[marron]

Good article.

[Pelham]

Another echo of Tolkien’s wartime experience at the Front is the Hobbit’s obsession with food. Tolkien wrote that the soldiers in the trenches were always hungry and food was always on their mind.

[Louis Foxwell]

The author ignores completely the most important element of Tolkien’s life, his deep and abiding faith in Christ. With his devoted friend, C.S. Lewis, they nurtured the spirit of Christ and His teachings not just in Oxford but in all of England. Wherever The LOR has touched a mind the knowledge of Christ has entered and taken root.

[Envisioning]

For later......

[T-Bird45]

This also shows why Ralph Bakshi’s animated interpretation of Tolkien was very much on the mark with what the author was conveying in his books.

[kalee]

Thanks for posting.

[exDemMom]

Very good article. Usually, the NYT is trash, but this one is superb.

Beside the courage of ordinary men, the carnage of war seems also to have opened Tolkien’s eyes to a primal fact about the human condition: the will to power. This is the force animating Sauron, the sorcerer-warlord and great enemy of Middle-earth. “But the only measure that he knows is desire,” explains the wizard Gandalf, “desire for power.”

The elements of lust for power that Tolkien recognized then are even more prominent today-witness just about any leftist politician. Tolkien also captured the deceptive language that the power-hungry use to mask their true motivations. For example, the language that Sauron's lieutenant used when parlaying with the representatives of Gondor. It was full of self-serving dissembling: how Sauron is merely minding his own business, and all the people of Middle Earth are unfairly arraying themselves against him, yada yada yada.

I started reading The Hobbit in 6th grade, but it wasn't until high school that I really was able to read it with comprehension. I was fifteen the first time I read The Hobbit and LOTR all the way through--my, what an exciting adventure! And I read it again every few years. Each time, I pick up on a new nuance that I've never seen before. Those books are truly classics.

[BipolarBob]

“I don’t like anything here at all.” said Frodo, “step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”

[SueRae]

Excellent reading.

[RayChuang88]

If you have read Humphrey Carpenter's authorized biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, one thing that was strongly seared in Tolkien's mind was the loss of two of his closest friends in the Battle of the Somme--a battle that in many ways essentially ended the supremacy of Europe as a power because so many of the brightest university students from the UK, France and Germany were killed in that bloody four-month battle. And it was battle that in the end changed nothing in terms of the location of the front lines.

It was only the arrival of the Americans in 1917--backed by the industrial might of the USA--that finally turned tide in favor of the Allies by 1918.

[Lurker]

For later.

L