Ilúvatar said again: “Behold your music! This is your minstrelsy; and each of you shall find contained herein, amid the design that I set before you, all those things which it may seem that he himself devised or added.” The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien I have a vivid memory of rocking my baby to sleep […]
When I told my wife what this week’s poetry blog would be about, she said it was “a shameless plug for The Silmarillion. I told her that she was absolutely right. The Silmarillion is, I would argue, the most imaginative work of literature ever created. Whereas most mythologies are created by whole groups of people
We Grow Accustomed to the Dark Emily Dickinson We grow accustomed to the Dark – When light is put away – As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp To witness her Goodbye – A Moment — We uncertain step For newness of the night – Then — fit our Vision to the Dark – And
I found an amazing book in my classroom recently–”The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology.” Despite the cheesy name, it really is a fairly comprehensive collection of mythologies from all around the world, and it has beautiful pictures to boot. My imagination was sparked when, beside a snapshot of an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, I read the following
Where did the concept of fantasy originate? For that matter where did the concept of fiction come from? Ancient man had sacred texts, but they certainly did not consider them “fantasy.” According to Gene Veith, it was the Bible that made fantasy possible in the first place. While the Greeks emphasized imitation, the Bible emphasized
Imago Dei and the Redemptive Power of Fantasy – Part 4 Read More »
Another common objection of our day is that fairy stories and fairy tales in particular are scary and violent and are therefore unfit for children. In the Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim deals with this issue at length. Bettelheim was a famous child psychologist who worked with troubled
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There is no natural connection between the minds of children and fairy tales, states Tolkien. That’s the assumption of people who tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal if immature members of a particular family and of the human family at large. He
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This essay was presented as an essay at the 2011 CiRCE Conference. There have been over 100 million copies of The Lord of the Rings sold. The Harry Potter series has sold 450 million copies, making it the bestselling book series in history. The last four books of that series consecutively set records as the
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Tolkien’s monogram, and Tolkien Estate trademark (Photo credit: Wikipedia) My family has a standing joke about my talks and articles – no matter what the subject, Papa somehow manages to work Tolkien into every one. Probably an exaggeration, and I certainly don’t “manage” it; Tolkien’s works have found a privileged place in that central storage
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