The Eric Metaxas Show - Holly Ordway

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Holly Ordway joins to discuss the spirituality of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works.

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments. Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to listen to a man of grace, sophistication, integrity, and whimsy? Well, so are we. But until such a man shows up, please welcome Eric Mattaxas. Hey, folks, welcome to the program. I am coming to you from Danbury, Connecticut. A few things to cover.

Kind of exciting. First of all, it's all exciting. I don't know where to start. I'll start here. John West of the Discovery Institute, I interviewed him for Socrates in the city. Oh, it's a few months ago. He's a C.S. Lewis expert.

And I've known of him of him for years. just only have met him a few times. But I may have mentioned this, but I was astounded the other day to see that he had written an article, May 15th, it is at the stream. So go to stream.org. Please do me a favor.

We'll also retweet it on our, we'll retweet it on our Twitter as well on the radio show. A lot of people who listen to this program are not on Twitter. So that's why I say, please go to stream.org. and his article, a shorter version of his article, is there. But in the article, he talks about my new book, Religionless Christianity and about a letter to the American church.

And he does something which I find embarrassing. He compares me and what I've written to Francis Schaefer. Francis Schaefer is such a legend and such an icon that to be compared to him can only make you look like a gnat. but it is as humbling and embarrassing as it is, it's clearly flattering. And so I feel very touched that he would write this long article. It's a long article. What's at stream is a much shorter version.

So you can go to stream.org. But what he's talking about is it's kind of at the center of my life these last years where you, you know, you kind of trade in your respectability with certain people. for speaking the truth because you feel you don't have a choice. And that's really where I have come in the last years. I feel that a lot of the, we can call them elites, particularly the evangelical elites, have ignored where we are and they have taken a safe path. Obviously, my writing about Dietrich Bonhoeffer shows that I believe that each of us has a duty,

not to take the safe path, but to do the right thing by God. And that's what I've tried to do. But it comes with a price. I rarely talk about the price, but it comes with a real price, losing friends, losing, you know, whatever it is. It's, that's not the fun part. But in any event, it happened to Francis Schaefer. It happened to one of the greatest human beings of the 20th of any other century,

Alexander Solzhenits. And you say stuff to the elites that the elites don't want to hear. And, you know, you pay a price. When Solzhenitsyn gave his speech in 1978 at the Harvard commencement, he went from being the darling, you know, of the Western elites to suddenly being a pariah, somebody who said some stuff that they didn't like or whatever it is. I don't know. And, you know, history will judge and God will judge. So it's just, it's just interesting to think about. But I was so. gratified to see the very, very generous things that John West had written. We don't know each other well. I had no idea he'd read my book, much less decided to write the article. But it's at stream.org today. The short version is at stream.org. I ask you to go there and share it. All right.

I was actually going to say, like, if you can sum up Francis Schaefer for people, sorry, because some people might not. Why don't you say that? Yeah, well, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. So I knew Francis Schaefer, when I was younger, he was sort of this countercultural person with this amazing hair and a beard and kind of the 70s, you know, groovy vibe.

How would you describe him for people who may not be familiar? He was really had a heart for culture. He was somebody who, he was the founder of the LaBrie Institute in Switzerland. And he was someone who, yes, I mean, the one way I can compare myself to him genuinely, is that he had a heart for the culture. for the arts. And he appealed, as I sometimes have done, not often, to, you know, the intellectuals among us. I mean, some people could accuse me of that with Socrates in the city and some of my biographies. So, you know, I guess, but he was just a giant, so I can't really be compared to him.

But there are enough similarities, I guess, that John West thought that he would mention me in the same breath. So it's at stream.org today. And again, I hope you'll go there, folks. Speaking of Socrates in the city, folks, if you're signed up for Socrates plus, which you can do at Socrates in the city. You have access to all of our Socrates in the studio sessions. We are today playing the audio of one of those sessions. If you want to see the video, you need to be signed up for Socrates Plus. But this is the audio of my conversation, spectacular conversation, with Holly Ordway on the spirituality,

the faith of J.R.R. Tolkien. Okay, so we have a few other things to mention. Our campaign with Christian Solidarity International. And we're doing a campaign with them. We ask you to go to my website, metaxis talk.com. You'll see the banner. Give today. Do it today.

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888-253-3522. Give whatever you can. You can go to the website metaxis talk.com. It's right at the top, metaxis talk.com. Please do it today. I should also remind you our partners, we have our partners at the Americans for Prosperity. They're the ones behind the biodynamics.com website. I don't know if you visited, but I again today, somebody put on Twitter, how much every American is paying more. Every American is paying more per year to have the same standard of living as they did under President Trump. It's astonishing. It is astonishing. And the folks... It's crazy. They've quantified the number per American family. I think it's literally just to keep up with last year's level, it's an extra $11,000 that American family has to come up with.

It's insane. If we have a fair election, Biden will be crushed. I cannot get over how bad it's gone. But Bidenomics.com is the website. I was just going to say, I'm sorry. I'm just getting worked out. But it feels like a controlled demolition of our way of life. You look at, you know, the president of Argentina, he's literally pulled back inflation

from 300% to 11%. So it just shows you how willful the recklessness is. Well, that is correct. It's to grow government. it's to crush people to cause us to reel into socialism, which we're well in our way. It is evil. It's kind of like when people ask you to tip the cashier, like every time like there's a transactional, it's like, well, they're not getting paid enough.

You should tip them. I'm going to tip the cashier. I don't think so. It's kind of like we're lurching towards socialism in America. So go to bionomics.com. Those are our friends at Americans for prosperity. Folks, if you're worried about the best educational path for your kids, and grandkids, I'm pleased to announce our new partnership on this program with the folks at the

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a spiritual biography. Her name is Holly Ordway. Holly, welcome. Hello. Hello. Thrilled to have you. Well, I'm just so thrilled to be here. here. Well, you come well recommended. Michael Ward, whom I've interviewed at Socrates in the

city, has interviewed you about this book. And I think I'm following in his footsteps. I didn't want to watch his interview with you because I didn't want it to, you know, prejudice me, that I ought to take a certain tack. So I will, I'm as ignorant of Tolkien and Lord of the Rings as Michael award is knowledgeable about it. And I want to ask you, here's the first question, and then we'll backtrack. But why a book on Tolkien's faith specifically? Well, amazingly, because that book didn't exist until I wrote it. Because most people, they know, okay, Tolkien, he's the author of the Lord of the Rings.

If people haven't read the books, they've probably at least seen the movies or heard of the movies. And he's a cultural phenomenon. And a surprising number of people don't even know that he was a Christian. A decent number know that he was a Catholic. A smaller number know he was a very sincere, faithful Catholic. But hardly anybody really appreciates how central his faith was to his whole life, to his character, to his writings, which are not overtly Christian the way Lewis's are, but they're really deeply Christian.

And I realized in my research in Tolkien that he talked about his faith all the time. And yet you would not know that from the scholarship or even the popular writing about him. It's like mentioned and then people move on. And I thought, why is there not a book about this? And then I thought, well, golly, I guess I'd better write it. Yeah. And guess what? Golly, you did, Holly.

Honestly, it needed doing. So thank you. I want to talk. I'm assuming that many people listening to this now know almost nothing about Tolkien. I remember, I only know about Tolkien really because of my devotion to C.S. Lewis, whose very dearest friend he was and whose life he influenced about as dramatically as you could influence someone's life. I want to get to that. But for folks who are not familiar with Tolkien or even with Lord of the Rings, give us the briefest pressee on the Lord of the Rings. and how he came to write it. Well, the Lord of the Rings is, well, the sequel to The Hobbit. So the Hobbit was a children's book that he wrote,

primarily coming out of his love for his children, telling them stories about this little Hobbit, you know, three-foot-tall little person who goes in an adventure with a bunch of dwarves who kind of hustle them out the door and they end up recovering the treasure of the dragon smog. Children's book, you know, fairly light. Along the way, Bilbo, the Hobbit, finds a ring.

and it's not terribly significant in The Hobbit. But then when Tolkien was asked by his publisher to write a sequel... On win? Yes. He asked him, can you write a sequel to the Hobbit? And so he decided, well, what can I write about? And I thought, hmm, that ring. And so it turns out that the ring is the one ring forged by Sauron,

the evil figure in the Lord of the Rings, who is trying to dominate all of Middle Earth. And it turns out that now Frodo, Bilbo's nephew, needs to destroy the ring. And so gathers up this fellowship and they take the ring outwards and eventually, after much suffering, Frodo takes it to

Mount Doom where it's dropped into the volcano and is destroyed. And Middle Earth is saved. And one of the really interesting things about the Lord of the Rings is it's the reverse of the usual quest formula. Because usually in fantasies and folklore, you're going to find the magic item

and bring it home and use it. But this, they're trying to destroy. destroy the ring of power. And it's such a modern vision, a modern grasp of the dangers of totalitarianism, of unchecked power in this medieval sort of fantasy world. And so that's the Lord of the Ring kind of in a nutshell. There's so many places to go with this. Let's, because the title of your book is Tolkien's faith, a spiritual biography, and by the way, When I went to the CS Lewis centenary celebration at Oxford and Cambridge in 1998, people at that event were suddenly saying, oh, no, no, no, it's pronounced Tolkien. And I thought, Tolkien, now it's pronounced Tolkien. You know, you get this, right?

No, no, it's not Nabokov. It's Nabokov, you know. How ought we to pronounce his name? Well, now I'm being all self-conscious because I just say it a lot of bit. Tolkien. Thank you. It's Tolkien. Get it?

No, but there's some people that's almost, and you can just feel the pretentiousness when they say Tolkien. Anyway, so Tolkien, just to, before we get into his faith per se, did he as a young man have literary ambitions, or were his ambitions strictly academic? and philological. Oh, he had literary ambitions really early on. I mean, in fact, his first ambition was to be a poet. And he had this group of friends, the TCBS or TKKBROVian Society in his school, a King Edward's school, and they were all keen on writing poetry. And so he reared and envisioned himself, even as a teenager as a poet.

So this is literally the first few years of the 20th century. Exactly. Yeah. So pre-World War I, this is around 1905, 1906. And what's fascinating to me, you know, having studied Lewis, C.S. Lewis especially, is that they grew up in a world where poetry was still a thing, where people read poetry. That world is gone, let's be honest.

But they lived in a world where somebody like the young C.S. Lewis would have as an ambition writing an epic, poem, writing a book-length poem, which he did, Dimer. I mean, it's so interesting because we're in a world very different than that world. But so you're saying that already as a teenager, Tolkien not just appreciated poetry, but wanted to write poetry. Yes, and he was writing it. And even, you know, the origins of Middle Earth, the first, you know, stories of that, which he wrote right around the start of the First World War, most of those tales were in poetry.

In fact, the first story that he shared with Lewis, the one that just sort of cemented their friendship, the lay of Lathian, was an epic poem. So it took him a while to work through that he wanted to do his stories and prose, but he had those literary ambitions from the beginning. How amazing, okay? So he shares the lay of Lathian.

With Lewis, Lewis is still an atheist. Like, it's hard for us to imagine Lewis before his conversion, still to some extent being C.S. Lewis, but becoming friends, real friends with Tolkien, who was at that point, even though a devout Christian, a devout Catholic, not quite practicing it

the way he had before or would after. Exactly. And that's the point that people don't appreciate, I think, as much as they should. People tend to think of him when they do think him as a Catholic as like some sort of super Catholic, like, oh, he had all of his ducks in a row. Well, he didn't always. And after the war, he went through the war, fought in the First World War, fought in the trenches, you know, saw the horrors of that, sustained his faith through that,

but then had a slump after the war. He said there was a period, we don't know exactly how long, but several years at least, where he says, I almost ceased to practice my religion. And it's right around the, towards the end of that time that he meets Lewis. He's still a Catholic. He's still, you know, he still believes, but he had sort of fallen out of practicing his faith. He's in slump. He's in a barren stretch.

And I think Lewis helped to revitalize that faith. I was going to say there are two things that need to be said at some point, so we might as well throw them out now. Lewis and Tolkien were the dearest of friends. It's hard to believe, but it is true that the Lord of the Rings, one of the greatest works ever written, certainly of the 20th century, might never ever have come into being or been published, if not for the prodding of C.S. Lewis.

Absolutely. In fact, I would go as far as to say, it wouldn't have. And Tolkien himself admitted that. He said if it hadn't been for Lewis's constant encouragement, he would never finish it. And given how many things he left unfinished, millions of words of unfinished projects, millions of words. I kid you not.

It makes us all feel better, those of us who are writers. Really? Wow. Yeah, I mean, the majority of his things that he wrote during his lifetime, he never finished or published. He just kept tinkering with them. And so there's a 10-volume history of Middle Earth with all the unfinished drafts of the legendarium. And then all sorts of other things that he wrote but didn't publish. Was it finally published? Well.

Or it's still being published? Still being, in a sense. There's so much of it. So his son, Christopher Tolkien, was his executor. And God bless Christopher Tolkien because he first pulled together sort of the essentials into what we now know is the Silmarillion. I was going to say if it weren't for his son, Christopher, the Silmarillion wouldn't exist. Hey, this is Eric Metaxus. For years I've told you about Nutrametics, a professional supplement brand trusted by doctors since 1993. Neutrametics offers a variety of health bundles. Whether you want to support your immune system, improve your sleep, promote joint comfort or detoxification support,

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Or go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Eric. So this is interesting that, I mean, this is interesting at so many levels. The idea that Tolkien had an ambition as a youth to write, to write, to write epic poetry, to write poetry, to write epics, to write. And yet, if not for the prodding of his friend, C.S. Lewis, he would not have written Lord of the Rings. That's astonishing. And it's a testament to the power of friendship, because...

Which is at the heart of much of what makes Tolkien's work so beautiful is these pictures of real friendship. Okay, so the other thing that needs to be said at some point, so I'll say it now, is that without question, it was Tolkien who led C.S. Lewis to faith in Jesus Christ. That, to me, I mean, that famous story on Addison's Walk with Hugo Dyson, when you realize that these giants of 20th century letters were so instrumental in each other's lives that they would not have been. who they became without each other. It's almost one of those things you don't want to think about because it's just staggering, really. That's what might have been.

So maybe, actually, that's a good place to enter the subject of Tolkien's spirituality. So he's on a walk with Hugo Dyson and C.S. Lewis, Jack Lewis, and they're young men, okay? So Lewis is what? He's 32, I guess. Tolkien's a little bit older, right? They're walking late at night. I mean, first of all, you know, when you read Lewis or you read Tolkien, you realize that they had lives that are sort of like what they write about in their books,

that they were drinking pints and smoking pipes and talking about literature. I mean, it just seems magical. And so one of these nights, they go for a walk on Addison's walk. and that's when, tell the story of what it was that Tolkien says to Lewis to begin dragging him in the right direction. So Lewis had been sort of moving towards theism for a while, so he'd arrived at a sort of philosophical belief in God, partly through Tolkien's influence and also from some other friends. So even that was Tolkien's influence. Yeah, he helped.

He wasn't the only one, but he helped. And so on this particular conversation, they started coming up to the question. of Christianity, and Lewis revealed that he had just trouble grasping the story of how Christ could be the Savior. What did that even mean? And Tolkien discerned that what Lewis's difficulty was, was that he was sort of compartmentalizing the rational doctrine and the story. And he said, no, no, Jack, you know, you respond to these stories of dying and rising

gods, and you have them in Greek myth and Norse myth. Well, Christianity is just the same. It's a story that you can respond to imaginatively, but with the difference that it also happened in history. And Lewis later said that that was the point at which he realized, oh, the two halves of his being could come together. He didn't have to reject his imagination to become a Christian, nor his reason. They both came together. And that kind of clicking was what enabled him very shortly after to say, yes, I'm a Christian. And that was Tolkien who helped to do it.

Well, it becomes therefore particularly interesting, at least to me, that Tolkien was not just a Christian, but a Catholic Christian. Because one of the things Catholics don't get wrong in the way that, I would say, more theologically hidebound evangelical Protestants get wrong, is pushing away the imagination. and making everything syllogistic, theological, almost like dragging it toward this enlightenment rationalism, which is just wrong. And as I just said, Catholics don't get that wrong. They tend particularly to get that right. So it's very interesting to me that here you have Tolkien,

who's able to appreciate that side of the faith, pulling Lewis in through their mutual love of story, and legend and Balder the Beautiful is dead is dead. Why does that pierce your heart? And that's his question, right? And that's when Lewis goes, oh, okay, I guess. And Tolkien even reinforced it. He is not just the conversation,

but surely after that conversation, he wrote Lewis a whole poem called Mythopeia, which is amazing poem, and he basically gives a set of apologetics arguments in verse, and he sends it to Lewis. And so, first of all, what a beautiful thing to do for your friend, but also because he got it. He knew that Lewis needed that imaginative connection.

So he doesn't just say, look, you know, this is true. He says, here's a poem that expresses that. And, you know, because if, you know, Christ is the word made flesh, so words are a way that we can understand him and come close to him. And Tolkien got that at a really deep level and was able to share that with Lewis. Now, there's no doubt from what I've read in your book and what I know that Tolkien's Christian faith was absolutely as profound as Lewis's was, but it didn't express itself in apologetics or in overt evangelism in the way that Lewis did. Now, of course, Lewis also had the imaginative side, which makes him such a genius so unique. but it's interesting because again it speaks to my mind to Tolkien's Catholicism that he felt that

at least he wasn't created by God to do that, to be evangelistic and to do apologetics in the way that Lewis did, but nonetheless that what he wrote was a testament to his faith. So talk about that. How was he was he very conscious? of that? I mean, it's obvious that when Lewis wrote the Narnia Chronicles, that he was inescapably conscious of the Christian element, even though he always demurred.

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Tolkien, listen up. To what extent was Tolkien as he's writing the Lord of the Rings and these things aware that this is an expression somehow less overt of his faith? Well, that's a really interesting question, because as he says in one of his letters, a very famous line, he says, the Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally religious and Catholic book unconsciously in the writing, but consciously in the revision. and so he's aware that there's a Christian element, but there's a couple key words here.

One is that it was unconscious in his writing. He's not sitting down to think, how can I portray this, because Lewis was conscious about the Narnia Chronicles, how can I show this? And Tolkien wasn't, but because he was so deeply rooted in this faith, the themes, the imagery come out,

they become fundamental. I think that word's really interesting. And then he's aware of that after the fact, and so then he's able to make the little linibus, and the tucks and the adjustments to make sure that it's communicating what he wants. But his mode is to do it under the radar, to do it implicitly. And I think that's mostly a personality thing. That is just how it worked.

Well, what's interesting to me, though, is that if you know that the Christian faith is true, you know that God wove it into the warp and woof of reality itself. So if you're simply communicating reality and truth, it's inevitable that it points to the author. of reality and truth. Exactly. There's no way around it. Yeah, I mean, his characters are expressing that in every being, whether they're making mistakes or doing evil or doing good.

They're all resonating with the underlying truth that he knew so well. But even when you're not trying to do it, as Tolkien said he wasn't trying to be overt, there are going to be times unavoidably when you're hearkening back to something where somebody will say, oh, that's, you know, What is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, what are they called? The numinorians. Mnorians. That, you know, the idea, there, there are just things there that if you read it, you say, oh, that's like, you know, that, that's, like, that's, that's, that's right out of Genesis or something like that.

So that, it's just inevitable, because you're writing about truth. You're writing about reality. And he was soaked in scripture. He knew that, he knew the Bible very well. And so there are all these sort of echoes of that as well. and then just themes about like humility. That was something, that's a very fundamental Christian theme. He even says that the hobbits,

says the Lordings is hobbitocentric, and it's all about the sanctification of the humble, which is really interesting. That's pretty inescapably Christian. Exactly. The sanctification of the humble. Now, so when he began, at some point I want to touch on Leaf by Niggle,

but before we get to Leaf by Niggle, that was the mid-40s when he wrote that, I guess. Um, that's actually, that's in the 50s. Okay. Right. Because just as he's finishing up, um, the Lord of the Rings, but hadn't published it yet. Um, right. Okay.

So, but, um, before we get to that, well, we can find it. It's all in, it's all in this book. Actually, you know what? You're right, Eric. You're right. You remember they better than I did. Of course I am. Because I've read the book more recently than the authors read her own book.

But, um, but, but the fact is before we get to Leaf by Niggle, I want to talk about Leaf by niggle. But, um, before, we get to that. Was Tolkien, at what point in his life did he come up with the idea of the hobbits? Because it's one of these things, you know, it is not derivative. That's what I find. I think that's what's so remarkable.

And when you think about the greatness of certain works of literature and of certain, and of certain writers of literature, what makes them great is their originality. There's nothing derivative. Or, I mean, there's always something derivative. But what I mean is that he comes up with this world. And to some extent, you can say, oh, it's because he read the North Saga's and whatever. But at some point, you have to stop and say, no, it's this and not this.

It's this and not this. So it's not generic. There's a specificity to the characters, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, elves, the hobbits, the orc, at what point did that, I'm not sure what the word is for that, but at what point did he settle on these things? In other words, what was the beginning of his saying, okay, it's about a hobbit? You know, that's so interesting because even he didn't really know. He had been working as legendary and his world of Middle Earth, and then one day he was grading exam papers, and he was just tired and cranky because he was grading exam papers,

and he gets to a blank page and he thinks, oh, good, this is one of fewer page I have to read. And I would know where he writes, in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Where did that come from? And he himself said, don't know, but that one line somehow was the germination of the hobbits. And then they percolated in his imagination

and all sorts of sources for those. I mean, my previous Tolkien book, Tolkien's modern reading, I look at the huge amount of modern reading he did. Of course, all of his medieval reading in the North Sagas, So lots of elements, but there's some sort of alchemy that happens in his creative imagination. Because you're absolutely right. Whatever source material he had is taken up and in his imagination, genius imagination. And then one day he writes, in a hole in the ground, they lived a hobbit and thinks, oh, well, I've got to stir about a hobbit.

What's a hobbit? Right. Okay, well, they live in holes, but not nasty holes, but pleasant holes. And then we're off to the races. Okay, so even before he writes that line, the famous line, that comes out of nowhere, which is, to say, which is the Holy Spirit speaking, it wasn't the collective unconscious in case you're squaring at home. But before that, you said that he'd been working on creating this world, Middle Earth. Why? Where did that come from? What was the point of creating this fictional

world of Middle Earth? And when did that begin? Well, it began, if we go way back to his teenage years, when he became fascinated with the languages. I mean, he was the king of the nerds, to say, that. And he loved language. And he started inventing languages. Oh, who hasn't done that? No, seriously, though, that when you read that, you just say, wait a minute, this is a little freaky. And then he levels it up. He invented, I mean, that is as next level as it gets. That's, that's, that's freakish. So, in the best way. So, yeah, at what point does he settle? Because I was, you know, sort of trying to get back to the, this, you know, moment.

When does he settle on, okay, Middle Earth, I'm doing this thing called Middle Earth? Where did that germinate? It kind of, it doesn't have a crystallized moment where the Hobbit does because he started writing a few little poems, a few little stories, and Middle Earth is just the medieval way of saying, the Earth, the world. And he's imagining a sort of prehistoric past, envisioning it differently. And when he first imagines it, it's more overlapping.

with our world and there's like a version of England and things like that. And he's imagining elves in it because he wants people to speak his languages. He invents the languages and then thinks, hmm, who would the people be like who spoke them? So he invents these elvish languages and then invents the elves so they can speak the languages. Has anyone in the history of the universe besides Tolkien ever invented a language? Esperanto doesn't count. People have invented languages all the time for fantasy stories, but they've never done it the way Tolkien did. Usually it's somebody just makes up some words where it's a glossary.

By the way, first of all, they got the idea from Tolkien. Well, quite. So what a wild idea. It's amazing. I mean, the man's genius has no limits, it seems like. I've spent my entire adult life working on Tolkien, and I turn around, there's this whole linguistic angle that would take another lifetime to even begin to crack. Okay, now this speaks to his faith, because, you know, he talks about it. about that we are made in God's image.

God is a creator. He makes us in his image ourselves to be creative and creators. And language is at the very center of what it means to be human. So the idea that as this sub-creator, creator, he also creates a language. I mean, it's like something we would make up, except he actually did that. He actually did it. It's amazing. And you're right that that idea of.

creation of creativity is right at the heart of this theology, because he talks about God as the great author whose story actually happened in history. And we are all, he says, sub-creators. You know, God made the primary creation that we're living out. And then we, because we're made in the image of God, we have the opportunity, the gift, the blessing to be able to sub-create. And Tolkien felt very earnestly this was a gift. It was a gift from God given to him, to use. So he thought he was expressing his faith and being who God made him to be by creating. He didn't just think, oh, this is some hobby, this is something I'm doing on the side. It was central to who God made him to be. Absolutely. And even in the very structure of a book like Lord of the

Rings or the Hobbit, one of the things he eventually articulates is his idea of eucatrophy, the good catastrophe, which is the unexpected happy ending when all seems lost. And he, and he, He makes a remarkable argument. Now, he coins that, he coins the word. As one does. Using the Greek U for good and tax it on a catastrophe. But if anybody could do that, he could do that. But so he is the one that invented that word and sort of brings the concept of it to our attention for the first time.

Exactly. And it's such a great word because that's sort of the happy ending. It's the most powerful when we think we're going to have a sad ending. But then there's an unexpected reversal. But Werek is really interesting, is he makes a connection to the resurrection. And he says in the epilogue on fairy stories that when we read a fairy story, a fantasy, any story that has a happy ending, we feel that lift of the heart. And he says, well, why?

He says, because even if we don't know it, even if we're not aware of it, because in some way we're participating in the cosmic happy ending of the resurrection, it's amazing. So as a girl, when I was not yet a Christian, reading the Lord of the Rings, experiencing that joy of the happy ending, I was sort of plugging in to the power of the resurrection, which is the thing that happened, whether we realized it or not, through that happy ending of the story. Well, it's inescapable. That's what's so fascinating is that if all that is good comes from God, whenever you experience goodness, whether you know the source or don't, that that's where it comes from. Okay, so you mentioned on fairy stories. When did he write that and talk about that for a moment? Yeah, that actually came, that had an evolution of several different sort of segments.

It started in 1938 when he gave a lecture, the Andrew Lang lecture at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. They asked him to do a lecture on, did it on fairy stories. And then over the next basically decade and a half, he expanded it, added to it, refined it. And it became basically his sort of statement of how fantasy works. And this, again, is why I love Lewis, Tolkien. The idea that they had this profound appreciation for what we call fairy tales, that Lewis wrote fairy tales, that both of them asserted the idea that these are not stories for children. It's a genre often relegated to the nursery, but it is for everyone. and that they had the humility and the tremendous self-confidence to work in those forms.