The Zen koan of Middle Earth

A web site called "Hobbit Lore" ended its successful four-year-run two days ago, when its architect decided that his inspiration, Peter Jackson's cinematic take on J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, had run its course.

In tribute to the Hobbit Lore site, I'm reposting an excerpt from the biography of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien by Ralph Wood. Wood's work had formerly graced the pixels of Hobbit Lore.

I blogged recently about irreducible complexity as the calling card for intelligent design. This is even more true of human relationships than of human lives. Note how Wood outlines the chain of influence in J.R.R. Tolkien's life. That chain runs from Jesus to Philip Neri to John Henry Newman to Tolkien's mother, Mabel, who found lodging next to the school where her son would go because she thought so highly of it:

The Oratory of St. Philip Neri is a congregation of secular priests living in community but without the vows of poverty or obedience to any monastic superior. Given papal approval in 1575, the Oratorians were introduced to England in 1848 by John Henry Newman following his celebrated conversion to Roman Catholicism, perhaps after his visit to the Oratory of San Girolamo in Rome. The Oratorians espouse a very Italianiate kind of Christianity--seeking to lead people to God through prayer, preaching, and the sacraments--and through the Baroque beauty of their churches. The modern "oratorio" (Handel being its most famous practitioner) grew out of the laudi spirituali sung in their devotional exercises. Chesterton's friend Hilaire Belloc was also educated at the Birmingham Oratory. Tolkien's own faith would be shaped by the Oratorians' attempt to steer a middle path between the world-denying asceticism of medieval monasticism and the self-indulgent worldliness of much modern Protestantism.

And that Zen koan to which I alluded up top? Wood found that while researching what turned Tolkien into such a formidable linguist:

Though Tolkien's imagination was supremely visual, he would realize his images primarily in words rather than pictures. He was drawn to the sound of words no less than their meaning. He would later observe that cellar door is a gorgeous phrase, far more attractive than the word sky, and even more beautiful than the word beauty itself. Tolkien was also mesmerized by the strange phonic order that words often have. Having begun one of his childhood stories with the phrase "the green great dragon," he was told by his mother that this wouldn't do, that it should be "the great green dragon" instead. Tolkien would spend his life seeking to fathom this syntactic mystery.

Great green or green great? The world is a better place for John Ronald Reul's jousts with this particular windmill. The red balloon that Tolkien found in the great green room was his own career. Thanks for highlighting that and so much else about the man, Hobbit Lore!

The implausibly lovely Cate "Queen Galadriel" Blanchett may have gone on to play Katharine Hepburn, but as Rings fans have been saying since the late Fifties, "Frodo lives." I work with a self-described "recovering lawyer " who has an elvish cloak in her wardrobe. Last Sunday, the associate pastor of my parish quoted Treebeard in a homily--and this from a guy more likely to quote doctors of the church than Ents.

After Mass, I found out that Father Tony hadn't chanced upon a cultural peg for his own musings by accident. Being almost as old and as wise as Tolkien made Treebeard, Fr. Tony generally takes a dim view of pop culture, but he also owns the box set "special edition" of the Lord of the Rings on DVD.

As Gollum found out, "nasty little Hobbitses" know something about the irreducibly Christian paradox of strength through humility.

(UPDATED with a little wordsmithery)