Tolkien Tuesday Thoughts

This is Why We Never Got Another Lord of the Rings (32 minutes)

A consideration of publishing history and how one man (hint: it wasn’t Tolkien) formed the genre of Fantasy for decades to come. You can only see the valley once you’ve left it and can look behind …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BBrDhgGz1k

Dickinson: And is that how new nations are formed? By a nonentity trying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves?
Franklin: Revolutions come into this world like bastard children,
Mr. Dickinson. Half improvised and half compromised.

-         1776

Then Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu each took his fire pan and put fire in it and presented strange fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them to do. So fire went out from before the presence of the Lord and consumed them so that they died before the Lord.‍
– Leviticus 10:1-2

"Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, Disney, Tolkien…What do all these things have in common? They’ve all been sacralized. This issue of sacralization isn’t one of should or shouldn’t-it-be-done but a phenomenon of human existence to be understood. “But those toxic fandoms! You know, the rambunctious opinionated types that hate everything? The world would be better rid of them.” Or so the story goes…

This type of thinking is the product of a misunderstanding of human existence altogether. Humans can’t help but engage with sacred things, and perceive that such things are imbued with meaning. If there is no “fuel” (i.e. meaning) then there is no drive to act. Water is the clearest and most immediate example. We don’t see H²O but a “thirst quenching thing”.

With “toxic” fandoms I think what we are seeing is something akin to the fire that came out “from the presence of YHWH” and “consumed Nadab and Abihu when they offered unauthorized incense”. ‍

Could The Rings of Power represent something akin to an offering of unauthorized incense (at least in the minds of its detractors)? Of course, it is authorized by the Tolkien estate, but does the presence of Tolkien and Middle Earth transcend the estate? 

…

Tolkien, and his Secondary World, Middle Earth, have become sacred for the religious and the secular alike. For the traditionally religious person this could be seen as a form of idolatry. However, in my opinion, if such a secondary world is approached in a manner similar to The Amon Sul Podcast, it can be beneficial.  Just as St. Basil was able to teach young Christians how to integrate pagan literature in the 4th century, keeping what is good and rejecting what is false, so too can we integrate Tolkien’s work. As a devout Catholic, Tolkien saw his Secondary World as an escape from the Primary World, that is from the modern machine-like world that is coercive and keeps people from realizing their true humanity.  What could a Secondary World mean for someone who doesn’t see him or herself as explicitly religious? How does a Secondary World function for those to whom Tolkien and Middle Earth are sacred? What does it mean for something to be sacred?

The sacred is something which “…manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane” as “a reality that does not belong to our world…” and yet becomes “equivalent…in the last analysis, to reality.” The fan of the secondary-world, the religious-man, “deeply desires to be, to participate in reality” that is, in the reality of Tolkien’s Secondary World of Middle Earth.  For this reason, myth, Tolkien’s myth in our case, is “bound up with ontology,” it “makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another.”  This is Tolkien’s Escape.  For, the religious-man “desires to live in the world as it came from the Creator’s hands, fresh, pure, and strong.” A creation resulting in this “nostalgia for paradise,” a “desire to live in the divine presence.” The profane is simply the opposite of all this. The particulars of one’s religiosity may seem different today because of the apparently secular context we live in, but these general patterns remain the same.

In the documentary, A Study of The Maker of Middle Earth, Dr. Verlyn Flieger says this of modern people:

“there’s a great hunger for some kind of literary tradition among my students…the book (Lord of the Rings) taps into some very old patterns of desire that I think everybody has, of wanting a world that is richer, deeper, and more alive than the one Descartes has given us, wanting to find not magic but enchantment in the world around us, which Tolkien’s world will give you on an abiding basis that when you close that book you can look around you and your eyes can keep that imprint that you still see on the world when you look around you.”

Given her comments above, is the manner in which The Rings of Power show-creators are approaching the sacred world of Tolkien profaning it (and the primary world)? Is it that these types of shows (and movies) have become something akin to the Ring of Power itself? Christopher Tolkien said of the One Ring, “it is a Machine of coercion.”  Could these fans perhaps feel that Tolkien’s sacred work is being used to transmit something other than what Tolkien is communicating, something that is ontologically other? What is a fandom exactly? Is it just a bunch of isolated individuals or is it something like a community…or rather a communion?

 - (extracted from) Death by Holiness, Toxic Fandoms, and The Rings of Power, Michael Parsons (2022)