I’ve made my first post over at Touchstone Magazine’s Mere Comments. Check it out if you like, but it’s pretty much a re-hash of my previous post here about the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the homosexuality issue, and the authority of Scripture.
Perilous Realms, by Marjorie Burns
Regular readers here are already aware that I’m a man of many prejudices, so it won’t surprise you to know that I approached Marjorie Burns’ Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth with suspicion. I fully expect any book written by a female academic to be tailored for the Women’s Studies Department—full of anger at men and contempt for the Christian religion.
So I’m delighted to report that this book, written by a female English professor at Portland State University, was a very pleasant surprise in almost every way.
Burns notes that many scholars have traced the Norse and Anglo-Saxon themes in The Lord of the Rings. But she is convinced that Tolkien also drew (less openly, because of the fashions of his day) on Celtic myth and folklore as well. She examines all of Tolkien’s fantastic works (not only The Hobbit and the Trilogy, but the Silmarillion and the later gathered works) and points out (quite convincingly, it seems to me as a non-expert) Celtic parallels that may be nearly as important as the Norse. (Tolkien, she explains, loved Wales but did not care for Ireland. Also, there was a general opinion that Celtic matters were in some sense effeminate, lacking the practicality and fatalism of the Viking world-view. [Reviewer’s note: When you think of it, Tolkien and Lewis were an odd pair of friends—a Catholic Englishman and a Protestant Irishman.])
Gender issues are certainly in Burns’ mind as she examines the accusation that Tolkien’s work, with its vast majority of active males and small minority of (generally) passive females, is a mark of misogyny. But she stands up for him in what I’d call a courageous way. For one thing, she thinks that Tolkien (based on the prejudice mentioned above) had the Celts in mind, and therefore a sort of vital femininity, in his portrayal of the Elves. She also makes much of the manner in which males frequently assume traditionally feminine roles in the books—cooking, nurturing, housekeeping, nursing, etc.
She also spends much time refuting the accusation that Tolkien’s characters are cardboard, either all good or all evil. She not only points to the weaknesses, frailties and near runs with temptation that the good characters display. She also notes the way Tolkien “doubles” his characters—each good character being matched with an evil one. Thus, while Gandalf clearly embodies many of the more positive characteristics of the Norse god Odin, Sauron (who, like Odin, has one eye) displays the god’s wicked traits.
Burns ends the book with a short chapter outlining three questions about the books, and giving her own answers. These answers are blessedly free of radical feminism or condescension towards Tolkien’s Christian faith. In fact, she seems to appreciate the significance of the doctrine of the Incarnation.
So I enjoyed the book very much, and recommend it.
Could Ya Write a Bit Faster?
James Patterson has an agreement with Hatchette Book Group to write (or something like writing) 17 books by the end of 2012. Seventeen books. I’m sure he has some of them mostly written already, because I have a hard time believing a book written from scratch would be worth reading. But then, Wodehouse wrote one book a year for a while, and many of his were terrific. Is Patterson as good as Wodehouse?
Meant to Be Condescending
When a Washington Post writer profiled a leader for the cause of traditional marriage and freedom from homosexuality, she meant for the piece to be “condescending” or perhaps “snide.” She didn’t mean for liberal readers of the Post to rake her over the coals for giving a conservative a fair shake.
Was Holly Golightly Employed?
I did wonder a little about where the star of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s got her money, but I slipped passed me that she might be something close to a prostitute. I suppose I don’t have the frame of reference to make that insight independently. (I also don’t like to assume the worst of people.) [via Book Trib]
More on Book Blogging
Ron Hogan offers comments on his purpose for blogging and asks whether our blogs will come to anything in a few years (link defunct). What do you think? Why do you read a book blog, and what do you find most interesting or helpful on them?
Still more on book blogging: I updated the symposium list below with a post released today.
Oh, joy.
Philip Pullman (of His Dark Materials fame) is going to publish an alternative version of the life of Christ. It “strips Christianity bare.”
Have the publishers considered the fact that Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet? That a book like this might insult Muslims? I mean, I know they despise Christians, but what about the Religion of Peace?
Tip: Dale Nelson.
What Good Is Book Blogging?
Here’s a round-up of posts on the current purpose of book blogging.
- Elberry: “i don’t really understand why people read the blogs they do. i am often puzzled that anyone reads mine. Maybe they just look at the pictures.”
- Mark Athitakis: “But in terms of them being inspirations and models, I largely looked at them as models for what not to do. Not because I disliked them, but because I figured that they had already claimed their particular patches of turf, forcing me to avoid their most common habits. (No knee-jerk whining about the contents of the New York Times Book Review, I told myself; no dutiful mentions of the death of a Syrian poet I’d never read and never heard of until the obit popped up in my RSS feed.)”
- Michael Gilleland: “One could make the case that blogging, i.e. rushing into print, is bad for one’s style. Horace (Ars Poetica 388-9) recommended that writers postpone publication for nine years. Nevertheless, the discipline of writing something every day is salutary.”
- Benjamin Stein: “Blogging has not only brought back the pleasure in writing. It liberated me as a writer.”
- Frank Wilson: “In fact, book blogging seems to me to have restored to literary journalism a good deal of the passion and immediacy that had long been missing from it. It had become restricted to pretty much the same people writing pretty much the same thing about pretty much the same sort of books. Blogging has opened up the field immensely.”
- Miriam Burstein: “. . . book bloggers aren’t necessarily tied to the rhythms of publishing and marketing: you can write about a book when it comes out; you can write about it several years later; you can write about it a couple of centuries later. (This is not to say that publishers don’t see book blogs as a marketing opportunity, however.)”
- Terry Teachout: “To blog is to become a public figure. Ad hominem attacks go with the territory. If you can’t stand the flames, log off.”
- Brad Bigelow: On how blogging differs from similiar material in newspapers or magazines “The simplest answer is that someone asks a reviewer to write about a book. Aside from a few well-known bloggers, none of the rest of us gets asked by anyone to write about any topic. The other main difference is time. Book reviews almost always have to come out just before or after a book first gets published. One can post about a book whenever one feels like it. A good thing, because some of us have missed the deadline by decades.”
- Ron Slate: “Auden said a critic must differentiate between taste and judgment: I can know something is trash and still have a taste for it, and I can know something is well-made and not have a taste for it. Generally, attacks are perpetrated by nitwits who can’t tell the difference or who haven’t had a good breakfast.”
- Nigel Beale: Quoting Jonathan Swift “A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that ‘great wits have short memories’: and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.”
- Levi Stahl: “. . . when I started blogging about books, I explained that I was starting a blog so that I would stop reading aloud at parties. I was only half joking”
- James Marcus: “In my book, Amazonia, I actually anointed Emerson as the First American Online. I think he’s a better candidate than, say, Montaigne, since he was a small-canvas artist whose unit of thought was the sentence: that seems very bloggy to me.”
- Patrick Kurp: “I’ve spent 30 years writing professionally, mostly for newspapers. This has instilled a fairly strict work ethic: meet deadlines, don’t wait for “inspiration,” write tight, humor editors but don’t encourage them . . . A blogger is a writer and a writer’s only obligation is to write well.”
- D.G. Myers: “. . . I am encouraged by the wit, knowledge, and book sense on exhibition in a few well-tended parks of the literary blogscape. But I am also discouraged about the future of book blogging. I no longer believe, as I once did, that book blogs might revive a free-wheeling and raucous literary culture.”
Happy Labor Day
I woke up this morning and the sun wouldn’t shine. I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine. I loaded sixteen tons of Number 9 coal, and the strawboss said, “This is a Bible school. We don’t even use coal. Have you ever considered more productive uses for your time?”
OK, OK. It wasn’t sixteen tons. But I did work today (my annual orientation talk to the incoming students), while the rest of you were enjoying your bourgeois, degenerate cookouts and picnics. I don’t mind. I’m glad to do it.
Because it makes me better than you.
And when you get down to it, isn’t that what we’re all working for, really?
I did a little web searching about my new exercise regimen, “Walking with weights.” I found that fitness experts are almost unanimous in their opinion that it’s a very, very bad idea. High risk of injury. Likely to cause dangerous high blood pressure levels.
Just what I’d expect. I finally find a discipline that really makes me feel good, and it turns out to be a dangerous drug.
Too late now, though. I’m hooked.
Higher Ed Is for Faculty Comfort, Not Student Need
World has an incredible cover story on how a study program at the University of Texas was skunked by liberal faculty who care more about their careers than teaching students. It’s an example of liberalism undermining the ideas that prop it up or enable it to live, the results being uneducated students and purposeless colleges.
Talking about the program his designed, professor Rob Koons writes:
Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a ‘distribution’ standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .
The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.
Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s own narrow research agenda. . . .
Rather than admit this self-interest, liberal arts professors at UT use postmodern and multicultural ideas to defend the Uncurriculum. These fashionable ideas form an ‘ideology’ in Marx’s sense: a system of ideas designed to cloak, rationalize, and defend an unjust set of relationships, namely, the exploitation of undergraduates and their underwriters (parents, taxpayers, and donors). . . .
Due to the Uncurriculum, the humanities are committing slow suicide. There has been a steady decline in liberal arts majors in the last thirty years (from over one-half to fewer than one-quarter of the total). However, the decline is slow enough to make little difference to tenured professors. . . .
The experience of the Western Civilization and American Institutions program underscores a sad truth about higher education in America—it is mostly run by and for the faculty. What it likes and dislikes trumps what would be best for students. Our system will never fully achieve its promise as long as that remains true.”