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From Christian Week-
In the wake of the Paris and Beirut attacks, it is easy to feel a darkness descending. What hope is there when people are willing to do such terrible and heinous things to others?
If there is any comfort in history, it is in knowing that we are not the first to feel this way, or go through this experience.
Two men who experienced the worst that humans can do to each other were J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings, and C.S. Lewis, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia.
Both men were soldiers in the British army on the western front in World War One. Tolkien participated in two attacks, in July and October, 1916, including one where he was in combat for 50 straight hours.
On November 8 of that year, he was sent to hospital with trench fever. He never returned to the front—which probably saved his life.More here-
http://www.christianweek.org/j-r-r-tolkien-c-s-lewis-great-war-present-darkness/
From Huffington-
This summer, I lived for five weeks in Oxford, where the influence of the Inklings -- the group of Oxford writers and thinkers including J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield -- remains visible everywhere you go. Whether you see their pictures in The Eagle and Child, one of their regular haunts in town, feel their presence as you walk along the Thames to The Perch or The Trout, two of their regular haunts out of town, or pass the New Building at Magdalen College, where The Inklings met for evening readings in his rooms, the Inklings are as omnipresent in Oxford as Lewis Carroll's Alice.More here-
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-garrett/the-fellowship-why-the-in_b_8055796.html
From Atlantic Monthly-
In this nearly magical room, amid fire-crackle and clink of glass, you can hear them talking. Pipe smoke is in the air, and a certain boisterous chauvinism, and the wet-dog smell of recently rained-on tweed. You can hear the donnish mumbles of J. R. R. Tolkien as the slow coils of The Silmarillion glint and shift in his back-brain. Now he’s reading aloud from an interminable marmalade-stained manuscript, and his fellow academic Hugo Dyson, prone on the couch, is heckling him: “Oh God, not another fucking elf!” You can hear the challenging train-conductor baritone of C. S. Lewis, familiar to millions from his wartime radio broadcasts; hear the unstoppable spiel of the writer/hierophant Charles Williams, with his twitchy limbs and angel-monkey face; hear the silver stream of ideas and argumentation that is the philosopher Owen Barfield. They are intellectually bent upon one another, these men, but flesh-and-blood is the thing: conviviality is, for them, a kind of passion. The chairs are deep; the fire glows gold and extra fiery in the grate. Lewis’s brother, Warnie, rosy with booze and fellow feeling, serves the drinks. And the walls drop away, and the scene extends itself backwards and forward in time …
More here-
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/j-r-r-tolkien-and-c-s-lewis-revived-myth-telling/399347/
From Brain Pickings-
“I do not believe that I have ever written a children’s book,” the great Maurice Sendak once said in an interview. “I don’t write for children,” he told Colbert. “I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” This sentiment — the idea that designating certain types of literature as “children’s” is a choice entirely arbitrary and entirely made by adults — has since been eloquently echoed by Neil Gaiman, but isn’t, in fact, a new idea.
On March 8, 1939,
J. R. R. Tolkien, celebrated as one of the greatest fantasy writers in history, gave a lecture titled “Fairy Stories,” eventually adapted into an essay retitled “On Fairy-Stories” and included in the appendix to Tales from the Perilous Realm (public library). At the crux of his argument, which explores the nature of fantasy and the cultural role of fairy tales, is the same profound conviction that there is no such thing as writing “for children.”
More here-
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/05/j-r-r-tolkien-on-fairy-stories/
From Christian Week-
