November 22: Tolkien , God's creation, and the implications for our relationships with one another

Notes for the Nov. 22 session will be published during the following week.

November 15 J.R.R.Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Evil and the Great Ring of Power

      We actually continued our discussion of Narnia as we worked into a discussion of Tolkien and Lewis and The Lord of the Rings. We also continued to talk about the functions of fantasy.  Doug noted that Tolkien said the fantasy speaks to our heart's desire. By reading fantasy, we can see what people were yearning for during a certain era. In The Rings we see a yearning for being connected to nature. Tolkien also expressed, in a lecture at St. Andrew's College, the hope that fantasy would lead to a fuller understanding of Christianity. He suggested that it worked as a foreshadowing of a richer and fuller life with God; evil is conquered and there is the hope of the resurrection.
     Tolkien especially wrote of the splendors of the universe. The Elves, for example, led by Galdriel, blend into their natural landscape.
     In  "The Lion, The Witch..." Lewis had the same goal. Here is an example. When all the children arrive in Narnia, they find Mr. Tumnus's home ruined and Mr. Tumnus arrested. A bird, however, leads them to the home of of the beaver family. The beaver hut is an ideal home with a deep familiarity and speaks to our wanting to be taken care of.  Our seeking an afterlife also speaks to our yearning for home. The "Fairy Stories," as he called them, offer us consolation.
     The questions that came up were: Did these writers (Lewis and Tolkien) set out to write Christian fantasy or did it emerge from the writing?  How do the two world wars figure into Tolkien's writing?
     At this point I had to leave the session to vest for 10:15 service, so I'm hoping that someone can fill in the gaps.

November 8: C.S.Lewis, Narnia "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"

     In this session, we continued talking about how fantasy can make the familiar unfamiliar and can therefore reveal to us certain truths that we have not seen before.  Specifically, looking at "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe," we looked at Aslan, Mr. Tumnus, and the White Witch. We also discussed the nature of evil seen here and in Dante. Here are some specifics:
When Christ is protrayed as a gigantic lion, we are propelled into thoughts about Him that go beyond our usual images. There is great majesty in Aslan; most important, he is not a tame lion. Yet, he is deeply familiar to the characters. Also, we often see glimpses of Aslan, from a distance or from the corner of our eyes. We were reminded  that in "Caspian," Lucy sees Aslan at a distance, but the others don't believe her when she tells them so.  She finally goes to him and Aslan says something like, "Why didn't you come with me the first time?" She has, of course, allowed the pressure and ridicule of her brothers and sister to deny what she knows to be true.
In an interesting reversal of "making the familiar unfamiliar," we discussed the scene between Lucy and Mr. Tumnus. Mr Tumnu is a faun-like creature who cannot believe his eyes when he sees an actual human, having thought that they were mythological creatures.  "What are you?" he asks Lucy.
In our discussion of the White Witch, we looked at the nature of evil that she embodies; she is cold, magnificent, and self-absorbed. Where she reigns, it is always winter. Her power is to render things lifeless--the ice statues that were once human are chilling examples of this, whereas Aslan's breath brings life into these frozen creatures. He is the breath of life.
Winter, of course, is not a terrible season; it can be quite enjoyable. But the winter in "The Lion, the Witch..." is removed from the cycle of seasons and is unnatural. (And, of course, it's winter, but there's never Christmas).  We are reminded of Dante's "Inferno," where those perpetrators of the greatest sin, treachery, are souls frozen in ice.
The lands of evil in both Lewis and Tolkien, we noted, have a real lack of variety and a sense of monotony. We concluded that evil can pervert what is natural. As with Edmund, for example, his temptation (for turkish delight) overrides his natural instincts.
For the 15th, we will probably continue to discuss Lewis before we move into Tolkien.

November 1 Christian fantasy in general

Our November series on Christian fantasy began with a general discussion of how fantasy works to enliven and enrich a world whose symbols have become overly-familiar and therefore do not resonate with us, do not speak to our imaginative faculties that enable us to connect spiritually with God's creation.
Doug Burger, our leader, mentioned Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn and read a passage in which the unicorns are conversing about the humans' failure to see them as unicorns. If we cannot imagine something, we cannot see it, even if it exists before our very eyes. We also briefly discussed Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, then moved into a conversation about the relationship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien--their personal relationship and their uses of fantasy.
Doug pointed out some real differences in their uses of fantasy:  Lewis is much more the allegorist, while Tolkien resists allegory. For example, in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," Aslan is clearly a figure of Christ; in the Ring trilogy, the Ring of Power or the orcs, for example, do not merely represent Nazis, but encompass many manifestations of evil.
Doug asked, "What does it mean--what are the implications for us--that Christ is portrayed as a lion [in "The Lion, The Witch....]?"