, a few people who make allegations of someone being hateful can make a tenured professor’s life miserable.”
“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”
These teachers, students–Christians of all professions–will have to ask themselves whether they believe Christ Jesus, whose kingdom will never end, was joking when he told us to seek his kingdom first and look to God to provide what we need.
“In the confused mishmash which constitutes religious education in our schools, it is considered fine to concentrate on what cakes different faith groups eat and what flags they wave. But to suggest Jesus was a unique figure in history would be seen as dangerous brainwashing, and to say ours was a basically Christian culture would be elitist.”