Pints With Aquinas - The ONE Lord of the Rings Episode to RULE Them All!

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

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Hey, everybody, before we jump into the podcast, I want to let you know that if you become an annual supporter over at matfrad.locals.com support, you will get a free pines with Aquinas beer stein. You just pay shipping, you'll get access to our free courses, you'll get access to our post show live streams that are exclusive to our local supporters. Also monthly spiritual direction with Father Gregory pine, as well as our free quarterly newspaper sent to your door. It's called The Jill and we even pay the shipping on that one, no matter where in the world you live. If you're interested in getting these perks, please go to locals.com, sorry, matfrad.locals.com slash support and sign up as an annual supporter to get those perks and you'd be tremendously helping us as a ministry. Thank you. Dr. Ben Reinhardt, lovely to have you on the show. It's great to be here. Give people a quick bio of you. All right, so I'm currently a professor of English at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Before that I was at Christendom College for about nine years. I was born in Indiana to a Anabaptist family, converted to Catholicism in graduate school at Notre Dame.

And that's the 15 second version. And a Tolkien geek. And a Tolkien geek, yeah. I know I have an answer to this, but I wanna know yours. What's the difference between a nerd and a geek? Oh, between a nerd and a geek. Geek's more derogatory, isn't it? Is it?

I think, or I don't know. I think nerd actually implies a little bit more knowledge. Geek is, or is that the other way around? When I think of nerd and geek, I think a nerd is somebody who's smart. Okay. And a geek is someone who probably has collectibles on their shelf. Okay, so- And is more like obsessive about more pop cultural things that smart people are into.

Okay, so yeah, I guess by that definition, I'm a talking geek. I've got the bust in my office on campus, so yes. When were you first introduced to Tolkien? I was probably about seventh grade. You know, I was just sort of looking around for things to read. I found that my dad had a copy of The Hobbit, so I started there, and then sort of rolled on

from that point on, so yeah. Awesome, I think I first watched, I first read The Lord of the Rings, I'm ashamed to say maybe. No, I'm not really ashamed to say, I the Lord of the Rings. I'm ashamed to say maybe No, I'm not really ashamed. I wish it was sooner is what I'm trying to say. It was about I Don't know eight years ago. Okay I Got a bit kind of bogged down in the third book return of the king and so list like was listening to the audiobook And but then two years ago, I read it with Mike Welker

Oh very who's a professor here on campus for those who don't know. And we came up with a reading plan and we read one book a month. And I say that whenever I read the Lord of the Rings, I'm convinced it's the best book ever written. And then whenever I read the Brothers Karamazov, I'm like, no, this is the best book ever written. And then I just go back and forth. That's an acceptable opinion, I think. So, so what was it like? I'm, I know I'm not interviewing you,

but what's it like to come know I'm not interviewing you, but what's it like to come to Tolkien as an adult? Because sort of the standard stereotype, right, is this is something that- Home school kids read. Home school kids read or geeks in middle school or high school and then they become overly enthusiastic young people.

But you approached it in your 30s, right? Yeah. What was it like? You know, I think it was C.S. Lewis, his little quote about the Lord of the Rings. It's often on the back covers. They say something like here are what does he say? Beauty is the pierced like swords are burned like cold iron. That's what it was like.

Yeah. So my one my one kind of the thing that struck me most is I was reading the Lord of the Rings and I was doing it to my kid, with my kids. And so, um, that was my excuse. And at the very end, you know, where, um, Frodo was standing and Frodo's gone off to see the elves and you've got Sam on the shores and it says it's sunk deep into his heart. And then he makes his way home and he, he's, he was expected all of these lines. It just came up and up as soon as I finished I Walked into my bedroom walked into our walk-in closet shut the door and wept It was so powerful and I think I've said a few times like please read this over my grave when I'm dead Like it was the most beautiful moving. Yeah, so it was just it was wonderful I think the first time I read

it I didn't like who's the fella who nobody likes who wasn't in the that's not true. Tom Bombadil. Tom Bombadil. Yeah. Second time I read it I loved him. Okay. We'll get to that. I don't know. Did you say nobody likes Tom Bombadil? He's the controversial one. He gets cut from the movies and people there are divided opinions. Everyone loves most everything else, but there is the yeah, he's the controversial one, right? Yeah So yeah, I guess it was it and it was just you just like when you're reading when you're reading about the Shire Mm-hmm. I feel like maybe I don't know if this is true for everyone But it seems to me that it's probably true that everyone has a moment where things were safe. And it's usually in our memory.

Yeah. I find this kind of nostalgia when I go to nice antique stores and I see things of yesteryear, and I just have this like, ah, there was a time things were good. Even if that wasn't true objectively, there was a time it felt right. Yeah.

And yeah. So no, everyone's got that moment, right? Because the Shire has this sort of childlike feel to it, right? It takes you back to that time where the world was idyllic, where you were safe tucked in your bed, and you weren't exposed to all the other stuff that we worry about all the time now, right?

With wife and kids and mortgages and everything else. Yeah. No, I think that's true. Is it your favorite book? Ooh, boy, favorite's a very, very big question. So favorite work of modern fiction, undoubtedly, right? If we start putting it up against the whole literary tradition,

it gets a little bit dicier. So there are some medieval works I like very nearly as much, or maybe more. There some medieval works that I like very nearly as much or maybe more. There are classical works that I like very nearly as much or maybe more. But for things written imaginatively in the past 500 years, it's absolutely my favorite. Yeah. What are some things people don't know about Tolkien? Things that people don't know about Tolkien. All right. So viewers of your channel are going to know about the Catholicism thing, right?

So this is something that gets pushed out to the corners of pop cultural imagination, but Pines with Aquinas viewers will know. Devout Catholic, Daily Mask, or for almost his entire life, things like that. But that's the biggest thing that's probably cut out of the popular image of Tolkien. Other things about Tolkien that people don't know maybe even Catholics don't know are sort of what a family man

He was right. So he lived very much for his family. He was an orphan. So he worked Massively massively hard to provide his children with the sort of life that he himself couldn't have so he took on extra work He you know labored all these hours to to make sure his kids could have prosperity, success, comfort right in their childhoods that he never knew in his own because of course he doesn't get rich from Lord of the Rings until the last decade or so of his life right so all that work also with the family man angle most of the drafting of Lord of the Rings was done after his kids and wife were in

bed because his ordinary duties kept him busy through the day. He was with family during meals. He took his kids into bed and most of that drafting would happen late at night. All, you know, all alone and up. So those are cool little tidbits about Tolkien that people might not know. Massive pipe smoker is pipe's a pipe smoker, yeah. I think I read a quote of him saying that every time he wakes up, he thinks, hurrah, like another 12 hours of nonstop pipe smoking.

I don't know if that's apocryphal. I don't know that quote, but I wouldn't discount it. Yeah. Born in South Africa, wasn't he? Born in South Africa, yeah. January 3rd, 1892, happily the octave of the feast of St. John, which is his Christian name, right? So John the octave of the feast of St. John, which is his Christian name, right? So John Tolkien, born of the octave of St. John,

born to a non-Catholic family, right? Leave South Africa when he's three years old with his mother because they've decided the family's gonna relocate to England. And this is probably the tragedy story that a lot of people know, right? His father, Arthur, stays behind to put affairs in order in South Africa, and the expectation is always that he's going to

join them. So John, John Ronald and his brother, Hillary, his mother, his brother Hillary, brother Hillary, or just an English Hillary, yeah. So John, Hillary, Mabel, they go back to England in 1895. The expectation is that his father's going to join them soon, but his father takes ill that fall and then dies in early 1896. So he never knows his real father. He's got one vague, hazy memory of his father

in the back of his mind, but that's all he had. So born in South Africa, relocates to England in 1896 versus or 1895 Which is the family homeland anyway, right and then it's sort of Consolation tragedy consolation tragedy for the next 15 years Okay, there's a lot of stories I hear about how he wrote that all the rings where he got the idea from whether it's an allegory of some sort Yeah, All right. So if we're going to start talking the idea for the whole thing, we got to start way, way, way, way back, right? The whole mythology is born in 1913, 1914. All

right. And this is going to show you how Tolkien's mind is weird and how his mind works. He's an undergraduate at Oxford. He's studying old English, And he comes across this poem, which today most people call the Advent lyrics. Some people call it Christ One. It's written by a poet of the eight hundreds whose name is Kuhnwulf. This is more than you need to know, but there we go. So he's reading along in this poem and he comes across these lines that just grab him. It goes, Allah erendel engle beorchtast ofer midden yard monum sendet. And it rolls on like this. This is a translation of the O Day Spring lyric,

O Oriens from the O Antiphons. Okay. So the old English poets liked to meditate poetically on liturgical texts. They do this all the time. So Tolkien's reading this and he knows what he's reading. He knows this is one of the O antiphons from Advent, but then he just fixates on that word, Arendel. Like, what does this mean? It doesn't feel.

What does the word translate as again? So Arendel, well, this is the problem, right? Tolkien is trying to figure out what does it mean? In context, it's clear it means something like, O dayspring, right? Because you're translating the day spring lyric, O dawn, O morning star, it means something like that. But the etymology is really fiddly with it.

So he doesn't know quite what it means or how this word came to be in Old English. So he starts obsessing over this word. What does it mean to say, oh, Aarendal, brightest of angels, sent over Middle Earth unto men? Right, that's what the poem says. So he starts obsessing over these words, right? And then as he starts to obsess about it,

he invents his own fake etymology for Aarendel in his own languages, right? He also devotes poems to this Aarendel character, this strange character, the sailor, he's clearly a sailor, Tolkien thinks, right? Who sails the seas and sails the skies and all the rest. And then from this mythological character, the whole mythology springs.

Later, he's gonna call those words the rapturous words from which sprang my entire mythology. Now, we're a long, long way from Lord of the Rings just yet. We've just gotten one character, right? So during World War I, he starts to fiddle more with these stories of elves and orcs and goblins and things like this, so they start to take, sort of really take root in World War I.

We don't get to the Lord of the Rings thing though, until he writes The Hobbit. The Hobbit comes in the mid 1930s, and his publishers ask him for a sequel to The Hobbit, right, and then this whole thing just gets swept up into this body of mythology that's already 25 years old. At this point. Baking in his mind.

Baking in his mind, right? So that's where it all comes from. So it all springs from this sort of like Catholic imaginative root, right? That's where it comes from. Now, on the allegory question, this is a really fun one too. Okay, keep going.

I have so many questions, but I want you to keep going. All right, so. And feel free to take as long as you want, because I am fascinated, and people out there want, they are here for this. So you're not boring us at all. This is wonderful. So the key quote about the Catholicism of the Lord of the Rings comes in a letter that Tolkien wrote to his Jesuit friend, Rob Murray Murray in 1954. Backstory is this, Tolkien had sent a partial draft of Lord of the Rings to Murray. Murray writes

back and says, oh this is fantastic, this is great, I especially like the Catholic elements in it. He draws attention to Galadriel and says she seems to be sort of like a Virgin Mary figure, right? And there's this sort of fundamental compatibility with Catholicism. And Tolkien responds, he says, the Lord of the Rings is, of course, fundamentally a religious and Catholic work, right? And he means, like, in its foundations, right, it's built upon this Catholic imagination, and it sort of grows out of that. But then he goes on to say, this is why I have not put in or I've cut out most references to religion in the story,

and I've absorbed the religious element into the story itself and into the symbolism of the story. So what's this mean? Tolkien is really clear in other letters that he hates allegory. He hates allegory all the time and all its manifestations. He puts this in the second prologue, or the prologue to the second edition of Lord of the Rings. But then sometimes, after he slams that door shut, he'll open it just a crack and say, but, well, maybe there's a little

allegory here, or maybe you can detect some resonances there and things like that. So that's the nutshell version of the controversy. What is a Catholic imagination and how does that differ from a Protestant imagination? That's a fantastic question. So I think a Catholic imagination, I think the roots of what a Catholic imagination actually is, it's going to be a liturgically formed imagination. I think that's the fundamental thing, right? If you think about what makes somebody Catholic, you're Catholic not because of the books you read, right? You're Catholic not because of the conversations you have, although those can be outgrowths of your Catholicism. You're Catholic because you participate in the sacramental life of the church. And this

is one of the things that Tolkien did with great regularity through his life, right? When his mother dies, he and his brother become what he calls junior inmates of the Birmingham Oratory. They're serving mass for Cardinal Newman's successors every morning. At the Birmingham Oratory? At the Birmingham Oratory. I used to study at Merrivale.

Really? That John Henry Newman founded. And I've been to the Oratory, I didn't know that he... Yeah, you can go to the Oratory and you can still see his mother's trunk there, the luggage trunk that she packed all of her possessions in when they sent her off, when she went off to England with the boys. There are many more stories about his mother who he thinks is a martyr, and he's probably right. But so, daily mass, right, in this deeply liturgical imagination,

he's always quoting things from the mass, he's quoting this deeply liturgical imagination. He's always quoting things from the mass. He's quoting things from liturgical prayer all the time in the letters. He's got the canon of the mass memorized in Latin and recites it anytime he's forced to miss mass. I mean, he loves the liturgy so much, right? And if you think about how the church teaches us, right, the liturgy is the prime organ

of the ordinary magisterium. It's how we're taught to pray. It's how we're taught to us, right? The liturgy is the prime organ of the ordinary magisterium. It's how we're taught to pray, it's how we're taught to believe, right? And so I think imagination that's nourished in that is what's ultimately gonna give you a Catholic imagination. Obviously there's gonna be symbolic content in that, right? You're gonna have a deep ability to see, let's say significance in events.

You can see significance in natural phenomena because the liturgy pulls all this into it. You're going to have a sense of sort of the sacred that secular people won't have, a sacredness of creation that sometimes not all Protestants will have. I think that comes through with the liturgical imagination as well.

So I think that's the thing that mostly would differentiate a Catholic imagination from a Protestant one. Now this might be an unfair question because you're not Orthodox or an Orthodox scholar, but how do you think the Lord of the Rings would have looked different if he had been raised Eastern Orthodox? Oh gosh. I, I'm not an Orthodox, as you know, not orthodox, not orthodox scholar.

I honestly don't know. I, in ignorance, I'm gonna put my hand over my mouth and not try to answer that. Anything I would say would be unfairly stereotyping the Eastern Orthodox. Maybe there'd be more Cesaro Papism. I'm very sorry to everybody. All right. So you said he began inventing this language well before he started drafting the Lord of the Rings. So what did that look like? So he'd always had a fascination with languages,

right? And he's thinking as teens when he starts working with invented languages, right? And he's, I think in his teens, when he starts working with invented languages, right? And then this continues, this continues through Oxford, this continues into the trenches and the huts of World War I when he's there and sort of that hell on earth, right? He's continuing to invent languages. And then of course, he's got this mythological element too, where, well, here are the stories, here are my languages,

and they sort of fuse together, right? And this is one of the things that contributes to the feeling of depth in Tolkien that you can't find anywhere else, right? So he's not just inventing, like, modern fantasy authors, right? They have to give their characters like, I've got to give them a fantasy name,

so they take some medieval name and make it sound stupid. And then, aha, here's my fantasy he's Roderick or something like this right Tolkien isn't just pulling together a grab bag there's like a linguistic consistency in everything he does which makes it feel like a real world which makes it feel like a real place that you can enter into right which is one of the things that he says a fantasy author has to do if you do your job well, the imagination of the reader is going to enter

into this sub-created world that has a complete internal consistency of its own, right? So the linguistic element is huge, and it's something that he continues to tinker with, right? Inventing not one, but many imaginary languages for elves of this sort and elves of that sort and men and men of this different sort and dwarves and all the rest. So how do you invent a language? Like do you sit down and write a dictionary? How does that work?

You know, so there I will confess near total ignorance I've never seriously attempted to invent a language. But it's not just a dictionary, right? It's the structure of the language. It's how it feels, right? Tolkien was a professional philologist, right? He studied, he was one of those guys who knows Greek and Latin in childhood, who teaches himself Gothic for fun, right? Goes off to university, becomes a master

of every Germanic language and several others besides, right? So he's been inside language structure, right? Because if you or I were to try to sit down and invent a language, it would look really, really hokey, right? We would borrow a grammatical element from English here, and then we'd shoehorn in something from Latin, but he wants his languages to have complete consistency

in everything. So some are vaguely Finnish influenced, some should have the feel of Welsh, right? Because he can do that, right? He's been fascinated with this, literally from his sort of early childhood days in the English countryside. So he's got that ability.

And it's something that, to be honest, I can't comprehend. I've studied language, but only from the outside and only superficially Tolkien's been inside it. What's his most completed invented language? Something like some form of Elvish? I think and I'm going to say this and this is the terrifying thing about giving a Tolkien interview. There are going to be people out there, you know, deeper levels of geeked them out. I got to pause and just say, well, that's true. I mean,

what I find is when academics come on the show, they're much more quick to say, I don't know, which is a good thing than people like without a degree, people without degrees, like I'm not going to masters, but I know nothing. No, I know, I know everything cause I, cause I know nothing, but, but people like yourself are always reticent. Because of the academic community, you've also got the Tolkien community that I'm sure are far more brutal. That's what I'm worried about.

So really I'm sort of burying my soul before you here today. Right? Yeah. No, it's good. Well, okay. Whatever his most completed language is, are there people who know it? There are people who know it and there are people who can study it. So from the 60s you have fellowships of people who study his invented languages. And there are some people who are

very very accomplished in, I think it's particularly Quenya, which is one of the Elvish forms of language. This is the one where he, you know, translated, translated, I think, parts of the Litany of Loretto, the Magnificat. He translated all these prayers into Elvish too. So I think that's probably the one that he got most complete. Although I, again, I speak this waiting to be corrected in the comment section. Yeah, funny because Latin, they say, is a dead language, but Elvish or whatever the language is he's come up with was invented in his brain and then presumably is dead except for a few.

So I wonder how what language how it develops organically it can't I suppose. It can't but it's something that Tolkien gives life to right and again this is a 50 year process for him. So he's thinking through how these elements will work together, he's tinkering with it. Even after he's stopped all of his creative work, he'll continue to tinker with this or that element of his languages because he wants them to just have this organic consistency.

He wants them to be real and on a certain plane of reality in this mental sphere that he's invented, they are real. So he's always half an inventor and half a discoverer, right? As he's thinking through how these things necessarily work, because there's such a structure to the reality of his mind, he can say, Oh yes, it's not that I've just come up with this, right? I've been thinking about it and I've discovered that this is the way it has to work.

So you said a moment ago and it's so true that when you read The Lord of the Rings, you are kind of sucked into a world much larger than your own. It feels like when you begin reading The Lord of the Rings that you're like, wait, did I miss like several books? Yeah, you just thrown into it and it feels like all these sort of peripheral things are mentioned without even detailing what they mean. And that adds to the.

And yeah, they're thrown out there just as though an intelligent person would know. Well, of course, you know this story because it's part of your cultural inheritance, right? So it adds to your sense of sort of being a traveler in a strange world where it's like, well, wait a minute, I don't know anything about, you know, the gods of old or Orame at the battle. Like that's just thrown out there in the battle of the Pelennor feels like what on earth is he talking about, right? I don't know any of this, but everyone else apparently does. So it adds to the sense of reality. It also adds to the sort of tourist sense you get, right? So it's like you're walking around in a foreign country, you've never visited it before and everybody assumes that, well, of course,

you know where this place is or that place is, right? You don't know, but it increases the wonder. Elves, orcs, did these things exist prior to Tolkien and where did he draw them from if they did? So they exist, but not in the form that he gives them, right? So elves are always really, really ambiguous in sort of the Western imagination. They're often bad. Elves are sort of malicious, and you can think of sort of Irish fairy tales

where you talk about the good people because they're actually quite dangerous. In Old Norse, elves are really ambiguous. Old English, elves are actually listed as descendants of Canes, who these quasi-cursed figures, right? So elves have a history. Tolkien is trying to reach back to one segment of that,

right, one segment of that long thousand year, 1500 year history in the Western world and recapture it. So that's what he's doing with his invention of the elves. Orcs are different still, right? So obviously there are a thousand antecedents in medieval literature. Orc is another word for demon, more or less in old English, right? But you've always got your ogres, your sort of your bogeymen, right? George McDonald is the most immediate predecessor with the Kurtie books, where he's got all these goblins

and the goblins of George MacDonald are a direct inspiration in some way for the goblins of the Hobbit, even though Tolkien doesn't really like MacDonald. So you get that, but then again, he takes the inspiration, he refines it, he develops it, gives it its own consistency. And then what you have in the end are Tolkien's elves and Tolkien's orcs, which are almost completely unlike anything you'd find in the tradition before that.

Am I right in thinking that what are goblins in The Hobbit are orcs in The Little Ring? Did he change the name at some point? He does change the name, right? Orc just sounds better than goblin. Goblin carries with it too much weight from like fairy tales and you know, fairy tales and childishness, right?

So he'll still occasionally use goblin and the Lord of the Rings and goblin elsewhere. He'll occasionally use orc in The Hobbit, but usually, usually you've got that switch. And I think it's just sort of an elevation of the seriousness of the work and the sort of the reading level of the work too, I think. Tell us about the Silmarillion.

What it is, where it came from, in the chronology of his other writings, whether you like it. I love the Silmarillion. I think the Silmarillion is one of the most important things for people who like Tolkien to read. It reads differently than Lord of the Rings. it's more mythological, it's less story driven, it could be, if he had chosen to develop it this way, it could be 15 or 20 books, but instead it's this large sweep of mythology. It was never completed in Tolkien's life. He'd been tinkering with it again since World War

One, he'd been tinkering with elements of it World War I. He'd been tinkering with elements of it. In the mid-1960s, an American professor, Clyde Kilby, comes over to try to help him get his Silmarillion notes in order. But Tolkien's in his mid-70s at this point, so his energies and his time are waning. It's only after he dies that his son Christopher pulls everything together. So the Silmarillion is part what Tolkien had finished and part what Christopher sort of chooses, selects and edits. It's mostly John Ronald Tolkien, but it's also a chunk of Christopher.

It's a collection of works, right? It gives you his creation myth, which is his sort of poetical re-imagining of the book of Genesis, the fall of the angels, the creation of the elves, the creation of men, and then this long history of warfare between light and dark, which leads you through the first age,

final catastrophe of the first age, which brings in that Aarendal character I was talking about earlier. Then you get the second age with Numenor and the forging of the rings of power. You got a little chunk on that. And then finally it brings you to the end of the third age with just a little snippet of Lord of the Rings.

It's sprawling, it's aggressive, and it's really, really good. Wow, all right. I got all these random questions that aren't, have nothing to do with what you've been saying. Here's one of them. What would have happened if Gandalf took the ring? He would have become, says Tolkien, much worse than Sauron because the ring would have corrupted, right? The ring necessarily would have corrupted.

necessarily would have corrupted. But Gandalf would have become the worst of tyrants had he taken the ring. Because as C.S. Lewis says, a tyranny exercised for the benefit of its subjects is the most fearful one of all. Right. COVID lockdowns. No, this is exactly it, right? Because Gandalf legitimately desires the good. He legitimately does want the good of Middle Earth, but part of what that means is a certain restraint, because this is always how it works in Tolkien's world. You can't force things. You can't force things to go against their nature.

You can't hammer them into shape. You've got to let them develop and unfold, because God is God in Tolkien's world, and you are not. So So you've got to sort of take things to a degree as God gives it. So Gandalf would have had increased power. Gandalf would have had the corruption of the will. The way to the ring to his heart is through pity, he says, pity and the desire to do good. Right. And what happens if you have someone who pities all of his underlings and will do nothing,

will stop at nothing to make their lives more safe or better. Right. And then it is, yeah, it's COVID lockdown. It's tyranny exercised for, it's an overbearing parent, but it's an overbearing parent. It's, it's that kind of tyranny. So it becomes sort of the diabolical nanny Gandalf. That's exactly what would happen to him, right? And the sense of self-righteousness, right? He wouldn't even have had the malice, right? The direct malice. He would have had this

overwhelming sense of self-righteousness, this crusade to put everything in order just so, and that would have made him more fearsome and in fact worse than Sauron himself. Wow. Yeah, there's a lot in the, you read from Gandalf slips in the Lord of the Rings that, that, that sort of is open to the, to the unfolding of the natural unfolding of things. So when he talks, when Frodo talks about wishing that Fro, uh, that, um, Bilbo had have killed Gollum, thank you, that he said it was pity that stayed his hand and that not even the wisest can see how things end and I take great comfort. I think a lot of people take great comfort in those particular lines in a day and age

where our country is being completely disintegrated right now, where it feels like the Western church is also all these structures that we trust in and feel like they're coming apart. And maybe there's an analogy there to YouTubers like me that want to take the ring and tell people the way they should act and the way things are instead of somehow submitting to the permissive will of God and all of this. No, of course, I don't think there's any problem in being the prophet crying in the wilderness, right? I think Tolkien would have been okay with that. But to the same point, right,

sort of consolation of God working in history, consolation that God works things according to his will and according to his purpose, and that all we can do is order our own lives as best we can and try to deal with and embrace whatever God's put in front of us. I think that's a massive element that goes on in Lord of the Rings, right? Yeah, tell us about that line, you know, where Frodo says to Gandalf,

"'I wish I had never lived to see such times.'" And all we can do is... He says, so do all who live to see such times, but that's not for them to ask. Right, all we can do is decide what to do with the time that's given us, right? Oh, that's so good. And that's, I mean, my gosh.

That's so good. Think about Tolkien's life, right? Think about Tolkien's life. He lives through two world wars. He serves in the first. His son serves in the second, right? That's awful. He sees the utter transformation of England,

the complete industrialization of the countryside and things like this, which is something he regards as sort of a tragedy. I think he's probably right on that. He sees then the social revolutions of the 60s and 70s and the ecclesial revolutions of the 60s and 70s. And so by the end of his life, he says, all we can do is just refuse to bow down and worship.

We can refuse to bow down and worship the spirit of the age. That's all any one of us can do at this stage in history. And this is one of the reasons why I think I think he's so inspiring, right? Because first of all, you've got the idea that God only puts so much on your plate. You deal with what's yours as best you can

and sort of leave the rest to him. Because again, the fundamental metaphysical fact of Tolkien's world is God is God, you are not, and you can only respond with gratitude to God for what he's given. That's the fundamental metaphysical fact of his world. Then there's also the sense that however bad things get, there will be deliverance.

We can't imagine what the deliverance is. You can't imagine how it's going to come and you can't try to force it right because it comes when God chooses that moment right and sometimes things will get really dark and you might not live to see the deliverance yourself but you know the whole pattern of history is ultimately a comedy and not a tragedy because Christ came the incarnation happened this is Tolkien's word for is you catastrophe.atastrophe, that's the fairy tale ending, right? It's the eucatastrophe of man's history when God becomes man. And then when Christ is raised from the dead, it's again, it's this true myth, it's this true fairy tale that

shows the real pattern of how the world works and is working. We're working towards that final end, we can trust in that because we know who God is, right? Even though things might be dark and oppressive in our own time. So even the Tolkien says he hates allegory. If I were to ask you, what does the ring represent? So if you have to make the ring represent something, right? The ring is closely united to the idea, very Augustinian idea of the lust for domination, right? You want control, it's power, exercise for the domination of others. And that's how it operates in the story, right?

So it's not even an allegory, that's just what it does, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder how, I wonder if you could make an allegory between the ring and the iPhone, or the smartphone, smart devices. So let's say this, let you could make an allegory between the ring and the iPhone or the smartphone, smart devices. So let's say this, let's not do an allegory, let's do an application, okay?

Because Tolkien would say, Tolkien, of course, can't imagine an iPhone, right? But he can imagine also. Sorry, I don't mean what did he envision, I mean how we can apply it. Fair enough, fair enough. This is something that he absolutely, absolutely is okay with saying,

hey, I read his work and I find myself applying it to this or that in my own life, because if it's a good story, it will have applications. Tolkien likes this. So the ring in the iPhone, absolutely, right? I carry it with me wherever I go. If I don't have it on me, there's that moment of panic, right? It dramatically increases my power. I can learn anything I want.

I can access any information available to any human being at any stage of history, very nearly, right? But what's the cost of it? When I'm anxious and scared, I can dissolve into it. And I can dissolve into it, right? And there's a way that it sort of steals your time. You can eat, you can even think about this, right? And there's a way that it sort of steals your time. You can even think about this, right? If a man or a hobbit has the ring, you don't acquire new life.

You don't acquire more life. Your life is just sort of stretched out and definitely stretched out. That's where you get the butter scraped over too much bread and it's sort of eating away at the back of your mind, right? And then like, I teach college, right? And you go around and you see these wonderful, should be healthy young people

who spend their entire lives just sort of being sucked into this world of information, right? It's the shadow world. It's this world of unreality. It's this world where you expose your soul to all these dangers that you're not even aware that you're exposing it to, right? Because you're walking in territory

that man wasn't meant to walk. The smartphone is probably as close to a ring as anything that's ever been invented in human history. I've got an acquaintance who says it's the most destructive invention in human history. I'm not sure I'd quite go that far, but you can see the logic behind it. If you're sympathetic to this, why do you have one?

Why do I have one? Because my family plan makes it cheaper for me to have one than any other system. But wouldn't it be cheaper to not have one? Yes, but there are external motivations for having a cell phone that I haven't yet been able to overcome I keep I never use the internet on it. I use it for messaging and I use it for I Use it for messaging. I use it for phone calls. And if I'm exercising I allow myself to play things in the background And so that's that's the personal balance that I've been able to strike.

At some point when it becomes financially more attractive to have a flip phone, I'll go back to the flip phone, but that's where I am right now. I'm with you. It's funny. So I had a dumb phone for a while and just tremendous freedom. I just loved it.

But what's funny is as the world moves on, it becomes increasingly difficult. So one example for me is if I get locked out of YouTube, that's a big deal. And it used to be the case that you could have them text you a code. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but the last several times it feels like they've moved away from this and instead now you either need like a YouTube authenticator on the Authenticator app or there needs to be like a link that you click through to YouTube It's really annoying now because you have to be using either You either have to be using offline algorithm based second

Second two-factor authentication codes. Yeah, you have to be using the Google authenticator app. And then things like you'll go to a restaurant and just scan the code. I don't want to scan the code, bring me a menu. Yeah, well, no, I mean, one flippant observation, one maybe more serious one, the flippant observation is we were talking about new exciting ways to take attendance at school.

And there's this new app where all students have to do is take out their smartphone, scan the QR code, and then they've checked in. And that's how you know the students in class. It's gross. It's gross. Hold on, can I ask a question about that? Yeah.

You can scan a QR code from a picture someone sends you. Oh no, they're clever, they're really clever. you can scan a QR code from a picture someone sends you. Oh no, they're clever, they're really clever. So what they do is the QR code changes every three seconds. So you scan it right now, right? Oh, so it's constantly updating? It's constantly updating. So they've thought of an end around for that.

But yeah, you're just encouraging all of your students to enter the shadow world. You're encouraging them to enter the shadow world. And more to the point, look, I'm a horrible professor when it comes to getting the names of my students down. I'm not somebody who naturally interfaces with a lot of people all at once. So I get to know a few people really well. But one of the ways that you actually get to know your students as human beings is something like this. You call out their names. They say here, you look at them in the face, right? I mean, this is the smallest of human connections. It's the smallest human connection. If my students were to simply check themselves in by this, it's not the most serious thing in the world, but that

would be an element of their humanity that I no longer recognize. And it's funny. It feels like with every advancement in technology, there is a poverty that we are soon to discover. But when the advancement hits, you don't see the poverty and it just feels all uphill. And then only later on do you realize little things like that that were actually helpful. That were actually helpful. And then also there's the assumption, right?

If students have to have their smartphones on them to check into class, well, then they've got to have a smartphone. And you're also training them. One of the most freeing feelings in the world is when I realized that I've forgot my cell phone somewhere. And it's just like, I can't check for a text. I mean, even texting, right?

I can't check for that. I can't look for this. Nobody can contact me. And it's a beautiful feeling, right? But it's sort of like this Pavlovian experiment where we're continually by this repeated stimulus saying, you've gotta have your smartphone. You wanna go to the restaurant, scan the QR code.

You wanna go to a baseball game, give us your e-ticket, right? So we are training people to pass through the ring, right? That's absolutely what's happening with modern technology and Tolkien saw all of it. He saw all of this happening, right? It was not the information age, but it was the machine age in his day, right? He called World War II the first great war of the machines.

And the only people who won the war, he said, were the machines, right? The machines are stronger now, the machines are dominant. Every human being in the world is poor and more wretched, but the machines have wants. What are the machines going to do next? And there's a very, very strong correlation between what the ring represents,

power, domination, control, the ability to affect your will quickly, and what machines, what computers represent. It gives you the power without the mastery and the discipline required to get it naturally. It makes your will instantly efficacious. My will is not good enough to be made instantly efficacious. My will needs limits placed on it, right? But that's the world that we're increasingly living under and we're going faster and faster in that direction. I usually, last few years, I've taken the whole month of

August off of the internet and didn't do it this month for different reasons. But I remember last year I took my daughter to Savannah for some reason and we were staying at a hotel and I needed a drive somewhere and I had to go downstairs and ask the person a number for a taxi. And that was awkward. And then taking a taxi was really not fun at all. You know, like as much as Uber's often an unpleasant experience, the taxi was really weird. But yeah, like even that,

like taking an Uber is just so much easier than. Yeah, it's easier. But yeah. And here I'm enough of a Luddite. I've never taken an Uber. I've been on three taxis in my life. It's just, it's just just I'm. Maybe what it is is if you wish to not enter the shadow world, there are many other things that aren't immediately shadowy that you have to cut off as well. So maybe in this day and age, if you wish to be a Luddite, that also requires you don't actually travel unless there's a funeral. You know what I mean? Yeah, there might be Luxuries don't directly connect to the iPhone that you also have to cut out and I think that's probably what's going to be required here, right? I

Don't think people have adequately Stopped to think about what technology has been doing to us and And I didn't mean to turn this into a technology rant. I think I did, so it's okay. But look, even in the 1950s, you can find all these people sounding warnings about how technology is either taking us away from natural human life, right? So if you think about the distributists,

if you think about Father Vincent McNabb, if you think about Father Conrad Peppler, these English Dominicans, they're very, very worried about this in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, right? So we're entering this artificial world, this cutoff from the world that God created, in the world where all of the significance of our lives

is actually found, right? And so the world, the mechanized in the information world breeds civilizational atheism, it breeds nihilism, and the only way out of it is going to be through abnegation and through a kind of asceticism. But the hope would be to recover those more primal things, those more primal significances, right?

Starting with things like, hey, here's a family meal, right? The sharing of food together as a family and seeing each other in the face, here's a family meal, right? The sharing of food together as a family and seeing each other in the face, that's a first step. Then what's the second step? What's the third step? Yeah. Right? These are acts of combat. These are acts of combat.

And again, little turn, a thousand little turning away. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm too impatient for the little turning aways. I'm far too idealistic, but then I backtrack. Yeah. So I'm the kind of person who would throw my phone in a river and then two weeks later buy one. I've had that temptation.

See, this is the benefit of being a melancholic. You think all these things. I am so, are you melancholic? I'm melancholic. Me too. Melancholic and phlegmatic. So I think all these things, I just don't do them. Yeah, I'm melancholic calering.

Exactly, so that's the difference. So I can just sort of like retreat into my own little world of sort of like slothful, slothful wrath. I don't know, it might be prudence though. Maybe it's prudence, maybe it's prudence. But the temptation to, yeah, I once watched-

Shut the phone, take an ax to the TV, right? Oh, I have all these stories. So I once watched Brother, Son, Sister Moon, that terrible St. Francis of Assisi movie, was so inspired by it that I took all the clothes out of my closet, put into a backpack, to walk down to the, there's like 10 o'clock at night to take down to the bins that you drop the clothes in with my phone. I broke the battery. I threw my phone away. I threw all my clothes away. And then a month later, bought a phone, bought some

new clothes. Were you already married at this point? No, no. Okay. But when I was married, but see when I was married, I was living in Ireland in Donny Goal and my wife and my son went back to Texas and I was left alone. And I thought, oh, I know what I'll do. I'd love to watch a season of The Simpsons.

Like, it's been so long since I watched television. I just really want to enjoy that. So I went I rented the Simpsons, I came. I watched three episodes. I was so disgusted. I took the TV that wasn't mine. I was renting it. Rip the cord out, threw it in the bin. So idealism without, no, it would have been amazing if there was follow through, but I'm pretty sure within a month I just got another stupid TV.

God have mercy on me a sinner. But I long for that. I long for something I can't seem to maintain. Yeah. No, and I think that's, I think that's, I think that's universal, right? We all recognize that there's something wrong. We all recognize that the rhythm of our life isn't what we want it to be, right? But there are very powerful interests who, who create an environment conducive to living out of rhythm, right? So you always feel that knee jerk reaction against it. I should delete this, I should throw that out, I should do this, right?

But then it's like, but- Then you come back on hands and knees. Then you come back on hands and knees, because it's like, well, but if I were to get rid of my Facebook, what would I do with these thousands of photos? Because it's my photo cache. That's right, yes.

And so, but again, this is the ring, right? Because it's your present, it's your future, it's your past. Like your memory's colonized by all this, or my memory is anyway, so. What do you mean? I like that, but what do you mean, your memory's colonized by it?

So, all right, let's talk about how things were, let's talk about how things are, right? So think about visiting your great aunt in 1995 or something like this and she can take out the family photo album. This is the most precious thing, right? This is when my parents would talk about what you would save from the house in a house fire. You go get those family photos because that's your past and that's what really really matters to you, right? Do you have a family photo album? No. I don't either, right? I have a bunch of little books

that Instagram helped me print off. The Instagram or the whatever. But I wouldn't think to run to them in a fire because I have them somewhere else. Because you got them uploaded, right? So you'd grab something else. But this is the thing, right? So our memories and our past are,

this is somebody else's phrase, but they're sort of, we're renting them. We don't own them anymore because- Oh, I'm gonna go on an ideological bender after this episode. This is somebody else's phrase, but there's sort of we we're renting them. We don't own them anymore because I'm gonna go on an ideological bender after this episode Renting them again, please so for my own sake. Yeah, so we're renting we're renting our memories from Facebook right because I don't remember what I did ten years ago But oh Facebook's gonna remind me and wasn't that a cute moment when my son was only so such and such old right? we rent them and

The fact that they're immediately accessible means that they don't Seep in the same way that they used to are you a sports guy? No, no, okay. You're not so this is this Australia I'd watch cricket I liked sports but it was more of a communal thing. More of a communal thing. When I was a kid, you know, you could ask people sports trivia and you'd know sports trivia. You know who led the AL and batting average or something like this, right? I see where you get that. But now we know nothing. We not only do we know nothing, but as we converse about it,

there's bound to be someone in the group who short circuits the pleasant conversation we were having with a factoid that he looked up on Google. Or even, I mean, again, this is absolutely not a sports interview, but it was something surreal 10 years ago when I was watching sports purely communally with a group of friends, right? There were three or four or five who were following the game, but then there were another significant chunk who were on their smartphones the whole dang time because, hey, here's my fantasy team.

Here's this, here's that, right? And so even these most simple pleasures, communal pleasure of hanging out with friends and doing this, they're sapped away and they're drained. So it's almost literally as though our lives are being drained into our devices. So yeah, so here's the upcoming vendor. Yeah, it's coming baby. It's going to come hard and fast and my wife's going to wonder what happened and I'm going to tell her to look it up on her phone because I no longer

have one and she will watch this episode. All right. So Bill Bow wrote The Hobbit. Who wrote The Lord of the Rings? Frodo, Frodo and Sam. Okay. So that's the conceit, right? So The Hobbit are the memoirs of Bilbo, right? And he writes them all down in his own personal journal.

When Frodo and The Hobbits come to Rivendell, they tell him the story, and it's like, oh, I've got to get all this down. When they come back at the end, he hands over the story, and it's like, oh, I've got to get all this down. When they come back at the end, he hands over the book, Frodo continues working through and sort of revising things. And then at the end, he hands it off to Sam for the last couple of pages.

And then, no, I mean, and again, this is, we talk about being geeks, but this is where Tolkien's own passion for his invented world goes beyond anything that any normal person would ever have done. where Tolkien's own passion for his invented world goes beyond anything that any normal person would ever have done. So in medieval studies, one of the things that you care about a lot is manuscripts, because every medieval text you have ultimately goes back to something copied down usually by some monk, right, in

parchment. And then you obsess over which manuscript is copied from which one, and the medieval themselves would obsess over these things. It's a long story. So what Stolken do, he invents not just the book that it comes from, but then he develops whole trees of books. This book was copied by this guy, this book was copied by this guy,

and that's how I found the story. This is more or less what he does because he is a very, very unique imagination. Gosh, that's fascinating. Here's the annoying question. Why didn't the eagles take Frodo directly to Mount Doom? Ha ha, okay, so, first of all, because they're not a taxi service, right?

Second of all, because if you go very deep into the mythology, the eagles are actually sort of spirits, they're angels, they're not just talking birds, they're sort of these incarnate spirits, right? And they tend to do what they do, not just because they're here to be very helpful birds, but because they're sort of a divine mission that they're sent on, right?

So they're there all the time. They're watching. They're watching the world sort of under the deputyship of God's chief angel in the world. And they intervene at key moments. Please tell me that mic is muted. Good man. You bastard. So they intervene only at really important moments, right? You can't use them just by use. They have their own concerns. They have their own concerns. And when they intervene in the world, they're intervening

usually as a moment of sort of special grace, right? So in the Hobbits, the Battle of the Five Armies, the eagles are coming. That's the big cry of deliverance. At the last battle before the Black Gate, the eagles are coming. That's the cry of deliverance. So symbolically, they couldn't do that, right? I suppose logistically there'd be the question of how you'd even get that, get it there and things like that, but it's less of a practical question, right? And more of a thematic and a, more of a thematic and coherence question. You can't just do that, right? What is Gandalf? He's an angel.

So this is a Silmarillion thing. It's actually something I was talking with my son about last night. He's like, dad, you say that Gandalf's like one of the Maya. That's one of the angels. He's like, which one is he? And he's like, and then I told him, he's like, I knew it, I knew it. So here's the story. Gandalf, when he comes back from the angels, he's like, which one is he? And he's like, and then I told him, he's like, I knew it, I knew it.

So here's the story. Gandalf, when he comes back from the dead, right, he gives the list of names that he's had, and one of these names is Olren, because this is one of those layers of depth that Tolkien builds in. If you go to the Silmarillion, you learn that he is the wisest of the angels,

he's got this deep heart of pity, he's got this special concern for men and elves, and that's who he is. So where these wizards come from, they're all incarnate angels and therefore capable of air, capable of misjudgment, capable of fall. They're sent by God's regents in earth to help out men and elves when things are getting dark, when they need this little extra assistance, extra mode of grace. Gandalf himself, I think it's pretty clear that Tolkien imagines him as sort of not just this incarnate angel, but this incarnate angel

who has a particularly close relationship to what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world. Gandalf says on the bridge, I'm the servant of the secret fire. Oh, what does that mean? Now, this is an area where I'm gonna like go far out on a limb, really far out on a limb, and somebody can cut this off later, but here we go. Tolkien allegedly told a friend later, the secret fire is just the Holy Spirit. the secret fire is just the Holy Spirit. The secret fire is just the Holy Spirit. It's what sustains the world and it's what Gandalf particularly is devoted to. Now if you turn back to the Lord of the Rings, if you look at the language that he's used, he's pitiful, he's full of pity, he's full of mercy, it's wisdom, it's

counsel, right? He enkindles the hearts, that comes up again and again and again. He's the one who enkindles the hearts of men and elves, never dominating, but just sort of stirring them up. The ring that he has, because he's got one of the three elven rings, is the ring of fire to make hearts of flame in a world that grows chill.

So there's this angelic element to him, this incarnate angel. But then, whether by design or whether this is something that Tolkien just recognized later in his life, his actions in the world are sort of an extension of the activity of the Holy Spirit. Like the Blessed Virgin. Like the Blessed Virgin, yeah. So this is a very, very fun thing with how Tolkien's imagination develops and sort of spins out, yeah. So what happened on the bridge with the Balrog?

I mean, we've read it, but... Yeah. So this is a really important moment for him, right? Gandalf is confronting, you've got an angel confronting a demon, right? This is literally what's happening here. The way Tolkien's mythology works, and this is what allows it to be a mythology rather than just a Bible story,

is that these forces of good and evil have actually physically entered the world and can be bounded by the world. So this is where in Tolkien, you can punch the devil in the face, where in the real world, you can't do that, right? Spiritual combat as opposed to physical combat. So you've got these two sort of co-equal spirits do that, right? Spiritual combat as opposed to physical combat. So you've got these

two sort of co-equal spirits facing off, right? And the one is the servant of the secret fire, the Balrog is this black consuming fire. So you've got this image as they're facing each other. Gandalf confronts him and in Gandalf's sort of descent to the underworld there, right? He falls down, he goes down to the depths of the earth. He really does die, right? And this is a beautiful thing because in his willingness to die, he's giving up potentially his entire mission. He's giving up potentially all hope for the quest. Couldn't he do otherwise? But he lays down and he empties himself. And then by special grace, by the grace of God, he is resurrected and sent on to continue his mission beyond all hope, beyond all expectation. And this is one of the things that's central to Tolkien.

You've got to be ready to die. Death is one of the central themes. If you're not ready to have this complete self-emptying, you're not actually living the life you need to live, right? Elves, men, hobbits are all called in their own way to be willing to give up everything to God, right? Because God is the giver of every good and perfect gift. You've got to have that perfect trust,

that perfect trust and reliance on him. And if you can do that, you can face whatever. But it's only through abnegation, asceticism, and pure and total emptying that you can hope to get there. My gosh. Yeah. I'm thinking of the trees of Fangorn. They had to give up their forest and they chose to help the hobbits, right? To correct me at any point if I'm totally wrong. So yeah. So the Ents come out of the forest, they give up their sort of rootedness and

they come out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The hobbits have they give up their sort of rootedness and they come out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Hobbits have to give up the shot, yeah. The Elves have to go west. The Elves have to go west, yeah. And going west means, Elves never die, right? So how can an Elf face death, right?

The Elf faces death by unclenching their hands and giving up what they've worked for and what they've loved and what they've owned. You've got to be willing to sacrifice that, right? So going into the West, it is for them a kind of death. It's a sacrifice. It's kenosis, right? So everyone is called to this.

And this is where the temptation comes in too, right? Because what if you had a way? To grasp. What if you had a way to grasp? What if you had a way to grasp, what if you had a way to grasp, what if you had a way to hold on to life? That's how, that's why men become Nazgul, right? Because if you're great, you seek to escape death, and the ring means you have everlasting life.

They never have to face the uncertainty and the absolute trust ultimately required, right? The elves, the reason why they make the rings is because they don't want to leave Middle Earth. They want to continue to have their cake and eat it required, right? The elves, the reason why they make the rings is because they don't want to leave Middle Earth. They want to continue to have their cake and eat it too. Right? This is why we get boob jobs and hair transplants. This is absolutely why we do that.

I'm so glad you didn't smile. You got exactly what I meant. Yeah. I love that you're weird like me. Right? That's right. We just want to hold onto it. We want to hold on to what we have and we're unwilling to give that up.

So because Tolkien is Tolkien, right, he actually develops a precise word for what's required of everyone. This word is estal, which is the high hope, which is rooted in God's divine nature. Estal is high hope, rooted in God's divine nature. You know that God is good, you know that God is loving, therefore you can trust and abandon yourself to whatever. And for men, this means you have to be willing to accept death because that's the gift that God gave you. Now, this is so important to Tolkien because when men fall,

it's because they're not willing to do that. The whole fall of Numenor, which is his Atlantis, comes because they become obsessed with cheating death. So boob jobs and hair transplants, right? They search feverishly for any way that they can extend their lives, right? They search for any way to prolong the enjoyment of the natural gifts of life. And then as you do that, you just become more and more obsessed with death. And the shadow of death is always sort of hovering over you. We're the same age. We know what midlife feels like. Right.

So you can, if you let it, it becomes an obsession. Right. But the thing that you're supposed to do is lay yourself down. This is that idea of Estel again. And the coolest thing about it is Tolkien actually wrote that directly into the Lord of the Rings because Aragorn's name, the name that he's raised with, is Hope. That's his name. So Estil is Hope. It's the high hope that is the only thing that can possibly, you can possibly hold on to in the Valley of Tears.

Wow. So both Sauron and Gandalf are Maia? Maia, yeah. Why do they appear, why do they seem so different? Why does it seem that Sauron and Gandalf are Maia? Maia, yeah. Why do they appear, why do they seem so different? Why does it seem that Sauron is much stronger? So there are a couple reasons for this. It could be just because Sauron is a sort of a higher order of angels, right?

Tolkien's got orders of angels just like we do, so Sauron is probably of a higher order than Gandalf to begin with. Okay. Probably. just like we do. So Sauron is probably of a higher order than Gandalf to begin with, probably. But then there's this other thing, right, where Sauron is always seeking to augment his power, to dominate other wills, right? This is why he makes the ring. This is why he does all this. What's required of these angels

who come to Middle-earth as wizards, it's sort of like a vow of poverty a little bit, right? You've got to surrender, you've got to give up some of the power that's proper to you so that you can be the counselor, not the dominator, because we're not opposing power to power. The job is to take a different way, right? And this is why Saruman falls, right? Saruman gets impatient. He doesn't want to just be the counselor. He wants to become the guy who rules, who directs.

He gets impatient with the idea of our petty and useless allies. So fine, I'm gonna take the ring. I'm gonna become the great man if I can, right? That's where the fall lies for Saruman. And that's where the triumph lies for Gandalf because the abnegation of power going all the way back to C.S.

Lewis is just about at the heart of Lord of the Rings. When we get we're going to take a break. And when we come back, I want to talk about who the real hero was on Mount Doom at the end and what we can learn from that. I want to look at some of the most

beloved quotations from the Lord of the Rings. And then we're going to take questions from our local supporters. This clip was sponsored by Hallow. And I have to say, it's very easy to promote these guys, love it. Catholic audiobooks, you can't go past Hallow. Go to Hallow.com slash Matt, sign up over there and you will get access to the entire app for free for three whole months. So what are you good to lose?

Here's the answer, nothing. All right, I wanna say thank you to Emmaus Academy. They've put out this brand new digital platform to help you grow in your love of sacred scripture and therefore your love of Christ. If you're like me, you know how tempting it is just to waste so much of your day on YouTube like maybe you're doing now

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and I mean it when I say it's actually really excellent and it'll help you love scripture. I think a lot of us want to love scripture but we find, we find, I don't know, we feel guilty that we don't love it as much as we should. Platforms like this will help you do that. So click the link in the description, stpaulcenter.com slash matt and sign up. When you sign up you get two weeks free to the entire platform. I mean think about how many times you and I have subscribed to say Hulu or something else, when we could be doing something like this and growing in a love of scripture. So again, StPaulStandard.com. Macco sign up today.

You get two weeks for free. You don't think it's worth it after that time. Cancel it. You won't be charged a cent. But I think you'd be really impressed with what you see. Any sinner is capable of being a great sinner. A great sinner. The secret therefore of character development is the realization of this power that there is in each and every one of us. For good and for evil. For good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves.

Do not think that people who have virtue and kindness and other great talents just came by these things naturally. They had to work at some very hard... Any sinner... is capable of being a great saint. And any saint...

is also capable of being... I love talking to you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Some quotations from the Lord of the Rings and want to get your take on them. It is not despair for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. So I mean, maybe these don only commenting on, but feel free. Just I've got a bunch here.

So feel free to if there's any that strike you feel free to comment on this is not read that again. It is not despair for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. So this is talking of course sort of a practical despair, right? This sounds like despair to follow this course of policy with Frodo and all the rest, right? But this is not despair because we don't know

that it's gonna turn out badly, right? But that's also, that's actually a nice little turn, right? Those who see the end beyond all doubt, we don't know. There could be deliverance here in time, right? But if we're talking on a more fundamental level, despair is for those who see the end beyond all doubt. The end for us, we know what that is. We know who God is, and therefore despair

is actually sort of excluded on principle, because that takes you back to that sort of theological hope that's so important to Tolkien. I like that. Yeah. And then her heart, so by the way, I have no kind of, uh, what do you say context for these? I'm just looking them up and then her heart

changed or at least she understood it and the winter passed and the sun shone upon her. So all's well that ends better. All's well that ends better. So, okay. So, so, well, you've got a one and Faramir there, uh, at with her heart changed, right? So this is where you've got someone who's a good woman, who's been poisoned by things like despair, poisoned by ambition, poisoned by sort of a restless dissatisfaction, right?

But then that's a really, really nice image, right? Drawing from, I think actually classical lyrics where her heart is changed and it's like the winter's passing and the spring comes, which also ties into the whole sort of Paschal and Easter imagery that dominates the entire end of Lord of the Rings. So it becomes part of a love story there. I think of the Song of Songs.

Oh, very nice. The winter's passed. Yeah. And the song of the turtle dove is heard, right? Yeah, in Hell Land. Oh, gosh, I had never thought about that. But yeah. He is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the ring and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream."

And this is again that lust of power, right? So Sauron cannot imagine that someone would not want to be him. He can't imagine that someone would not wish to have that level of control and domination over other wills. So this is where, you know, there's the stereotype that good can't comprehend evil, but in reality, right, the darkness can't comprehend the light. So the idea that's, the idea that humility is possible, the idea that abnegation is possible, is something that is, is something that's utterly foreign. And you know, here, let me go at least a little applicable, if not full on allegorical, right? If you think about the central theme of Lord of the Rings,

it's one of the central themes is the exaltation of the humble. It's the spirit of the magnificat. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, sent the rich away empty, filled the hungry with good things, right? And that's what's going on here, right? Because you've got Samwise Gamgee, who is as,

I mean, come on. What a guy. What a guy. What a guy, but what a goof, right? He's a gardener, he's vulgar, he's ignorant. He's got some higher, but come on, he's not edgy. He's nothing, he's the hero of the whole work, but he's nothing, right? But Samwise is exalted.

Sauron is cast down, right? It's again, the spirit of the Magnificat, right? And just like the devil particularly cannot comprehend things like Mary, right? The devil particularly can't understand how this creature, right? This lower creature could be so exalted just in the same way, right? This demonic force of domination, subjugation, control, can't imagine that other people wouldn't will the same thing. Let the children come to me. Let the children come to me, right?

And yeah, and so that's one of the great, beautiful things at the very heart of the work. I often think that my children are trying to remind me how to be human. I've shared this story before, but I find myself very frustrated with one of my children because of me, not because of him. He's terrific. Peter Francis Fratt, he's one of the coolest humans I've ever met and he lives in a different world. I said to my wife the other day, it's like, he's in a different story to us. My story is get your bloody shoes on. How many times? We just got some mulch put down on our front yard and I said, don't step in it. Like don't. And I look out my window and he's

jumping off the front stoop into the mulch. So technically not stepping. That's true. I guess that's right. And I was like frustrated and thank God I had the presence of mind like, okay, what Peter, what are you doing? Turns out he's found an injured bird. He's placed the injured bird next to him on the stoop and he's showing it how to fly. I wanted to leap. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

So if I would just humble myself and allow him to teach me, I'd be a happier man. I think that's right, yeah. And no, we've got one of those too. It's just, you know, her own world She doesn't understand how to put shoes on. She doesn't understand. She didn't see the point What's the point? Why do we need to go? but and again living in her own little fantasies, but yes almost always good-hearted and

But come on, I gotta read the news. I've got a No, that's a good point and now we reference this already Yeah, no, that's a good point and now we reference this already but Frodo says to Gandalf what a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature when he had a chance Pity it was pity that stayed his hand pity and mercy not to strike without need and he has been well rewarded Frodo be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil and escaped in the end because he began his ownership of the ring. So with pity. And so that's a quote. I remember that going differently.

That surprised me the ending there. I thought it was going somewhere else. It gets slightly changed in the movie. It gets truncated and things like that. So you know, and we've got Ian McKellen reciting it tends to stick in your memory a little bit, but that's one of those quotes quotes that that my son threw at me this morning He's like aha because the angel has pity and that's one of the areas where you can see the connection But the idea of this primacy of things like pity and mercy, that's beautiful

Also the way that the beginning of a work can govern it, right? So the fact that Bilbo begins in pity sets him off with a proper disposition, which otherwise could have gone very, very differently when it came to his ownership of the ring, right? If the first thing he does when he takes the ring, when Gollum gets it, the first thing, or even before he gets it, it's murder, right?

So he's doomed from the start. He begins with lust for power, and that's how his ownership of the ring begins, right? Bilbo's comparative detachment, where he's willing to possibly die himself, right? Because, hey, Gollum's in the way. He could just kill Gollum, right? But there's this moment where he just can't comprehend

ending this wretched creature's life. And so rather than stab him and run on out, which would have been the safe thing to do, he once again risks his own fulfillment, risks his own quest, his own life, so that he can be merciful. And so it is mercy, but it's also detachment, right? Detachment from the beginning, which helps him resist the lure of the ring over the next 60 years. There is a line when they're talking about Gollum in the beginning of the book and like this whole paragraph to me just speaks of pornography, because it says that he you you'll know this, I'd love you to quote it back to me but

something like looking to tap into its secrets but all he finds is dark and empty earth and and it just from it just it seems to me that like the allure of pornography is just this this joy and ecstasy unbounded and when a man goes into, he finds nothing but night and empty earth, something like that. And all the great secrets turn out to be nothing. Right? This was nothing. Again, this is not a thought original to me, but look, if you think about, if you think about how apostasy and things like this are presented in the old

Testament, it's very often adultery, right? It's very often adultery. It's this, it's this sexual sin, right? It's very often adultery. It's this sexual sin, right? And so when you've got Gollum turning away to find all these secrets, this intellectual pursuit, it is very much like it. And then of course you're finding nothing, but the nothing becomes the chain that binds you, right? And it's such a powerful thing because

this is something that Tolkien and Lewis know so well, like the sexual instinct of all the things that we have is the thing that's most screwed up in us, right? We've got concubiscence, but if we were to indulge our appetite for food to the fullest extent, what would happen? I'd get sick. You'd get sick, and you get sick and you might possibly,

you might possibly eat twice or three times as much as you should, right? But the sexual instinct is just so, so, so screwed up. We could populate an entire village. Tolkien's got a great letter to his son giving him marriage advice. He says, listen, once again, denial and asceticism are the only ways for a happy marriage

because Brigham him young he says Fathered however many children and died a healthy and happy man, right? You know because you can if you indulge that if you go down that road you can and then So if you're looking for the primal image of this nihilistic bondage, right? Golem and pornography bent over turned in on himself, talking to himself, right? That dissociation. That's something I never considered before, but I think that's an application that could be actually very useful to a lot of people. Yeah. I've shared the story on the show before. When I grew up in Australia, I'm going to be careful here with names and not

giving away anyone's identity, but I had a friend whose father abandoned the family and went to a nearby country. And it was quite well known that he was with hookers and drugs. He came back to the town and he had to live in government housing. He was fat as shit. He had bleach blonde hair. He was pathetic. And I like to remind myself of him whenever I feel the temptation to just burn everything down.

Cause I know I'm not beyond it. And that's terrifying to me. Anybody who says they can't imagine why anyone would like leave their family. And I'm like, what the hell is wrong with you? You can't imagine that. Why can't you imagine that? What's interesting isn't that people abandon their families

and burn their life to the ground. What's interesting is why people choose not to do that. No, I mean, this is a thing where if everyone would, maybe there are some people who are so formed in virtue that they really can't imagine doing that. But I think for almost everyone, for 99.9% of people who I've ever met, if you just take a little vacation,

stop attempting to be good, stop imagining that you're good, this is a very, very easy thing to do, right? If you can't see yourself, if you can't see yourself in the Israelites of the Old Testament with repeated apostasy, you're absolutely missing the point. Because of course, if you or I were in the book of Exodus, right, we would not be Moses and we would not be Joshua. We would be everyone else, right? And if

the ring came to us, we would probably be Gollum and we wouldn't be Frodo. We wouldn't be Aragorn, because that's where the pity comes. That's where, on the one hand, pity for the fallen can come in, but also humility with regards to yourself, because if you think you can't, you just haven't thought hard enough about who you really are, right? And it seems to me that the greatest saints believe themselves to be the greatest sinners anyway. That seems to be a pretty strong correlation, yeah. Yeah, Paul, Teresa of Avila. Yeah, yeah, and so they know themselves and they guard themselves. I subject my body, lest I who have preached to others should be cast away, St. Paul says, right?

Because obviously, this is who we are as fallen humans. And this gets back to this idea of clinging to the ring, metaphorically, or submitting to the trials and tribulations of life. With a mate who is a fallen daughter of Eve, wretched as you are in her own disgusting way, just as you are with your own beauty and her own beauty as well. And then to live in that, oh, that's hard as hell to continually lower your defenses before one another when you have deliberately hurt each other. Not on accident. Like, now you've deliberately gone for the jugular.

And then you ask her to lower her defenses and she says the same thing of you. It's like, that's why I say it's not interesting where you see men or women just abandon everything. Like, of course. It's like, it's the same thing like we live in Steubenville. People have meth problems. It's like, what's interesting isn't why people

get hooked on meth. What's interesting is why someone might taste it, experience it, and then choose to be free of it. Yeah. What's interesting isn't why people lose themselves in pornography. That's the most obvious thing ever. What's interesting is why someone would go against that impulse and seek to live a more aesthetical, disciplined life. Can I read a quote from The Man who was Thursday? That is this exactly? Yes, please. Yeah. Yeah, okay

so Gregory the the red-haired Anarchist poet is saying that the train is boring because it always comes where it's supposed to do you know where I'm going now? I have never read it. So I'm excited. You remember this quote now, don't you train tables are poetical, right? Yes He says he said it is you who is, who are unpoetico, unpoetical replied the poet's time. If what you say of clerks is true, they cannot be, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, the strange, the rare, the strange thing is to hit the mark.

The gross obvious thing to do is to miss it. thing is to hit the mark. The gross obvious thing to do is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man one man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere to Baker Street or to Baghdad But man is a magician and his whole magic is that is in this that he says Victoria and lo it is Victoria No, take your books of mere poetry and prose Let me read a time table a timetable with tears of pride Take your Byron who commemorates the deep defeats of man. Give me Bradshaw who commemorates his victory. Give me Bradshaw who commemorates his victories, I say." Praise God. The man who was

Thursday. The man who was Thursday. And again, like, yeah, going right, insanity is the extraordinary thing. This is why the saints' lives are so much more interesting, right? Yes. Sin always tends to devolve to a point, right? But there's an affiliation and a branching out when it comes to the saints. So you've got a Teresa of Avila or a Bernard of Clairvaux or a little flower who are also gloriously different and gloriously alive. That's where-

And then they line up the world's tyrants. Exactly, so yeah, I mean- And they're similar. Yeah. Boringly so. Boringly similar. That's beautiful Who is the hero of the Lord of the Rings? Yeah So it's it's easy. It's 100% Samwise

He's one of the first characters you meet. He's the one who the story ends with right and He is the sort of primordial lens through which you experience things, right? He is the sort of primordial lens through which you experience things, right? Lord of the Rings puts earth under the feet of sort of the adventure novel of romance, right? And it pulls it back down to the humble. And if you're looking at the exultation of the humble, Frodo becomes a very noble soul. Frodo is great. But Frodo is not the prime hero. It's the choices of Master Samwise that carry us through to the end. Sam, who really is the one who has the most complete success, even though Frodo's failure

isn't entirely his fault, or isn't even in the main his fault, right? It's Sam who has the prime success. And as you're looking at the ending chapters, here's Sam's perspective, which continually tends to dominate in the ending chapters. He's the one who wakes up on the field for the victory. He's the one who sees,

and through whom we process all what's going on. So it's really Sam, right? He's the one who is most humble at the beginning. He's the one who's most completely exalted at the end. And that final line, well, I'm back. It all tends towards what? It tends towards this little rustic life where Mary and Pippin,

they're gonna be big, important people. They're gonna be sort of these nobility in the Shire. They're gonna be riding back and forth to the kingdoms of men. And they're gonna have that life. But it's Sam who ennobles the Shire, right? Which is where we begin. It's Sam who returns to the Shire and it's Sam who has that sort of full perfection of his life. So I would say Sam.

Beautiful. The last paragraph. At last they rode over the Downs and took the East Road and then Mary and Pippin rode on to Buckland and already they were singing again as they went. It just, yeah, it seems that it didn't pierce them in the way it pierced Sam. It didn't crush them in the way it should have maybe. No, well, and you know, they had a very different life. So they become adventure heroes, right? You know, they go on the battlefield, Mary strikes down the Witch King and Pippin's there on the front line. So they have their reward.

They're wrong to have this experience. I don't think they're wrong. I don't think we can fault them, right? But Sam's one who's been dragged through the desert and has been carried through by the simplest things, right? By that simple, plain common sense, right? His hobbit sense, by his love of home, by his love for his master. Those basic things, those things are so, so lowly, are the centerpieces of the work. So, so no fault, no harm being a great person,

no harm becoming King of Gondor, right? But the focus of this tale is on the guy who goes home and becomes the mayor of the Shire. But Sam turned to buy water and so came back up the hill as day was ending once more. And he went on, whoo, and there was yellow light and fire within. And the evening meal was ready and he was expected. That might be my favorite line in the entire book. And Rose drew him in and set him in his chair and put little Eleanor upon his lap You talk Well, I'm back

No, but this is he drew he drew a deep breath. Well, I'm back he said What else what else could you want? What else could you hope for? Right? I mean, this is this is Everything that it means to be human. This is full life. He's got his wife. He's got his first child there. She drew him in. She draws him in. I love it.

You got the fire. You got the fire on the hearth. You've got the meal on the table. And what more is there to life than this, right? This is everything that's fundamental to a naturally thriving human life. And Sam gets it. He's home.

And there's really little else to say. Tolkien did write another chapter focused on Sam and Rosie and their family and focused just on the simple little joys. He did, he cut it out in the end because you can only have the return of the king end so many times, right? So he has to cut it off somewhere.

I think he was right to do it when he did. But it's fun to read it as an epilogue where Sam's reflecting on married life. It's 10 years or so on, right? His children are growing up. He talks about how Saruman wouldn't have liked his big Catholic hobbit family and things like this. It's really, really cute.

But again, you've gone through the desert, you've gone through the darkness, you come home, the wife draws you in, you're expected, and that's what it all ultimately means. These are the things that the whole quest for the ring is designed to help preserve, right? Speaking of fireplaces, do you know that the bastard Irish government

has outlawed fireplaces in new buildings, new houses. Yeah. Fireplaces of any sort. Yep. Can you have a fireplace in a new house in Ireland? Yes, it is possible to install a gas fireplace in the new build. Piss off, you tyrannical pricks. There are many options available here. Whilst a conventional flue gas fireplace requires a chimney, you can have. Do they let you have electric ones?

Yeah. Do they let you have a family meal? Do they let you have a family? They have a sodomite running the country, don't they? I think they do. Yeah. But look, I mean, here's my gosh. Can you still burn wood in Ireland? The fact that people are asking this. So you will be able to purchase and use a wood burning

or multi-fuel stove in 2022 and beyond. They are better for the environment. And you bastards. I would move, I would move over that. So I say this as someone who doesn't have a proper, proper fireplace, we've only got a gas one. But the combination of tyranny here, because that's 100% scouring of the shire tyranny.

We know better, we're doing this for your own good. We can't trust you to burn wood, so we are enacting this. It's tyranny, but it's also, it's striking out one of the most fundamental things that it means to be human, right? This has nothing to do with Tolkien. I'm gonna say it anyway. The idea of the hearth, right?

It's one of the most sacred symbols in the Western imagination. And this, you can find this traced from India to Ireland. The idea of the family hearth, which is the soul of the home, right? If you think about things like sort of the household altar and Virgil, right, and the household gods and all this stuff. This is what the life of the family is. It's a

metaphor and sometimes in history it's more than a metaphor for a real family life because the fire is the heart of the home and all this. And it just amazes me that people would be so dumb to natural human symbolism that they'd be willing to not just discourage, but to cut that out entirely. It's like saying you can't plant a garden. It's like saying you can't you can't own a dog because dogs sometimes bite your cut. For the good of humanity, you're striking at something that it actually means to be human. And that's that's. Typ typical, I guess. But yeah. If someone hasn't read The Lord of the Rings and they want to, what advice would you have upon the first reading for them?

Take your time. I would say take your time. One of the most dangerous things you can do is to read The Lord of the Rings like you're reading, say, another fantasy novel or reading it like you're reading a sort of a modern adventure novel novel because it doesn't really do that. There are fight scenes, there are perils, and there are terrors and things like this, but the point is not, it's not a thriller, right? It's a journey and it's a journey that's intended to help you experience a very great story, to walk along with some characters.

And one of the main effects is to teach you how to see the world differently, right? So taking your time, and sometimes Tolkien will go on for a page about how many different flowers are in this woodland glade. And sometimes, I know that's weird for modern readers, but letting the work work on you is I think something very much worth doing.

That's good. And you know. that's what the liturgy does It works on you. You submit yourself to it. Submit yourself to it and let yourself sort of be carried along because it is a great story You don't sell like Tolkien sold you don't inspire movements like he inspired movements on American campuses in the 1960s without having something real to say so on American campuses in the 1960s without having something real to say. So one of the dangers is we don't read anymore, right? We read tweets at 140 characters a pace, right?

We read blog posts and then we get bored by the time we get to the end of the blog post. So people are very, very impatient when it comes to reading now. Learning a little bit of discipline of patience is probably necessary to fully enjoy Lord of the Rings. But it's also a good thing for your life. So if you begin and get bored or get bored

or start to tone out, don't get discouraged. Take your time, read it, and actually try to engage the faculty of the imagination. This is something that we also don't often do, right? We just sort of plug in and go. Our imagination is the ability to picture things in our mind. It's very, very atrophied because we've got a thousand stimuli all around us all the time. So why would you slow down to build a picture in your mind? You should

take time to do that. And I think that would probably be where I'd start. Slow down, take your time, work your imagination and see what happens to you by the end. And would you also say it's okay if you find yourself not understanding things? Oh, of course. Yeah. So because of course that will happen. That it will happen that you don't understand discouraging. And the big thing is just to note that the characters don't understand everything either. Right. So just walk along with these simple little people.

They won't get half the references. They can't read everything that's written. They don't understand all the languages. That's fine. It's just something that's meant to contribute to what your experience is. So if you hear these strange tones ringing that you've never heard before,

you're like Sam coming to Rivendell. He's never experienced this either. So that's okay. I like that. That's really good. All right, we have some questions from local supporters. Emilio says, what is the worst change in the movies? Oh Boy Emilio you're cruel

So I'm gonna limit myself to the Lord of the Rings movies Not the Hobbit movies the Hobbit movies deserve to be wiped from human memory and that's uh, that's a beginning there the worst change in the Lord of the Rings movies I there. The worst change in the Lord of the Rings movies... I can't choose one so I'm gonna give you two. There are two fundamental character assassinations that Peter Jackson can never be forgiven for. The first one is when Sam leaves Frodo, right? They're going up the stairs of Te-Te-Kirith on goal and Sam is sent back by Frodo and Sam actually turns his back on his master and starts going back down.

It's not just stupid, it's obviously stupid. What's he gonna do? Walk by himself all the way home? This is nonsense, right? But it's also fundamentally against the grain for what that character means, right? He means the loyalty and the dedication and everything else. And for a moment of completely manufactured tension, Peter Jackson assassinated Tolkien's

main character. So I'd probably say that's the worst thing that he did, but I gotta give you two now. A step below that one is what Peter Jackson does to Faramir. So Faramir is in some ways Tolkien's favorite character in Lord of the Rings. Of all the characters in the novel it's the one that he most nearly identifies with. He's not so lofty as Aragorn. Aragorn is sort of untouchable. Nobody can be like Aragorn, but he's this humane, noble, humble, long-suffering man. Faramir is amazing, right? And when Faramir refuses the ring, he says, I would not take this thing even if I found it on the wayside, he's honorable, he would

never do that, right? And so he gives you this image of human nobility that Peter Jackson just doesn't get, right? So Faramir turns away from it in the books and then movies, Faramir takes it, he's going to take it back into Gondor. He's going to send it to Minas Tirith, which is stupid. It's a massive fall for the character, and it fundamentally changes the themes that are going on in the book. All again for a moment of sort of manufactured drama. And this is ultimately because in both cases, I don't think Peter Jackson deeply understands

simple human goodness. He can see the big epic moment, the cavalry charging into battle, right? He can see horror and the grotesque, but he can't see the purely ordinary virtue that's so interesting that's at the heart of the work. And that's his greatest failure. Michael says, why does Tolkien not like George MacDonald? Why is Tolkien not like George MacDonald? For a variety of reasons.

He finds him sometimes a little bit cloying. He thinks that a lot of his fairies are silly. They try to be funny and fail, or they try to preach and succeed is what Tolkien says about MacDonald's fairies. So when they're being funny and goofy, they're just sort of childish and hollow. Or sorry, yeah, they're not funny.

But when they become these moralizing preachers, well, McDonald's very good, but that's not what fantasy is meant to do. It's not meant to be this, let's have a serious conversation right now. So Tolkien doesn't like that. If you want more, his Smith of Wooten Major is in part an anti-George McDonald

tract. So that's an area to get a sense of what he's poking at against George McDonald. Aldo and Isabelle say, my family just moved to Steubenville. We love the Lord of the Rings enthusiasm from most people who live here that we have met. Thoughts on throwing an annual Lord of the Rings Steubenville party. All of the little kids can dress as hobbits. It'll be great. Maybe respond to that and then tell us about this huge talking conference you've got coming up.

So first of all, welcome to Steubenville. It's great to see more families moving here. It's a very exciting thing. A September 22nd Hobbit party makes a great deal of sense. There are local businesses down on 4th Street who I think would be pretty interested in it. You've got the Bookmarks Bookstore. You've got other businesses that maybe could be persuaded to come in on something like this. You should all know that there is a conference on September 22nd and 23rd at Franciscan on Tolkien and his works. So this is a little bit more geared

for adults, but we are doing something at Franciscan this year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death and to commemorate his legacy. We are hoping, it's not set in stone yet, but we're hoping that we can find a way to have an event down on 4th Street that's not officially affiliated with the conference, but that is sort of having a synergistic moment

with the conference. So that would be a lovely thing if we could pull that together. We have about 8,000 pipes for sale at our cigar lounge that we could maybe bust out. I think there could be interest in that. Yeah. Yeah. Teddles says, so then is Gandalf not taking the ring an argument for separation of church and state?

Just a pop question drawn from this conversation, not a question I'm ready or willing to oppose or defend. So separation of church and state is a tricky thing. And the question of power and Lord of the Rings is actually trickier too. So this is going to be a longer answer than the last one. I apologize for this in advance. The ring represents not just power or authority, right? Because Tolkien believes strongly in authority, right? But he doesn't believe in power, exercise for the domination of other wills. So the Augustinian lust for power,

that's what he's excising, right? But then you've still got real power and authority in Gandalf and Aragorn and in others, right? So it's a spiritual authority, sure, rejecting the lust for domination, but is it a rejection of power? I don't, or a rejection of authority itself? I'd be hesitant to go that far. I'm going to give you two data points and then you can do what you want with them. The first thing is, when Aragorn reestablishes the kingdom, Tolkien compares this to a reestablishment of the Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome.

That's the political and spiritual significance of what's going on here. Not only that, but because we're in a very many thousand years before Christ and very many thousand years before even Revelation in Lord of the Rings, in Lord of the Rings, what you have for worship is actually a priest-king line. So Aragorn, when he reestablishes Gondor, becomes a priest-king in Gondor. This is actually what his role would be. There's that one scene that everyone always forgets, nobody pays attention to it. He goes up to this hallow in the mountains. This is the sacred mountain where the priest-king of Gondor would lead would lead worship. So, it's not going to be a modern separation of church and state in the imaginary world. When we turn to Tolkien's own political views, separation of church and state gets a little bit fiddly there. There's a really

great letter he writes to C.S. Lewis, taking issue with mere Christianity, where Lewis says, oh, we should just have Christian marriage and secular marriage be completely separated. Tolkien says that this is idiotic. I've heard a priest make this comment recently. He said, maybe it's time to just stop using the word marriage. We'll call it holy matrimony and just distinguish it. And I think there's a stronger argument, right? Because in 2023, the world is crumbling so much that maybe sort of stepping back and going back to basics, pretending that we're in like the Roman Empire in 200 AD might be the thing for us to do, right? Tolkien in the late 1930s, early 1940s is living in a world where the Christian element and civilization is still stronger, right? And he's articulating a principle for how things should be. It should be that public law gives witness

to the truth of Christian marriage. So he actually argues that you can't separate, or you shouldn't ideally separate civil marriage and Christian marriage because it's an argument against the authenticity, the legitimacy of the sacrament. So Tolkien wasn't for complete separation of church and state he would be very very cautious though about the corrupting effects of Power simply considered but especially the will to power when you start mixing those things together. Okay, is there sorry

Can I ask a clarifying question? Is there a difference between that and theocracy? Can I ask a clarifying question? Is there a difference between that and theocracy? Cause there's, it's, you know what I mean? Like, is there a difference between like a power that is keeping in mind the sacred and like the church itself ruling? And I think you could draw a meaningful distinction between that, yes.

So distinction between a Christianity affirming public order and then the idea of clerics themselves and commander. I think you could meaningfully draw that distinction. Yeah. All right. Favorite Tolkien language and favorite. Do you do it? Well, this is, this is James asking this James A. Lewis.

Do you have a favorite translated phrase? So is there something you can say in Elvish? I've never done the language study. So I can't answer that. I think the Elvish language is particularly beautiful. I don't think the Dwarvish language is beautiful. Obviously the Black speech isn't beautiful. And the Numenorean language I find actually kind of ugly.

So I'd probably say Elvish is my favorite one for the sound of the language itself. Yeah I'm not going to embarrass myself with translated phrases so I will gracefully step back on that one. Kyle Whittington says I'd be shocked if you remember this but the last time I played Monopoly was with you at the Hans house in 2011. It was an intense game that I didn't stand a chance in. Do you have any favorite board games? Do I have any favorite board games? That's a horrible, horrible question.

But for, I don't play many board games because I've got five kids and the time it takes to set up a good board game is more attention than my children have. That being said, the one that I can get away with playing the most with my children is a pandemic based board game called Fall of Rome. It's cooperative and the goal is to prevent the barbarians from overtaking the Roman Empire. And it's very much a history nerd slash history geek board game. But that's a good one, which Joe Hahn

did introduce me to. So credit to him. Bent Nail says the following, an ant riding an elephant at full charge hurls a boulder with all his might at a perfect 45 degree angle directly towards Barad-dur from the border of Rohan. One, will the boulder strike the dark tower or two, will Legolas see it from any spot nearby? And what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow? I'm not quite sure That would be the better yes, so so is it a is it a Western or an Eastern olefant it yeah, I No problem. Don't don't presume to know yeah Can you tell us more about Tolkien's relationship with Lewis?

Tolkien's relationship with Lewis is a very very very interesting subject. Obviously, they meet in the late 1920s. Tolkien's instrumental in Lewis's conversion to Christianity, although not to Catholicism, which was a little bit of a sensitive subject, right? So it's on the famous walk around Addison's Walk in Oxford, where Tolkien and Hugo Dyson convince Lewis that Christianity is true. It has value as the true myth. Tolkien actually wrote a poem called Mythopeia to sort of summarize a little bit of the conversation

that went on in that walk. They became very, very good friends, right? But it's a complicated friendship. It's a friendship that has a little bit of a source about it because of the religious difference, right? Lewis really hurts Tolkien early on by sort of mocking his devotion to Saint John. And you've got elements of that that recur throughout the friendship. There's also the challenge of Lewis is a bachelor, right? Lewis has sort of free run of his time. Tolkien is a married man with four kids. At one

point, Lewis gets exasperated and calls Tolkien the most married man I know, right? Because he's always going home to be with his family, being with his wife. On the Tolkien family side, Edith did sometimes sort of resent the amount of time that he spent with his friends. So it's a beautiful friendship. It's also a really complicated friendship, right? There are massive triumphs, and we should focus on the triumphs

of the friendship of Tolkien and Louis, because that's the main note, right? Tolkien is the one who gets Lewis's space trilogy published in the first place. Tolkien encourages Lewis and Tolkien helps Lewis. Lewis, for his part, is sort of this continual encourager without whom Lord of the Rings would probably not be written.

The final note though is actually kind of a sad note. The Tolkien-Lewis friendship is really, really strong through the 1930s. 1940s it gets complicated by the introduction of Charles Williams, who Tolkien sort of suspects in a couple of ways and who immediately captivates Lewis. Then Williams dies in 45, then later in the 50s Lewis has his somewhat strange marriage, right? It's a marriage under strange circumstances. This further drives a little bit of a wedge between them. And this is

the horrid thing, right? By the time the early 60s roll around, the friendship has largely cooled, and each man is wondering why the other one doesn't make more time for him, right? So it's a beautiful friendship. It's got great moments, but it also has these bittersweet elements built into it. Right. Neither one would have become what they did without the other one. They push each other on, they refine each other's thoughts. It's a glorious thing, but being human as we are, there's also tension and sadness in it too. So. What did Tolkien have to say about Lewis's space trilogy?

Tolkien was favorably disposed to the first two books. So the first two books, Out of the Silent Planet and Perilondra, Tolkien was in favor of, although he was irritated because Lewis did, in fact, plagiarize a couple of his ideas. So he took some character names from Tolkien, Tor and Tinnidril. He took the idea of Numenor from Tolkien and Tolkien resents that. He does not like that hideous strength. He doesn't like it at all because he notes in that hideous strength you've got this Charles Williams mysticism sort of creeping into it. He notes that in that hideous strength you've got this Charles William

fascination with the Arthurian legend and he thinks that spoils the conclusion to Lewis's space trilogy. So, favorable towards the first two books, generally speaking. The third book he regards as lamentable. Mason-Pence Getting to Lewis's fiction, when you read Dostoevsky, he says more in a paragraph than modern authors saying books. There's just so much coming at you with every word and you get such a full idea of not only the picture, but the kind of psychological state of the, those interacting talkings like that as well. It's just, it's like a thick steak. You know what I mean? When I read Lewis, it feels to me more like a, and this just might have to do with the fact that I really

haven't spent a lot of time with his fiction, but it certainly feels less like that. More like a chicken breast, not a thick steak. And then when you're in modern authors, you know, like I've told you, occasionally I've tried to like Stephen King or something and I never can, but it feels so surfacey. Just tofu. I like that. So I do think there's that difference right um Lewis is a very forceful and energetic writer right certainly in prose and in protein sorry prose my gosh certainly in nonfiction also in fiction there will be less packed in there there will be be less that sort of arcane that you have to work through,

there's less layering, there's I think I could be proved wrong on this, I think the grammar is probably more simple as well. I would really encourage people to read Lewis and like Lewis and enjoy the style, right? A chicken breast might not be the most amazing meal you ever had, but chicken breast can be really good

and really consistent and most people can cook it. So when I advise students to learn how to write, I say read C.S. Lewis because he teaches the average person and I consider myself an average person how to write well and forcefully because most of us can't write like Tolkien, but most of us can, can in some way aspire to write like Lewis. Okay. Yeah. Good. Eddie says, what is your favorite book about Tolkien's works? Favorite book about Tolkien's works. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. Sorry, this is this is taking me longer than it should.

How about not a favorite, but what is a book? All right, Tolkien's works. I'll give you a couple. So. Tom Shippey's author of The Century is really, really good. So Tom Shippey is a medievalist and also sort of a world renowned Tolkien expert. Almost anything written by Tom Shippey will be excellent, and he does a better job of seeing to sort of the roots of Tolkien's imagination

than almost anybody I can think of. I also really value works written by Tolkien, Tolkien friends and associates during life. So there's a very small book by Clyde Kilby called Tolkien and the Silmarillion, written after Tolkien died, but before the Silmarillion came out, where he's giving a little bit of an insider's view

into Tolkien's life, I think that's fun. Also, a fantastic, fantastic volume for anybody is edited by Joseph Pierce. It's called Tolkien, A Celebration. And in it, you've got a bunch of different essays. But among those, you've got George Sayer, who was a friend of Tolkien and Lewis, giving his remittances of who Tolkien was.

You've got an interview with Walter Hooper, who was C.S. Lewis's literary executor. And I value those sort of first person, those first person accounts more than I value things that come from people who didn't really know him and people who are just sort of reconstructing things from the legacy of what he's written. Christian P asks,

could someone feasibly write an adequate continuation of the Lord of the Rings or anything set in Middle Earth? Or did Tolkien finish the story in such a way that anything written after would be sub climactic? There was a time when Tolkien envisioned when his work was done, that other people would come along and sort of fill out Middle Earth because there are so many stories that are only sketched and sort of partial form that you could develop. I talked about the Silmarillion could in fact be developed

into 10 or 15 separate books if people wanted to, or if Tolkien had wanted to. Developing Tolkien would always be a really, really contentious thing. It'd be a really, really contentious thing. It'd be a really, really delicate thing. I think it would be possible for someone to not go forward in Middle-earth, not go beyond the reign of Aragorn. I don't think that would be a good idea to go into the Fourth Age.

I think it would in fact be possible for somebody to look back on Previous ages or previous parts of Middle Earth's thousands of years of history and do something there I think that could be possible. You couldn't do it right now because of the Tolkien estates Copyright laws, but I would not be surprised to see that happen somewhere in the future Amazon Studios decision to set their story in the second age with Numenor and the forging of the rings and things like that I think that's a fantastic decision. The problem is that everyone who's involved for that production has a worldview. That's not just a Different from Tolkien's but antithetical to Tolkien's so it could be done and it could be really really interesting I'd be Skeptical of it happening anytime in the near future.

Your thoughts on Rings of Power? It's garbage. It's utter garbage. Sorry. Did you watch it? I did watch it. Yeah. So it was a penance last fall to sit through all the episodes.

It was really a failure in every conceivable way, right? So they did things with Tolkien's history that made things make no sense. The casting wasn't good, the acting wasn't good, the writing wasn't good, and you'd have people who... Other than that though. Other than that. It was great. No, no. You have people who don't even care about Tolkien's wider mythology who sort of panned it for those reasons, right? But the big problem is, again, you've got Amazon Studios,'ve got Jeff Bezos if you wanted to come up with somebody who is the representation the distillation of all the things that Tolkien Resented right? Let's turn to Amazon Prime. Let's turn to the multi-billion world dollar world of high-tech

This is what Tolkien feared right and they're gonna be the ones who tell the story it was again as is what Tolkien feared, right? And they're gonna be the ones who tell the story. It was, again, as antithetical to Tolkien's vision as a work could be. It makes the Hobbit films look like a success. So, yeah. Oh, okay. Matthew Cantrell says, "'Hi, Ben, have you read Tolkien's short work, "'Leaf by Niggle?

"'If so, what are your thoughts "'on the beautiful allegory found in it "'in spite of Tolkien's usual dislike of the use of allegory? Leaf by Niggle is magnificent and everybody should read Leaf by Niggle and On Fairy stories together. So it's the most unusual work that Tolkien ever wrote, as far as I can tell, because Tolkien's usually the guy who drafts things out over years or decades, right? Lord of the Rings took him from the late 1930s all the way through the 40s to write. Leaf by Niggle, he wakes up one morning, he has the entire thing in his head, he sits down and he writes it out. And then as

you know it's this beautiful allegory for both artistic creation, the value of fairy story, the value of art, and how these things relate to the spiritual life. It's wonderful, it's just about, no, I'll take it. The only other depiction of purgatory that I would put close to it is Dante's. Dante's vision of purgatory, Tolkien's vision of purgatory are the two great imaginations of purgatory, I think, in the, uh, in the literary tradition. And the crazy, beautiful thing, my favorite thing about the story is at the end, when Niggle has spent his entire life working

on that picture, and everyone has forgot about Niggle in life, that God has taken his picture and made it real. He's made it real, he's made it this earthly paradise that people can progress from purgatory to before they go out from heaven. Have you read this story, Matt? Okay, so this is fantastic. Niggle is Tolkien, more or less. The picture which consumes his whole life and sort of takes on this life of its own is the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. He neglects his

actual duty sometimes to do this. He dies, he goes to purgatory, right? And when he's on his way out of purgatory before ascending into heaven, there's this earthly paradise stage like Dante gives you, and it's his picture. He enters into his picture. So if you're doing the whole allegory thing, right, Tolkien seems to be suggesting that in fact, maybe at the end of his own purgation process, he and others would enter into the Lord of the Rings before they progress on to heaven, which sounds insane until you read on fairy stories where he actually Says this exact thing that god and his infinite bounty might condescend to take our

Feeble works of imagination up and make them real All of our wishes all of our bents might be might be Ultimately satisfied that our works can become real because in the gospel, legend and history have met and fused. So Tolkien is actually suggesting that creation could be enriched by art in that way, which is a little insane, but also as pointed out, really, really beautiful. Joe Brew says this one's for both of you, which I'll just let it be for you since I

don't think I'd have an interesting answer. Which character do you think was changed the most in the film adaptation for better or worse? It's always going to be worse, isn't it? It's almost always worse. And again, I think it's probably got to be Faramir, right? Who is this touchstone character for Tolkien and gets absolutely, absolutely torn down and destroyed. absolutely, absolutely torn down and Destroyed I think the one who becomes more admirable actually in the movies is Boromir, right?

so Boromir Takes on a stronger role. I think it's partially because of the actor's portrayal of him But Boromir is actually much more magnet or He brings him a magnetism that is hard to detect in the books. Part of the reason why Boromir looks better is because also Aragorn's been made very very much worse, so Boromir looks cooler by comparison. But those two, those two characters, the two brothers, are the ones where you see I think some of the most interesting and lamentable change.

Veritar says, theologically speaking, who does Tom Bombadil best represent within Christendom? Within Christendom, I don't think it'd be easy to make him represent somebody within this Christian order that we have, right? But if we talk about concepts, or we talk about themes or ideas that revolve around Bombadil, right? Bombadil is sort of pure love of creation that God has given us, right? He doesn't exert domination,

not even over his own little old forest, right? He sings at Old Man Willow, but he doesn't make Old Man Willow be uprooted. He doesn't chop him down. He doesn't do any of these things, right? So there's power. There's all sorts of power associated with Bombadil, but it's turned in wonder to the enjoyment of creation,

and to the sort of celebration of God's creation, which is why he just hops along in his own little merry way without any thought of control. And this is why the ring has no control over him. Fascinating. So it's spelled out for us, for those who aren't aware. So Bombadil sees Frodo. Frodo puts on the ring, tries to sneak out. And he sees him. He sees him because again, the one who has completely emptied himself of all this desire for control, the ring which is itself this desire for control

can't possibly affect, right? Frodo gives him the ring, Bombadil plays with it, he makes it disappear, he makes it reappear. But again, because he has no such desire for himself and because he's of such a high order, it doesn't impact him at all. So here you have someone who just purely enjoys the celebration of and the contemplation of,

I would say creation, right? He's got joy just in a tree for being a tree or wonder at a flower for being a flower, not a desire to control them, to breed them, to improve them, but just that, right? And this is where he's actually, he's sort of a character of restoration, right? He speaks in verse, he speaks in poetry, because there's this natural primal simplicity and innocence to him, which is beautiful. When the hobbits are around him, they start speaking in verse, they start singing as though it were more natural than talking. So it's this recapturing of a primal innocence. If the fall

comes through pride and desire for domination, restoration comes from humility and wonder, and that's what Bambadil is doing. So I can't think of anyone in Christendom who quite would represent that. If we're looking for analogous figures, I think the closest analogous figures you could find would be. Joseph Pius. Joseph, who, no. I think you'd find those medieval figures, right? Those medieval figures, those saints who had so far

conformed themselves to Christ, that they owned all things. Right, the ones who have come so close to Christ, they sort of recaptured the Edenic prerogatives, you know, such that here's St. Francis and the wolf, right? Or here's St. Cuthbert with ravens bringing him food and even the sea and the waves obeying him because it's the Holy Fool who has become so conformed to Christ that all creation is there sort of at his command, although he doesn't really usually command, right? What is Tom Bombadil and how was he first received by the first readers of The Lord

of the Rings? You know, I don't know what the original reception of Bombadil is. I should know that. In the overall theme of the work, he's probably a spirit of a similar order to Gandalf, right, who came in and is, you know, in origins, sort of the spirit of the Oxfordshire countryside, right? That's, that's what he represents. He existed before Lord of the Rings in these stories that Tolkien would tell his kids, right? But he gets sort of swept up into the story as a thematically enlarged and developed character who I think is worth having around. Mason- So this is just my poor attempt of trying to understand Bombadil, but for me, he represents those people I encounter in life who will not be categorized.

And I think of my son, Peter, who we mentioned a moment ago, like I tried to, I try to like box him in so I can like and comprehend him, but he keeps bursting my categories asunder. And it's irritating when you not my son, it's irritating when you meet people like that. Sometimes they seem like they're looking for attention. Why are they dressing funny? What do they speak like that? You because of your own hard-heartedness, perhaps presume it to be arrogance

and then you realize it's not and you just, it's frustrating. And again, it's frustrating to a person like me because I like categories, I like to be able to file things away, I like to have my bounds of experience and I know how everything fits. Bombadil is somebody who doesn't fit.

There's a wider world and a greater sort of energy and wonder to what God's given us than naturally fits in the categories we have. And I think Bombadil very importantly represents that. ARC says, does Dr. Reinhardt have a favorite class he teaches at Franciscan? Oh, so I've only been at Franciscan for a year, so I haven't taught all that many classes. Franciscan. So I've only been at Franciscan for a year. So I haven't taught all that many classes.

I should say that my medieval lit class was my favorite because I really, really enjoy teaching medieval literature. But actually this was sort of unexpected. I teach a classical mythology class and this has become just about my favorite class to teach because in mythology, you've got everything. You've got how the ancients see the world, how they see themselves, how they see God, how they see creation. You've got these sort

of faltering attempts to grope towards the truth and sometimes they actually manage to recover really important elements of the truth. There are also horrors in classical mythology that sort of beggar the modern imagination and they show us the world that Christ came to redeem. But on the flip side, you have the opportunity for real sort of restoration and rediscovery, because you're seeing the world as a place, you're seeing a world charged with the grandeur of God in classical mythology, right? You see that there is something sacred in what God's given us, and classical mythology can help us recover that, right? The greatest thing about classical mythology is it gives way naturally to Christianity,

gives way to Christendom, because the gods die, Pan dies, according to Plutarch, at the same time that Christ comes. And so Christ doesn't wipe out, but he transforms all that. And so classical mythology has in fact become my favorite course to teach. Okay. ZMT316 says, thoughts on the portrayal of Gladriel in Amazon's Rings of Power series. Oh come on, why do you do this to me? So it's... I want to see that vein in your head bulge. It's painful, right? It's painful both because of the sort of Xena warrior princess vibes that they give off I'm Xenia Xena warrior princess wasn't cool in 1995 or whenever that show was on it's much less cool in 2023

But It's it's a painful reimagining of right? Because she's supposed to be this figure of grace and beauty. In some of Tolkien's stories, she had had this rebellious moment in the past, but that's long in the past, and she's learned how to fight the long defeat. And here that's reduced to this sort of machismo,

swaggering attitude, which is just, it's utterly, utterly foreign to Tolkien's imagination. And the things that she's seeking to do are precisely those things that Tolkien himself would argue that you shouldn't do. The worst moment, the worst moment in that very awful show is when she's sent into the West, which is returning to Paradise, returning to the land of Alinor, and it's basically as punishment or an exile, right? And she's there, the pearly gates are opening up, right?

The pearly gates are opening up, the light is breaking. And instead of going into the light, she remembers something that her brother said, something like to know the light, we must touch the darkness or some crap like that. And she turns around from paradise and dives into the ocean. And then we're supposed to believe that she swims across the entire ocean to go back home, which is stupid enough in itself. But the monumental rejection of what Tolkienian goodness is, sacrifice, self-abnegation, release of control, and instead we're celebrating this Promethean, this Byronic desire to assert the individual personality. It's very nearly a diabolical moment. So that's

the worst element of a gladrile, but just about everything she does is off. Thank you. Kelly McLaughlin says, my husband isn't into fantasy and won't read the books or even watch the movies. Can you please tell him he's wrong? Thanks. What's your husband's name? She doesn't say, Let's call him Jim. Mr. McLaughlin, you are wrong. Now, look, fantasy is not for everyone, right? Fantasy isn't for everyone, but at the same time,

it can be a way to enrich the world that you find. I think somebody who had a purely sacramentalized life, a truly sacramentalized and authentically human life, would have less need for Tolkien than I find myself having. But living in the world that we do, living in the age that we do, there's a restoration and a rediscovery

of what it means to be human and what it means to live through Tolkien. So if he's interested in those things, if he's interested in being human in the modern world, I think he should give it a chance. What is the difference between sci-fi and fantasy? Oh, whew. I've got a funny answer, but...

I want your answer on that. I forget who it was who said it, but they said, fantasy has trees on the cover. That, okay, fantasy does have trees on the cover, but that's actually not a horrible answer, right? Because if you think about the way science fiction works, science fiction works under the assumption that these things could actually happen, right? You're not actually entering a secondary world. You're entering a world where like,

hey, once we discover warp speed travel or something like this, it's technologized. Now, some things that we call sci-fi, I think are actually way closer to fantasy than people would allow. Star Wars at its best is really close to space fantasy more than it is to science fiction. Compare Star Wars and Star Trek, right?

Star Trek, clearly science fiction. Star Wars, Return of the Jedi stuff, this is closer by a good stretch to what you see in fantasy. You've got magic, you've got swords, you've got knights, you've got things like that. It's not dependent on new technology. It's not dependent on new technology. It's not really even suggested that if you found the right crystals, you can make a lightsaber. That's not the crystals are magical crystals. And if you put that 5000 years in the past, or I guess it is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, it

could just as well be fantasy. So Star Wars is sort of on the boundary, right? So these things would exist on a spectrum. But what fantasy primarily does is it takes the ordinary things of experience, like trees, and enchants those things, right? Fantasy, if you do it right, you take the things of common ordinary experience and you pass them through this lens where you re-enchant them and give them a wonder that they didn't have before. So the natural reaction to Lord of the Rings, if you've read Lord of the Rings and understood it well, what you want to do is you want to go home and hug your wife and kids, go for a long walk in the country, maybe get a pint with a friend. These are the things that you want to do having read Lord of the Rings, right? Contrast this with James Cameron's

Avatar, right? There's actually this Avatar Depression Syndrome that came out after that movie was released because people became so obsessed with this sci-fi world, right, and the wonders of the sci-fi world that the modern world seemed drab and cheerless by comparison. So fantasy, I think, more naturally lends itself to the rediscovery of things that are in fact

wonderful. Whereas sci-fi can, when it's done poorly, lead to a dissatisfaction with the world that we live in or even worse with Star Trek leads to sort of utopian fantasies about the way the world will be when we just hack humanity enough. Can I ask a question? Okay. Talking about sci-fi. Why?

I'm going to say no? Yeah, no you cannot. Next question. Why was Tolkien wrong? Why did Tolkien... Okay. Why did Tolkien not like Dune? Which is objectively the wrong opinion.

But why didn't he like it? You know... Because I think I know why, but I think he's wrong. Okay, so... I have not read Dune. So I can't comment on why he would not like dune I'm very sorry he would read science fiction right we know that he read science fiction but I don't know why particularly he didn't like dune why he did I he did say

in a letter that he disliked it was some vehemence I think is the direct quote I think that Frank Herbert had a pretty pessimistic view on belief in religion. And I think Tolkien read it as like belief in religion is all made up. So it doesn't matter. Okay. But I think the correct reading of it is not a condemnation of those things, but a statement that, um, whether a statement that's value neutral on the truth of belief in religion, but is actually on the power of enough people believing a single thing for long enough that it, like it actualizes

itself. Okay. Which I think is really cool. But I think Tolkien didn't like that because it seemed to be pessimistic about religion. Sometime when I have enough time, I've had friends telling me I should read Dune for the better part of my life. I think people started telling me that in high school and I've never gotten around to it, but I should so I can see the truth of your judgment. Matthew McCloskey says, what does Ben think of magic the gatherings take on the Lord of the Rings universe? Do you know anything about this? This is another area where I should turn in my geek card.

I've never done magic the gathering. A wolf says, can you ask Ben to speak to the humanity and redemption of Boromir? I feel like we can't attain the Christ likeness of Frodo and Sam or Aragorn, but the boring Boromir empties himself and pays with his life, speaks to me on redemption, and is so much more attainable that these in some ways, it feels more, he's more of a, okay, it's more relatable and attainable than these more heroic figures. Well, and in some ways I'd say that with Boromir you see something that is more purely heroic in classical terms, right?

You've got somebody who's up against, you've got a flawed character who's up against a temptation that's greater than he can bear for a moment, right? And then he errs and then he pays for it with this moment of heroic redemption. I think Boromir is meant to be someone who we do admire. You're supposed to look at him with a degree of wonder. And the books do this. You see him through the hobbit's eyes as this wonderful character, right? The movies do this in a beautiful way, right? Where you see him taking on this very paternal role

with Mary and Pippin and being particularly devoted to them. Like that's really, really good. And what he's asking for in the end is something that good people could very naturally be yeah tempted to right I mean if you offered me this magical technocratic fix to transform the world and to get rid of everything I don't like or at least to save my people yeah I would be very very tempted so his tragic fall is just that right so? So there's that element of,

I'm not using it theologically, but I'm using it sort of poetically, of despair, of the despair that's so characteristic of the pagan hero, the doomed futility of the pagan hero. But then he failed, he tried to take the ring from the hobbits, he's paid for it, and then you've got that moment of forgiveness and reconciliation.

There's something profoundly beautiful about that. And again, you can't be so hard on Boromir, who is a fundamentally good man, who's brought to fall by extraordinarily trying circumstances without being hard on Frodo too, because Frodo ultimately fails at a much more critical juncture in much the same way. He claims the ring, right?

And Tolkien wants you to see that this is, it's a failure. Frodo himself fails, but in the order of grace, God's brought it to a point that his failure is not going to be the final word on his life. So there's redemption for Frodo too. Frodo needs redemption. You can't condemn him, you can't scorn him. Some readers have done that.

But Boromir and Frodo, first book and last book, are sort of two bookends to this process. Boromir, greater strength, greater nobility, feels the temptation much more directly. Frodo, with his humility, endures it longer, right? But it's ultimately sort of a piece. So you've got to appreciate that in the human story, grace can abound where sin has abounded,

right? So I think that's sort of what's going on there. Yeah. I think a lot of modern stories want to blow the line between good and evil. It's like, even though he's a goblin, he's good. Yes, yes, yes. Whereas they do. What's beautiful about this is to be able to, it's almost like the authors of these modern stories are trying to teach children like beauty can be found in ugliness and we shouldn't be judging people based on appearances and things like that. Whereas what this does so well is it shows the child that all of us can make horrible errors and then repent of the evil we actually committed. Right. And this is central to Tolkien and it's also central to the controversies around Tolkien. If you go all the way back to the 50s, Tolkien was getting reamed out by reviewers because, oh, the moral world here is so simple.

The good guys are good and beautiful, and the bad guys are horrible and ugly. And C.S. Lewis was one of the first to come to Tolkien's defense. He says, these people obviously haven't read or haven't understood a single thing that's going on. Look through the story, right? The first book has the tragically flawed character

of Boromir, who's a good guy, who nearly falls, who is saved from his own fall by his failure to be good enough to take the ring, right? Boromir or Theoden or Frodo at the end, right? These are good people who struggle and who fall. It's not that the characters are all, either all good or all evil. It's the fact that Tolkien believes in a fundamental good

and a fundamental evil. That's the distinction. If you go to modern fantasy, right, there's the idea that there's this nihilism, right? And I think probably George R. R. Martin is the great exemplar of this, right? Let's tear down, let's demythologize, let's disenchant, let's blur the lines, let's rejoice in the grimyimy in the grit and then all the way down the line to kids

Fantasy you see the same things happening where you're blurring the moral sense and blurring the imagination We're Tolkien You allow that there's ambiguity in the world, right? Golems Golems final hardening into evil comes when Sam who's the best and the most selfless character in the entire work at an off moment, says something cross and nasty to him, right? Good people make mistakes, good people sin, good people fail. But it's not that people are all good or all bad. It's that there is such a thing as good and bad.

And that's what modern modern seculars from 1955 until 2023 just can't abide. What would be a good example of a child's children's book that does that, modern seculars from 1955 until 2023 just can't abide. What would be a good example of a child's children's book that does that, that blurs those lines? Oh gosh. Um, well, you know what? So I will take, I'll take some simple things that, and I'm not absolutely condemning these things, but there are things that have a little bit of the poison mixed into them. Like let's take the most simple example of all in Shrek, right? and I'm not absolutely condemning these things, there are things that have a little bit of the poison mixed into them.

Let's take the most simple example of all in Shrek. Shrek goes beyond a, it's not a children's book, it's a children's movie, but it goes beyond an exultation of the humble, and it goes into this reveling in the ugly. Oh gosh. I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this, but I think Harry Potter does this sometimes.

I'm not saying, I'm not here to condemn Harry Potter wholesale, but I think Harry Potter can in some ways blur and obscure the moral sense by blending things that ought not be blended and by making muddy sometimes these clear distinctions. And I'm sure I can think of others but I'm Blanking right now. Do you have a do you have a good example? No. Well, I mean last night I went and took my 16 year old son to go see Ninja Turtles. How was it? It was a decent movie. Okay. It was fun One of the things I liked about it is there's a point and this isn't a spoiler

Well, it might be so depending on how sensitive you are to spoilers, but there's a point in the movie where, you know, the, the Ninja Turtles are trying to save humanity so that they will be accepted by humans and they're condemned by humans. They're misunderstood. And I think it was Leonardo who says we had the wrong intention. Maybe they'll misunderstand us. Maybe they'll hate us. But let's save them anyway. I was like, wow, that was really good. That's beautiful.

What I didn't like about it is many of the evil characters like Bebop and Rocksteady, who are the villains, are said to be good. Like they they kind of turned good and there's only one bad guy. And so the ugly is exalted as good. And that's and again, like I think this is what you'll see more than anything else, right? It's, it's a blurring of distinctions. It's a blurring of, and it's an exaggeration

of certain important lessons. The important lesson is that, hey, there can be beauty in the beast, right? External appearances aren't always reality. Like those are good lessons to learn, right? But they can sort of metastasize and they can become all that there is where you, instead of saying ugly is not evil,

you can instead rejoice in ugliness, right? And you can say that being flawed doesn't necessarily condemn you. And then you can just sort of rejoice in being flawed, right? And what you find, I think, I know more kids' movies than I do kids' books, right? But the constant assertion of the individual will, right? And what you find, I think, I know more kids movies than I do kids books, right? But the constant assertion of the individual will, right? I'm going to write my own story, I'm going to define my own being, I'm going to, you

know, break apart from this, that, or the other. I think that's this little moment of sort of an idyllic imagination that could tend towards a diabolical imagination pretty quickly if you're not careful. So Andrew Bocela says, what are Dr. Reinhart's thoughts on the Elvish perspective that the morality of man is the gift of, how do I say his name? Iluvatar? Yes. Or Iluvatar, depending on who's saying it.

So oh, I love this. So the fundamental idea that you get in Tolkien is that men were not created for this world, that somehow men were meant to pass through this world and go to God. This is the primary difference between men and elves. Elves were intended to be in the world and to enrich the world as long as the world exists.

Men have a greater but more tragic gift that they're supposed to leave the world and go on beyond the circles of the world to be with God when their span of life has ended. The way it works in Tolkien is before the fall, this would happen sort of naturally, like sort of like an assumption, right? That's how Tolkien's myth works. But after the fall, there is not the option for the assumption in this sort of natural passing on to God. There's the painful separation of death. It doesn't change that men were not meant for the world. So death is the gift of men in that respect, right? But it changes how we experience the idea of this passing on, because before, man in a state of grace would not have needed the faith or the hope because you would just you've just had it right you've just known that this is the way it works

But now the idea that you're supposed to lay down your life or that you are snatched from the world It's a terrifying thought and that's what animates so much of the drama and the Lord of the Rings Yeah, there's one of the weirdest things that Tolkien ever wrote is a dialogue between the elf Finrod and oh for crying out loud I'm forgetting the woman's name an immortal woman where they're debating Mortality immortality how god created the world what the fall was what redemption might look like so it's this philosophical dialogue Where tolkien lays out in sort of a socratic form or a boethian form everything he believes about mortality He wanted this to be printed as an appendix to every copy of the Silmarillion that was ever sold.

But people don't have an appetite for fantasy philosophical dialogue, so it never has been. You have to go deep into the history of Middle Earth volumes to get it. But it's a really cool idea that death itself is in a way a gift. Our hearts are restless,

we're always seeking something beyond the world. So death itself is an evil, right, as we experience it. But seeking beyond the circles of the world is what we were actually made to do, and that's where the Elvish perspective gets to something very, very important about what it means to be human. Final question. This comes from Francis Baggett. Do you think Tolkien will ever be declared a saint? That seems unlikely to me because the ordinary way that saint processes go would involve you have to establish there was a cult. You'd have to establish there's a continuity of

cult. And I don't think And by that for our Protestant listeners, you mean Sorry, but by cult, I mean, you'd have to show that people had a devotion to this character or to this person, and that people have this sense of veneration for this person. Like, this person is clearly with God, and that they would venerate him and things like this. I don't think you'd have an easy time doing that with Tolkien. You could probably have an easier time finding people in 2023 who do that, but it might be pretty hard to find people in 1973 who were doing that.

So I think that would be challenging. The heroic virtue task, I don't know what the devil's advocate does these days, but looking into his life, I think you'd find a good man. I don't know if you'd see, here's clearly somebody who is living a sanctified life all of his life, or gives that sort of witness to heroic virtue. I'm not saying he wouldn't, I'm just saying I don't know. My guess is no.

But the world's a crazy place right now, and canonizations are a little bit crazy right now too, they're happening a lot. So I would be open to being surprised. We'll play this as a clip right after he is canonized in 10 years. Any place people can go to learn more about you? Have you written on this topic? So I've got a few articles out on Tolkien. So if you want me being cranky online, there are a few articles in Crisis Magazine or Catholic World Report, I think, talking about Tolkien and applicability of Tolkien to the present day, reviewing the films or the Amazon Prime series.

You can find things like that. I've got a few egghead articles on Tolkien that exist. One is out in myth lore, another one's coming out in Tolkien studies. So there are a few sort of academic articles, but those are, that's really where I've written. I should plug that there's an Emmaus Academy course that will be coming out that I did on

Tolkien's liturgical imagination. Little did you know that that was the advert we played in the mid roll. Oh really? So go to stpaulacademy.com slash Matt. St Paul Center. St Paul, now you'll need a check. I'm pretty sure the Matt St. Paul Center St. Hold on. My now you need to check. I'm pretty sure the link is in the description. I'm Tom Slash Matt.

If you want to learn to love scripture and not just scripture, apparently Tolkien, go get a free two week course by signing up by clicking that link below. You have access to all the amazing courses that are put there by Dr. Bergman, Dr. Hahn, Dr. Rinehartsen. And I think you'll really like it. And again, you can try the whole thing for two weeks. If you don't like it, you can quit.

You won't be charged a cent. I've signed up to it and I really think it's really well done. But that's good to know. When will that be out? I don't know when the release date is. I assume sort of later this fall or over the winter. I think that's the plan. And that's what I've got right now. And what about the talking cost?

Is that worth plugging or is that more of an in-house Franciscan thing? Oh, the Tolkien conference? Sorry, yeah. So yes, we would- Is there a website or? So it's franciscan.edu slash Tolkien dash conference. Franciscan.edu. Can you get on that Thursday?

Thanks. A Tolkien conference. So registration is going on now. I would encourage people, if you want to come and want to register, students are coming back this weekend. And Franciscan students, if any of you are watching, you get free registration,

and that's going to be going out to you. So when the students are back, registrations are going to start going pretty quickly. So if you're from out of town and wanting to register, I would encourage you to register sooner rather than later. September 22nd and 23rd, it's going to be a great weekend. Terrific. All right, thanks so much for being on the show.

This has been awesome. Thank you very much.