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Originally posted by Draught Horse
The Hobbit = Older Testament
LOTR = Newer Testament
Silmarrillian = Apocrypha.
I am also editing a Lord of the Rings study bible.
[Edited on 2--28-06 by Draught Horse]
Originally posted by Ex Nihilo
Originally posted by Draught Horse
The Hobbit = Older Testament
LOTR = Newer Testament
Silmarrillian = Apocrypha.
I am also editing a Lord of the Rings study bible.
[Edited on 2--28-06 by Draught Horse]
I have to disagree.
The Silmarillion, with its creation story and accounts of patriarchs, is obviously the Old Testament.
LOTR is the New Testament, sure. The Hobbit can be the Apocrypha...
Though certainly not specifically Christian (and that may be better--LOTR itself is not specifically Christian and trying to make it so can be a mistake), the book Understanding Middle Earth: The Best of Tolkien Criticism is pretty nice... a lot of different articles ranging from an exploration of the book's relationship to Norse mythology to C.S. Lewis's review to W.H. Auden's comments. Some good stuff.
The fact is that Tolkein modeled his mythological universe after Celtic, and more particularly Scandanavian mythology and folklore. That there are Christian themes that can be implicitly read is to be admitted. I think one shouldn't look beyond the struggle between good and evil, if one wants to get some overarching theme complimentary to Christianity out of the LOTR.For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.
Originally posted by Draught Horse
But if its allegory, does that still mean it can't be true????
Originally posted by mgeoffriau
I don't understand the question.
Originally posted by Draught Horse
But if its allegory, does that still mean it can't be true????
Originally posted by Bladestunner316
LOTR is awsome!!!!!!!!
Originally posted by Bladestunner316
just say no to pomo!!
I think this point is relevant, because so many people think that it was not intended to be Christian. I have heard a number of people conclude this based on Tolkien's statement that he did not intend The Lord of the Rings to be allegory. It is Christian, but not in an allegorical sense."œOf course God is in The Lord of the Rings. The period was pre-Christian, but it was a monotheistic world," Tolkien responded defensively when asked by interviewers in 1968 why he had ignored God in his trilogy. When interviewers pushed him further, asking who the God was, Tolkien responded: "œThis one, of course! The book is about the world that God created "“ the actual world if this planet."
As subcreator, Tolkien desired to recreate the truth, laws, and beauty of God´s created order. As he told a Jesuit friend, The Lord of the Rings is "œa fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in its revision." To American evangelical Clyde Kilby, Tolkien wrote: "œI am a Christian and of course what I write will be from that essential viewpoint."