Recommended Reading: Foolishness and Faith in 1978's The Lord of the Rings

by Sarah Welch-Larson

In Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation, the hobbits are kindred spirits with the members of the early church.

The Lord of the Rings, director Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy series, attempts to tell the story from the point of view of the hobbits.

Bakshi’s film has been generally forgotten in favor of Peter Jackson’s more successful live-action movie trilogy. It’s true, this version is unpolished and imperfect. The story is incomplete, leaving out the end of Tolkien’s saga. To fans of the books, this version feels like an unfulfilled promise. But its unfinished status belies its unique creative vision. Nowhere is that vision more apparent than in the movie’s presentation of the hobbits as innocents undergoing a mission that they are not equipped for and cannot hope to complete on their own. Impossible though it might seem, they must complete their mission anyway. In this, they are kindred spirits with the early church; like those first believers, these hobbits seem foolish for both their hope and their faithfulness.

Hobbits were the first beings to appear in Tolkien’s stories; of all the different beings that populate Middle-earth, they were likely his favorites. They’re the creatures most like him: homebodies and gardeners, lovers of good food and beer and things that grow. They don’t seek out adventure, but have it thrust upon them. Tolkien describes them frequently as “cheerful” and “foolish” and “silly.” They are literally lowly people, half the height of men and living in holes in the ground. By contrast, the villains of the story are often referred to as “crafty” or “cunning,” making calculations about how best to dominate the world. Hobbits don’t want power or glory. They are content to live in a quiet forgotten corner of Middle-earth, a strange, small, peaceful people in an increasingly dangerous world. This is remarkably similar to the early Christians, who were instructed by Paul to “live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.”

Bakshi’s version of the story demonstrates just how fond he is of hobbits as well. Where Tolkien describes them as “foolish,” Bakshi shows them to be so. The characters’ actions are expressive almost to a fault, each yawn and smile and step exaggerated to make the hobbits appear like innocents. When Frodo (voiced by Christopher Guard) agrees to take the One Ring out of the Shire, he does so almost nonchalantly, shoving his hands into his pockets and kicking a rock down the path ahead of him. Sam (Michael Scholes) dances in place when he realizes he is going to see elves, then bursts into tears—a childlike action. He and his friends do not understand the full consequences of their choice to do the right thing; they just know that they are about to go on a big adventure. They move through a wild world that does not value them, but the movie does. And it works hard to make sure the viewer does too.

Frodo is a reluctant adventurer who accepts his charge to take the One Ring to Mordor without fully understanding the dangers he will face on his journey. He is a nobody, an echo of the early church members, who were neither powerful nor influential. The animation styles emphasize Frodo’s place in the world: delicate watercolors for his home in the Shire; heavier oil effects for the kingdoms of the elves; and pen-and-ink drawings for the dangers of the wilds, with trees and rocks dripping with dark lines, as well as menace. The hobbits look weak in comparison.

Read the full article: https://thinkchristian.net/foolishness-and-faith-in-1978s-the-lord-of-the-rings

Recommended Reading: Spiritual Formation in 1977's The Hobbit

by Abby Olcese

The Rankin/Bass animated adaptation offers an unexpected journey of discipleship.

The 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has never enjoyed a consistent reputation. Today, some elements of the animation hold up wonderfully, such as the genuinely frightening goblins and lamp-eyed Gollum. Other parts—the rudimentary character movement and cheesy original songs—feel more than a little creaky. At roughly 80 minutes, the film also essentially makes a simplified book report out of Tolkien’s original story, something Peter Jackson’s later, live-action trilogy more than compensated for.

The Hobbit’s compression of its source material, however, may actually be a hidden strength. Originally made for television, the Rankin-Bass version sticks to main plot points, while its episodic storytelling contains clear lessons for the character of Bilbo Baggins (voiced by Orson Bean). The end result is a moral arc that highlights the story’s formational aspects. In this incarnation, The Hobbit moves beyond an epic adventure tale to become a parable of discipleship.

The opening of The Hobbit—with Bilbo briefly introduced before the wizard Gandalf (John Huston) shows up to recruit him for a mission, bringing along a posse of dwarves—mirrors Tolkien’s book in its sudden pacing. Gandalf appears out of nowhere, immediately asserting that Bilbo is the right fit to help the displaced dwarves reclaim their kingdom from the dragon Smaug. With his short stature, big eyes, and reluctant voice, Bilbo seems an unlikely candidate. He’s ready to take on the job, however, despite knowing nothing about it. Within moments, he’s hosting Gandalf and the dwarves in his home and then packing up to join them on their quest.

Gandalf’s surprising choice of hero turns out to have incredible consequences—not only for Bilbo, but for Middle-earth itself. Important figures with humble beginnings are also an important part of the biblical tradition. In the Old Testament, God guides Moses, the child of slaves, to lead his people to freedom. He chooses David, a young shepherd, to defeat Goliath and become Israel’s greatest ruler. The tradition continues in the New Testament. Jesus’ disciples don’t come from venerated lines of great priests. They’re mostly fishermen. In fact, Christ’s calling of his closest followers bears striking similarities to the way Gandalf first appears at Bilbo’s home. In Matthew 4, he calls Peter and Andrew while they’re fishing, telling them simply to “Come, follow me . . . and I will send you out to fish for people.” He later calls James and John the same way.

Read the full article: https://thinkchristian.net/spiritual-formation-in-the-hobbit

Woke Christianity? You betcha!

Recommended Reading: C.S. Lewis and the Sex/Gender Distinction

by Billie Hoard

A Paper Presented at the 2024 Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference

Beyond Perelandra, in 1948 when Lewis first published Priestesses in the Church?17 which ends with Lewis contrasting the roles of men and women within the church to their roles in society, he concluded “With the Church, we are farther in18: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us. [emphasis mine]”19. And of course this was written only three years after Lewis had published That Hideous Strength which, if anything, supports and expands this concept of gender as more fundamental, more real, than sex—the thing towards which sex points.As Mary Steward Van Leeuwen puts it: 

“The younger Lewis, … argued on behalf of including gender forms, or archetypes, to which women and men were called to conform themselves. ‘Suppose,’ Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength wondered, just after her conversion,  “Suppose one were a thing after all … designed by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had regarded as one’s true self?”20.

Neither does Lewis’s approach to sex and gender here seem to have been even a notable departure from the thought of his peers. In The Silmarillion Tolkien comments that

[T]he Valar may walk, if they will, unclad, and then even the Eldar cannot clearly perceive them, though they be present. But when they desire to clothe themselves the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby."

Here again, we see the idea of gender as a quality of spirit/soul which determines the Valar’s sex when they elect to take a body. Meanwhile Charles Williams’s whole concept of approaching God through the ways of negation and affirmation of images (corresponding roughly to apophatic and cataphatic theology)21 certainly points in a similar direction, being grounded in the idea that we can (imperfectly) use the physical world to gain some degree of understanding about the spiritual, by which it is caused. And of course Barfield’s “Great War” with Lewis over the role of imagination as a mode of divining Truth22 situates Barfield as inclined to place more weight than Lewis on the legitimacy of gender as the unifying meaning of physical/biological sex. As he (arguing for the capacity of poetry to unveil Truth) argues in Poetic Diction 

“Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once only perceived as immediate realities. As such the poet strives, by his own efforts, to see them, and to make others see them, again.”23

Finally, beginning at least as early as 1944 we have manifold evidence that Lewis held to what has been described (and not infrequently criticized) as an overly platonic or sometimes (mis)characterized as a “Cartesian dualist”24 view of reality, and that this platonist influence which understands the physical to be an outflowing of the spiritual, formed a critical part of his overall theology and metaphysics25 writing in the original version of the essay Transposition that:

“Our problem was that in what claims to be our spiritual life all the elements of our natural life recur: and, what is worse, it looks at first glance as if no other elements were present. We now see that if the spiritual is richer than the natural (as no one who believes in its existence would deny) then this is exactly what we should expect.”26

Read the full article: https://billieiswriting.substack.com/p/cs-lewis-and-the-sexgender-distinction

Public School for the Public, Not Your Personal Religious Teaching

As a person of faith myself, I agree with the idea of this. 

Public school is not the voice of the church, any church, nor should it be. If you want a religious education, send your kids to a religiously affiliated school. The public school is not the place to teach any religion other than ALL of them as they relate to history and literature in a third-person sort of way, not as a school practice. School is never a place to encourage, or promote religious practice, whether Christian, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, Satanism, etc. 

Teach academics and life skills. 

Save the religious practice for home and church. 

And let's put our prayers in our prayer closets in private, not in public (as the Pharisees do). And schools already reserve a period of silence during which students may pray as they please, if they please.

Interpretation, not Infallible Truth

 This is what I try to explain to fellow believers. No denomination holds the corner on what's the "accurate" interpretation. There are too many years and too many individuals to not take other interpretations into account. This is why making laws based on any Bible doctrines can become dangerous. 

(And that's ignoring the fact that no religion is supposed to impact our laws more than any other according to the founding documents.)

Poetry Corner: I Am

 

In the hallway today I passed students,
Some afraid, others emboldened,
Once sung precious—In whose sight?—
All distracting themselves with trivialities.
“Did you hear about…?”
“Are you going to…?”
“Do we have practice…?
It kept them from noticing the dreams
Of existence, of acceptance,
Of being a part of the Grand Experiment,
Kicked along the dirty floors
As they scurried to class.

Driving to work today I watched the woman
Standing in the rain,
Holding the sign,
“Out of Work Please Help,” shivering, shimmering.
Mother, sister, daughter, aunt—perhaps
Saint, sinner, harlot, sacrifice,
Prophet, poet, priest, king—
Bosses watch clocks, and we can’t hesitate,
Not in the rain, nor in heavy traffic,
It’s easy to forget after all
When there’s a man with a sign
Two blocks closer to the office.

In my newsfeed today, opinion hurled like daggers,
“Not a woman”
“Biological male”
“Sports and bathrooms”
Rainbows and flags posted support
Allies brought hammers and words to build
A place to be secure, to exist,
To know who she is, was, will be, amen.
But the damage was done,
Hateful words have barbs
And even to pry them out
Leaves scars and bleeding.

I am not them.
But I am them.
I am he, she, they, all the pronouns.
They are always in me.
The him, the her, the them,
Flow like oxygen through my lungs,
Expressed outward in his, hers, theirs,
Collectively exhaled from my open mouth
To the ground below,
Picked up by some, ignored by others,
On the way to class, driving to work,
In the anonymity of virtual life.

I am that I am, one said.
Know that I am, said another.
I am too, I proclaimed.
To be one,
To be one another,
To be.

Sean Taylor © 2024

Visit my poetry.com site.