Patchwork Post (Homesick for Charis, Loving LOTR)

I'm tired. D. is traveling yet again regarding care issues for his mom, something that continues to weigh on our hearts and minds. S. is struggling some in ways she hasn't in a long time. School is taking up more time than I remembered it did, and while that's not a bad thing, I'm having a hard time remembering how to fit everything else I do into the cracks and crevices of our schooling life. I also seem to be coming down with something that is making me feel miserable and draggy.

In the midst of all this, I am missing Charis, the central country of my fictional work-in-progress. D. and I spent a lot of time this summer, sometimes even during our most tired times, working on history and geography. He's marvelous at helping me world-build, and if I wasn't feeling so tired, I think I would be writing a lot right now. Charis and its neighboring kingdoms and their complex history certainly are a big part of my thoughts at the moment. It's finding time and creativity and just plain energy to try to convert those thoughts to paper that's feeling difficult.

Most of my writing time at the moment is taken up with web content, and while I am thankful that writing educational/job profiles and product descriptions (as I can get them) are helping to bring in some necessary income, I am beginning to feel like if I write one more detailed description of a pair of hiking boots or explain one more time how one moves from an RN to BSN degree, I am going to either burst into laughter or tears. My push to accomplish more web content work came in a week when I discovered I wasn't going to be doing teaching assistant work for the seminary this fall (due to low enrollment) and when I had an essay I worked on in the summer turned down by a journal that I had real hopes might want to publish it. So I know some of the frustration level I'm feeling about the "floor mopping" kinds of writing I'm doing (and trying to do with love, since it's part of the way God provides) is part of a larger piece of frustration over a lack of opportunity to do more of the kinds of work that I feel more passionate about.

Mostly I am feeling grumpy and inept. There. That's honest! 

Lots of good things to be thankful for right now, including a good Sunday School kickoff yesterday, plus the ordinary blessings which are never all that ordinary really. Not to mention the fact that we're less than a hundred pages from the end of The Lord of the Rings, our first read-through as a family, and a powerful re-read for me this time through. Thank you, J.R.R. Tolkien, for the fortifying nourishment of your narrative.

Of Cottonwoods and Mallorn Trees

We had a beautiful long weekend in Erie. We spent almost every moment we could outdoors, from drives on the peninsula to shore time by the lake to playtime on the sweet girl's favorite sandy playground to s'mores around our trailer-side firepit at the campgrounds in the evening. We also got to see wonderful friends for dinner on two successive nights. Despite some stressed moments (we continue to be very concerned about D's mom's deteriorating health and will be making another trip soon to see her) and our usual sparse accommodations in the trailer (made even more rustic this year since they'd opted to improve the bathroom facilities but take out the shower) we really had a lovely time.

One of my favorite parts of the beautiful flora and fauna on Presque Isle are the cottonwood trees that seem to grow everywhere. These are tall, beautiful trees that rustle with a hushed music in the frequently strong winds. It was the sweet girl who pointed out that the back of the green leaves seemed to shimmer with silver -- the leaves are a kind of greenish-gray. Coupled with the few eager leaves already turning yellow in anticipation of the autumn, there was a lovely silver-gold quality to some of the trees. It made us think of the Mallorn trees of Lothlorien, and S. and I ended up calling them Lothlorien trees every time we traipsed under another stand of them near the beach.

I love seeing S. learn to love Tolkien. We're nearing the end of The Two Towers, and every time Tolkien stops to describe the phase of the moon and the quality/timing of its light, she practically shivers with delight. I love that our daughter, so like us and yet so uniquely her own self, loves him as much for his scientific accuracy as she does for his poetry. She is so impressed that here, at last, is an author who cares about those kinds of details!

The Annual "Happy Birthday, JKR and Harry!" Post

It's the birthday of author JK Rowling and her beloved fictional wizard Harry Potter! Jo Rowling is 49 (in real life) and Harry would be 34 today.

In honor of the day, I thought I would re-post a reflection from my archives. I'm cheating just a tiny bit -- or rather, double-dipping -- in that the post is just as much about Tolkien as it is about Harry Potter. Given that we're in the midst of The Two Towers right now as a family, however, I've had Tolkien very much on my mind, and happened to be revisiting this post today. It's an oldie but a goodie.

I hope Harry and Jo both gets lots of owl post today!

Tolkien Summer

I've begun blogging about our family's summer reading of The Lord of the Rings. We began reading Fellowship of the Ring on Sunday night, and I've gotten a couple of posts up since! If you'd enjoy following along, you can find what I hope will be a daily (or at least regular) log here.

Thoughts to Ponder: Writers for Life

One of the habits I’ve cultivated over the years is collecting quotes. I used to jot them 

down in my journal, and while I still do that sometimes, these days I am more likely to past them (or type them, depending on where I find them) into a document on my computer. I add scripture verses, snippets of poetry, prayers, and inspiring quotes from all sorts of sources, and the ultimate collection can get pretty long (last year’s ran 13 pages). So each year I start a fresh document, labeled with the new year, and begin again.

I thought that from time to time, I’d post one of my daybook quotes here. I kicked off 2014 with these words I so resonated with from C.S. Lewis scholar Don W. King:

“Each of us should find a writer

we can read for the rest of our lives.”

sweetclipart.com

Lewis may be the writer that is truest of for me. But also L’Engle, Tolkien, Austen. Sayers is moving toward that list as well. And Eugene Peterson. I go through seasons where I read them more or less, but I go back to all of these particular writers a lot, never feeling like I’ve exhausted what they have to say. They are also writers I love to read about – biography, literary analysis, appreciation.

With Lewis, I always feel especially glad that I have so much more of his work to read…I don’t think I could ever exhaust it. Even if I eventually read it all, it always bears repeat readings. That’s also true of Tolkien.

I’ve probably come closest to reading everything of L’Engle’s. In my late teens and early-mid twenties, I went out of my way to collect as much of her work as I could, even the harder to find things (and for at least a handful of Christmases, my family did an amazing job of giving me hard-to-find L’Engle books). She was hugely formative in my developing spiritual life, and while there are a few books of hers that I feel I’ve somewhat outgrown (not, by the way, her children’s books) many of them I still revisit often, and a few of them have deep places of honor in my mind and heart.

I’ve purposely not ever read all of Austen’s letters, her juvenalia, or her incomplete novel, mostly because I don’t want to say I’ve read everything she’s written! I’ve read most if not all of Sayers’ novels, and also Mind of the Maker, but only some of her drama and essays, and not many of her letters. Peterson is so prolific that I don’t think I could possibly exhaust all of his work, but I like knowing so much of it is there, and that I can always drink deep when I turn to him.

One reason why Lewis has moved to the top of my list over the years, besides the obvious richness to be found in his work, is that he is the kind of writer one really can visit in different seasons and moods. Narnia was my foray into Lewis’ world, and I entered it around the age of ten. But I still revisit Narnia, and I still find more there to learn and ponder and enjoy and love thirty-five years after I first read the books. They are perhaps richer for my having visited them so often, and richer still because I’ve now read so many others books by (and about) Lewis, including books it took me a while to be ready for. Essentially, he is not a writer I ever outgrow – he’s always somewhere I feel I need and want to be, saying something I need and want to hear, challenging me, delighting me, at different seasons and times in my life.

Is there a writer, or writers, that you feel you could read for the rest of your life?

The Staying Power of Art

My husband brings home the most interesting books. This week it's Charles M. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time.

You may think you don't know Knight, but if you're at least forty, you probably do -- even if not by name. Knight was the artist/naturalist who, for many years, was the "go-to" guy for artistic renderings of dinosaurs in museums and textbooks.

Although the jury is still out on what dinosaurs looked like/acted like (in recent years, there's been a switch to quicker moving avian-like as opposed to slower moving reptilian-like) it was Knight's imaginative renderings, based on fossil reconstructions and the scholarship of his day, that captured the public imagination for so many years. When I look at the paintings in this book, especially of his T-Rex and Brontosaurus, I harken back to elementary school...and I also think "yup...that's what's dinosaurs look like." Stephen J. Gould is referenced for saying that "although Knight never published original research in scientific journals, he was more influential in shaping our ideas about ancient extinct animals than any paleontologist who ever lived."

I found this buzzing around my brain this morning as I thought again about what I reflected on in my last post ("Feeling and Thinking"). The power of imaginative work that engages our senses as well as our minds is staggering. Work that captures our curiosity, makes us feel or ponder, has real longevity -- in our own lives and in the life of the culture. It's not that creative artists can't be scholarly -- many creative artists are also scholars, or are creating their works of art (paintings, songs, stories) as part of a responsive engagement to scholarship. But it's the stories/poems/songs/paintings that have the staying power, long after the scientific (or theological) journals are set aside.

For evidence of that, one need only turn to an imaginative storyteller like C.S. Lewis whose heart and imagination capturing work has phenomenal staying power. So does J.R.R. Tolkien's. The pictures these writers painted of a world invaded by grace have an ability to raise questions, stir eternal longings, and move people Godward. Their work lives on in a way that the work of academic theologians of the same era -- and there were some good ones -- simply can't. I'm not saying that good, theological scholars aren't necessary; I'm not even saying that either Lewis or Tolkien saw themselves as theologians. But they were actively engaged people of faith who poured their grace-steeped views of the world into their work, with the result that the gospel truth was so intricately and beautifully woven into their stories that people still see it and marvel and respond to the whole big picture (and sometimes without even seeing all the threads). 

One of the reasons I think it's so deeply necessary for Christians to engage in the arts (beyond the sheer joy of doing so, in response to our very creative God!) is that it's storied/poemed/sung/painted truth that has a lasting power in the shaping of the human soul and a lasting influence on the culture.

Tolkien as Artist (Heraldic Symbols from Middle-earth)

We're continuing our study of imaginary landscapes in the afterschool arts program today. D. has been researching into art inspired by Tolkien – there’s a lot of it – and he’s also had a fascinating book and documentary video that showcase some of Tolkien’s own visual art.

I knew that J.R.R.T. had done maps, other drawings, and water colors. I had even seen a few of them (mostly the ones that appear on the covers of some editions of his books) but I had no idea how many lovely paintings and drawings he did. Not to mention some very fine doodling. As a somewhat prolific doodler myself, I was happy to see some of the interesting designs he created in pen and ink and watercolor.

One of the things that fascinated me most was to see that he had created heraldic devices, symbols for many of the characters and houses in Middle-earth. It doesn’t really surprise me to learn that he did, given the incredible amount of detail that went into the creation of every aspect of his subcreation: language, geography, cartography, legends, music. It makes complete sense that he would have colors and symbols in mind for his characters. But oh, I love them. As someone who likes to play with repeating designs, I find these symbols beautifully winsome. I think they have inspired me to try my hand at some similar symbols and designs for my characters in the Four Princesses.

They're all lovely, but I think this one, for Luthien, is one of my favorites:

(This is taken from the Tolkien Gateway site; as a non-profit, they use the image under fair use laws.)

Bilbo's Song (An Original Poem)

I have a dragon in my living room. Okay, just the skeleton of one. My husband continues to build Smaug for the middle-school production of The Hobbit he's directing this spring. And I continue to be on a total Tolkien tear, reading more literary criticism than I have in quite a while.

More on some of the things I'm reading soon. For now, a poem I penned a couple of days ago. It sure is lovely to be hanging out with Bilbo again.

Bilbo’s Song

As anyone who knows me likely knows,

at home my life is filled with lovely prose.

Green hills, good food, a round and solid door,

my pipe and blooming garden, heathered moor.

All’s quiet here until the kettle sings.

You’ll find me on the doorstep blowing rings.

But you can read me like an open book.

Away? My life’s a poem, a rushing brook.

The cozy, prosy things so sure and sweet

are like a dream. They keep me on my feet

when journey’s long and all becomes a quest.

And sometimes I’m not sure which I love best.

The homey prose, it fills my traveler’s pack,

but it’s poetry that sings me there and back.

I couldn’t live without the deep, familiar places.

But oh! Indeed I love the wilder spaces.

~EMP 4/15/13

Happy Birthday to the Hobbit!

It's the 75th anniversary of the original publishing date for The Hobbit. I intended to celebrate today by having a second breakfast, but alas, it was one of those days that got off to such a crazy start, I hardly got a first one!

A few things have been making the rounds in honor of this special day. One I especially enjoyed was this article by Devin Brown on the C.S. Lewis blog. It's a lovely post. While most Tolkien and Lewis enthusiasts won't learn much from it that's new, it's still delightful to be reminded of the story of The Hobbit's genesis and of the life-giving friendship between Lewis and Tolkien in the early years.

Two things I especially took away from my reflections on this post today. The first is in reference to The Hobbit's beginning. About that momentous and mysterious start, when Tolkien scribbled the line "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" inside an exam booklet he was correcting, Brown writes:

"Had Professor Tolkien not needed the money which grading secondary school exams provided, had there not been so many of them, had there not been a blank page left in one exam booklet, there might never have been the beloved story we know today."

Don't you love that thought? We can trace the lines in hindsight, but at the time they were such ordinary things. Tolkien was a hard working teacher who needed money and took what I'm sure was a mind-numbing job. (There's that insight again: limitations can sometimes push us to new creative territory.) And in the midst of the mind-numbing pile of papers, a blank page beckoned and a story he didn't even know was percolating put forth its first tentative shoot as he scrawled that one gift line.

Isn't it good of God to give us gift lines and gift images? Remember Lewis saying that Narnia started with the picture of a faun carrying parcels in a wood? From such small beginnings -- one line, one picture -- whole stories can bloom. What a wonderful, mysterious thing creativity is.

And I loved this wonderful reminder from Brown's reflection:

"In a real life story as fascinating as the imaginary ones they would later write, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis became friends, Tolkien became instrumental in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, and then Lewis became instrumental in Tolkien’s completing his great works.  Together they formed the Inklings, the close-knit Oxford reading and writing group which met in Lewis’s college rooms and at a pub named The Eagle and Child.  It was at these meetings that the early versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were first read aloud, critiqued, and made into what they are today."

Again we can trace the lines. Lewis and Tolkien's friendship, complex as it was, was nourishing and fruitful for them both. As Brown goes on to say, after Jack's death Tolkien would talk about what a debt he owed him and how he wouldn't have finished LOTR if it hadn't been for Lewis' encouragement. It was because Lewis wanted to hear more of the story that Tolkien kept writing; he was the kind of writer who needed that encouragement (I think most writers are, but some more than others). Sometimes in our rush to write and create as artists, we can forget how important that gift of encouragement can be to other artists who are also giving their all to write stories that are good and beautiful and true. What it would be to have a friend like Lewis to draw out the best in us. What it would be to be a Lewis for other writers.

It's the beauty and complexity of that collaboration amongst Lewis and Tolkien and the other Inklings that Diana Pavlac Glyer captures so beautifully in her masterful book The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. The book is a great read for many reasons, but I think it especially helped me to understand Tolkien better. As I wrote in my review of the book three years ago:

"If one individual Inkling stands out in this volume, it's Tolkien. Though Glyer does a great job of covering the group as a group, it's inevitable that the members who wrote more and are better known will receive fuller treatment. But I think there's more than that in the thoughtful depths of her look at Tolkien: Glyer clearly wants to paint a more accurate portrait of his working style than has been attempted before. He's often been looked at as a kind of solitary genius, but as Glyer points out (and brilliantly backs up) of all the Inklings, Tolkien may have been the most dependent on community for inspiration and encouragement, as he was what I believe she terms a "notorious non-finisher." 

That was due in part to his incredibly lengthy revisions: he could write for years on one project, and create draft after draft. Just consider that the 600,000 plus words of Lord of the Rings took him about two decades to bring to completion, and that he worked many more years than that on his Silmarillion (only published after his death, its many drafts finally edited by Christopher).  Tolkien, Glyer asserts, would never have finished LOTR without the Inklings: "they supported Tolkien's natural impulse to keep polishing and perfecting his work." Beyond this general encouragement, the Inklings and Lewis in particular made specific comments and suggestions that we know (from evidence Glyer provides here) "led to modifications" in the work. Key changes were made in the shape of the narrative, and even in Tolkien's choice of how to end the book" 

On the 75th anniversary of The Hobbit, we can celebrate not only a wonderful story that has lasted in our hearts for so long, but the creative inspiration and collaboration that stood behind it.

Maybe They Migrated

I love autumn. The leaves here in western Pennsylvania are truly beginning to turn. Yesterday, when I walked to the post office, I was almost stunned by the beauty of the locust tree in the town park, right next to the p.o.'s flagpole. The sky was that lovely shade of blue you hardly ever see except in September/October, and the small leaves on the tree shimmered like golden coins.

The maple by the town gazebo is also blushing from the top down. A carrot top! There are several maples bunched together there, but one of them almost always turns first, and it's currently a blaze of rich, mellowy orange.

One of the advantages of living in so small a town is that you get to know the individual trees so well they fell like old friends. That's why I was shocked to realize the other day that the beautiful ginkgo trees by the public library are gone.

I don't know how I missed this fact. There were three (I think!) lovely ginkgos there for years, their skinny, knobby trunks rising like church spires. The fan-shaped leaves are beautiful when green, but especially noticeable in fall when they turn a perfectly pale yellow. They make wonderful leaf piles to play in, soft and slippery. The sweet girl played in those piles more times than I can count when she was a toddler/preschooler, and we always brought yellow ginkgo leaves home for the table.

We came out of the back door of the library last week and headed for the sidewalk. I had just opened my mouth to say "let's see if the ginkgos have started turning yellow yet" when I stopped, my mouth practically still open, and stared at the spaces where ginkgo trees used to be. Someone must have cut them down in spring or summer (though how we failed to notice this is beyond me) and really rooted them out, stumps and all. We were able to find the still slightly bare patches where the stumps used to be, but just barely.

"Where did they go?" I found myself asking stupidly, and after a thoughtful minute, the sweet girl replied, with a giggle, "Maybe they migrated!"

We had fun amusing ourselves the rest of the way home, imagining the skinny ginkgos stalking around like long-legged storks (I can't wait till we get to Tolkien and the sweet girl becomes acquainted with Ents) but I must confess I'm still in mourning. I wish now that I'd taken photos of those beautiful trees. I miss the delicate yellow fans that used to decorate our fall table.

I feel sad to think of them being cut down. I'd rather imagine them winging their way through October blue skies headed who knows where for the winter.

Literary Influences

I've been thinking a lot about literary influences lately. Partly this stems from all the reading I've been doing, especially in the fantasy genre, where more and more I see things bubbling in the giant "cauldron of story" that J.R.R. Tolkien talked about. Sometimes it's difficult to know just who put what in the pot first, or when and how an author added his or her own special ingredients or gave it a unique stir.

I find it fascinating to wonder how certain stories grew, especially when elements jump out as being so similar in tone or atmosphere to another (often earlier) work. Did the author borrow directly? Did the author perhaps read that other work once at a crucial place in their own formation and development as a person or writer? Did they read it over and over and perhaps soak the story in so deeply that they no longer know where that story finishes and their own starts?

Or are the similarities "coincidental" or unconscious? Could it be that author A has never read author B, but they both share a love of author C (or even art or music or poetry D) and that influence has permeated their work in similar ways, giving their very different stories a similar flavor or scent?

Or is it that there really are only so many stories that can be told in this world, despite the huge variety of people who live them and tell them? Could it be that our shared humanity runs so deep that our memories/experiences are more kin than we usually acknowledge?

And how much does shared genre shape an author's choice? If a writer knows that he or she is plowing familiar territory in a certain kind work, do they perhaps choose to draw (or find themselves drawing naturally) on certain images, character types, symbols, and even narrative rhythms?

I find this whole topic fascinating, but I also find myself welcoming the opportunity to widen the discussion of literary influence beyond mere echoes and similarities of content and style. I recently finished a book that does just that: Diana Pavlac Glyer's The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community.

Although it's not just about Lewis, Glyer's book has joined what I'm coming to think of as my canon of personal favorite books about C.S. Lewis. It's a painstaking and highly readable work of scholarship. More than the meticulous research that went into it, however, and the many new facts I learned about some of my favorite authors, I enjoyed it for its fresh approach to the topic of the Inklings. Glyer asks readers to consider the question of literary influence in much broader perspective than we usually consider it (the context I laid out in the earlier part of this post). She looks at the way community fosters influence, assessing mutual influence by looking not just at similar writing style or writing interest, but by looking at the ways writers in community affect one another as "resonators, opponents/critics, editors, collaborators, and referents." She then proceeds to look at the interaction of the Inklings in light of those categories.

The book gave me much to think about as a reader and a writer, and as someone who appreciates the writing friends and community I have (and longs for more). What role do our writing friends, our resonators, play in our creativity? A far larger role than we might guess, I think.

All of which leads me back to the thoughts that fascinate me about the "echoes" I hear in certain stories. We may never know what lies behind a certain turn of phrase, a choice of image, a decision about a character. But we can be sure that such writerly choices are not made in isolation, even if a writer thinks they're working completely "on their own." There's really no such thing as "on you're own" when you join in the long conversation of creativity that flows down through the ages. When you step up to the pot to create your "own" recipe, you never really start from scratch.

The Joys of Re-Reading

One of the many blessings of discovering kindred spirits in online reading communities is the realization that I am not alone as a re-reader.

I have always loved re-reading books. As a child, the books I loved most were books I went back to again and again. It surprised me when I discovered that not everybody did this, and I went through a period of time when I thought perhaps I was just weird or perhaps not as smart as people who could get everything they needed or wanted from a book the first time through and go on to other things.

Gradually I began to realize that I wasn't re-reading because I forgot "things that happened" in a story (though sometimes I did, and part of the joy was rediscovering events or lines I'd forgotten!) but for the sheer pleasure of revisiting a world I'd loved the first time through. We would never say "oh, I've been to grandma's house once, so I never need to go again." Every trip is different and new, even though elements of such visits are comfortingly familiar.

I use grandma's house as an analogy partly because it was my own paternal grandmother, who came to live with us when I was nine, who presented me with one of my first pictures of an adult re-reader. My parents, who loved books and made sure our house was full of them, were rather busy in that season of my life, busy raising four of us children, taking care of my invalid grandmother, and working hard at their various jobs and household tasks. They both read, but mostly late at night or in the cracks and crevices of their busy lives.

(Side note: I still recall marveling that my mom could fall asleep over a book, something I almost never used to do -- until the past few years. Middle age has not deprived me of my love of reading, but it has ensured there are times when I simply cannot keep my eyes open and end up with my face pillowed on a paperback.)

But my grandmother, who was confined to bed for large portions of the five years she lived with us, seemed to read constantly. And I was intrigued that she went back to her favorites again and again. Suddenly I didn't feel so strange about reading Little Women for the third or fourth time, because there was Mamaw cracking open the red covers of Jane Eyre again.

I've been reading C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism for the first time, and it's such a delight to hear Lewis talk about the joys of re-reading. He hails literary readers as "deep" readers, who often want or need to go back to the same book again and again. He seems to feel that a good book is a book that can and should be revisited often. All of this gels wonderfully with the thoughts of John Granger, whose reflections on the Harry Potter stories I've enjoyed now for several years. In his new book, Harry Potter's Bookshelf (due to be released tomorrow!) John talks about the "slow mining" one can do in the great books, books that have been written with more than one level of meaning and that provide rich treasures for those who are willing to keep going back to dig.

I don't often consciously choose what to re-read when, but more often than not, I find myself busy with a re-read at the same time I'm reading other books for the first time. Certain authors seem to pull me back into their worlds at regular intervals, and even sometimes in regular seasons (Austen is almost always an autumn/winter re-read for me.)

At the moment I'm re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and absolutely loving it. Although I typically re-read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings every 5-7 years, it had been quite a while since I'd done a full read-through of The Hobbit. I'm guessing it's been at least a decade (I know the last time was before the sweet girl was born, at any rate, so over 7 years). I'm about fifty pages from the end now, with the Battle of the Five Armies on the horizon, and while certain images and scenes have definitely come back to me, I'd also forgotten many things. It's been wonderful to re-read for the sake of the story itself, but also eye-opening to think of it as a "prelude" to LOTR (so many foreshadowings and set-ups!) and even to read it with my recent re-read of the Harry Potter series in mind.

I'm still not sure where I fall on the spectrum of thoughts about Tolkien's influence on Rowling (how direct or conscious such influence was) but it's been interesting to note certain similarities. One realization I had was how much Rowling pulls on and yet also subverts, in her usual fascinating way, the story tradition of dragons. Tolkien's Smaug is such a nasty, greedy brute, hoarding every bit of plundered treasure so that he knows down to the last ounce exactly what he's sleeping on, even though he never puts any of it to use except to encrust himself in diamond armor.

It makes perfect story-telling sense for Rowling to have dragons guarding the treasures in the vaults at the deepest levels of Gringotts, the wizarding bank, but the plight of those dragons seems so sad as they're not free (not even free to be greedy and nasty as in stories of old!) and the treasures they are guarding are not their own. By the time we get to Deathly Hallows, we've been long set up to feel sympathy for dragons through Hagrid's care for a baby dragon (and his love for all wild things) and even Harry's grudging admiration for the Hungarian Horntail. The dragon the trio meets in Deathly Hallows is a sad portrait of a proud creature now broken and in chains, trained like a beaten dog to guard someone else's hoard. It makes the whole escape from Gringotts in DH yet another yet moment when Harry, acting on intuition and his own love-shaped character, frees an oppressed fellow-creature. I know it's not his main purpose (he needs to find an escape route, after all!) but it's a happy by-product of his actions, and one that he never seems to regret. As much as JKR writes about Harry's "saving people thing" it's his "freeing people/creatures thing" that feels almost as interesting, whether it's making glass walls disappear at the zoo so the boa constrictor can slither away or making sure Mr. Malfoy hands Dobby a sock. And oh, the fruit of Dobby's freedom...

I did happen to notice that the bit of treasure that Bilbo first sneaks from Smaug's mountain of treasure (the missing bit that enrages the dragon once he wakes up and realizes he's been robbed) was a two-handled cup. It reminded me forcefully of Helga Hufflepuff's cup, the horcrux Harry, Ron and Hermione manage to get from Gringotts and then flee with on the back of the dragon. This time around, the enraged creature is not the dragon (who could care less about the treasures he's guarding for wizards and goblins and only wants his freedom) but red-eyed almost totally inhuman Voldemort. No wonder Voldemort has such an affinity for snakes and basilisks. He's got a greedy, hoarding dragon heart.

Respect for the Body: Lessons from the Deaths of Mad-Eye Moody and Boromir

I've been working my way very slowly through Travis Prinzi's delightful book Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds. There are books I gulp, and then there are books that I want to gulp but realize early on that I would be better served by enjoying slowly and steadily, reading them with pen in hand. Travis' book falls into the latter category for me. After I'd raced through the first two chapters, I decided to start over (with that pencil handy) and read it at a more sane pace. I'm glad I did, for it stands up to that kind of rigorous reading.

I keep meaning to jot some of my thoughts about the book here, but haven't had the opportunity. This morning, however, I was reading along in Chapter 4, Travis' treatment of how Rowling defines and deals with evil in the HP series, and came upon his comment that...

"...Rowling is no Gnostic dualist when it comes to the human being. While there is no unambiguous discussion about a future bodily resurrection in the Christian sense of the idea, Rowling shows tremendous respect for the body. When Mad-Eye is killed, there is no question in the minds of Bill and Lupin about what must be done:

"Mad-Eye's body," said Lupin. "We need to recover it."

"Can't it --?" began Mrs. Weasley with an appealing look at Bill.

"Wait?" said Bill. "Not unless you'd rather the Death Eaters took it?"

Nobody spoke. Lupin and Bill said good-bye and left."

Travis goes on to say how significant it is that they all accepted the importance of recovering Mad-Eye's body before the Death Eaters got to it. "There is nothing of the kind of dismissal of the body that we often hear at funerals..."

I was struck by this (and his following reflections) on various levels. But I also paused because a lightbulb went off over my head. "Ah!" I said. "Boromir!"

Remember Boromir in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings? He was the member of the Fellowship who tried to take the ring from ring-bearer Frodo, then died in a valiant attempt to save Merry and Pippin from a foul band of Orcs.

Back in 2002, my friend David Mills wrote a terrific article for Touchstone magazine entitled The Writer of Our Story: Divine Providence in the Lord of the Rings. I commend the whole article, which is archived here. But the section that stood out to me when I first read it and the one I've not forgotten in all these years is what David writes about the death of Boromir and his friends' care for the body of their fallen comrade (fallen, one might almost say, in more than one sense):

"To obey the laws of their world, they must bury their fallen comrades, but if they do, they will lose several hours before they can chase the Orcs. “First we must tend the fallen. We cannot leave him lying like carrion among these foul Orcs,” says Legolas, and Gimli agrees. But Aragorn says, “But we do not know whether the Ring-bearer is with them [the Orcs] or not. Are we to abandon him? Must we not seek him first?”

It is, as Aragorn says, “an evil choice,” and as far as they know, one that will decide the fate of the whole world. The Orcs, they assume, are servants of Sauron and are taking the Hobbits to him. If the Orcs have captured Frodo, Sauron will get the Ring and the world they love will die. If the Orcs have only captured the other Hobbits, Sauron will torture them in unimaginable ways and learn from them Frodo’s plan and his last known location. Then it will not take Sauron long to find Frodo, and when he finds him, the world they love will die.

It is obvious, to most of us, that they ought to leave the body. Boromir had betrayed them, after all. Burying him could do him no good and would lead, almost certainly, to the final success of evil. And yet they bury him, because that is the right thing to do.

When I first read the book, as a typically secular-minded American twelve-year-old, this scene astonished me. It made no sense. It seemed to me a flaw in the story that these three heroes should do something so pointless and irrational and self-defeating. This is the reaction of those who do not believe in Providence."

David's further comments, in the context of his article, show that if we're looking aright, we can actually see the hand of Providence clearly at work in their seemingly senseless but respectful action. "Because the three spend several hours burying Boromir, they never catch the Orcs who had kidnapped their friends..." he writes, and goes on to explain the whole "domino" chain of events that arises from the fact that Merry and Pippin escape on their own, meet the Ents, etc.

The issue of Providence is one that I think has been under-explored thus far in Harry Potter studies. Is there something comparable going on, either in this decision of Mad-Eye's friends or in other moments where we see Rowling's characters choose "what is right over what is easy"? (to quote Dumbledore). Worth pondering.

But for today I'm simply enjoying the parallels of the two scenes, and what they tell us about proper respect for the body in stories shaped by Christian vision. Bodies, of course, as Travis points out, "matter" (and what a lovely play on words). In a week where we've been reminded by the church that "we are dust and to dust we shall return" we also remember that the sign marked on our foreheads is the sign of a cross, and that our bodies, along with the rest of us, have been fully redeemed by the God who first made human bodies and called them good and then took on flesh in order to redeem fallen and broken humanity.

In a culture often uncomfortable with bodies (that too often chooses to worship, indulge, denigrate or neglect bodies, all skewered responses to the flesh) it's refreshing to come across stories that put bodies in proper perspective. They are not the end-all, but they matter. To God and therefore to us.

Calendar of the Heart: J.R.R. Tolkien, January 3, 1892

It's the 117th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien's birth today. I try to keep what I think of as my own heart's calendar, which includes the birthdays of loved ones, but also the birthdays (or feast days) of saints, poets, writers, artists and musicians who have gone before, leaving the world a much more beautiful place.

To celebrate Tolkien today I turned to this paragraph near the end of The Return of the King. If you've read and loved Lord of the Rings, then you know this moment. It's the place in the narrative I can hardly ever see clearly for tears:

"Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long gray firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise."

Do you ever stop to think how Tolkien and Lewis must have felt when they entered into glory? Both seemed to peek past the veil while still here. Both had such a wondrous, numinous sense of "the other side." You can feel the awe and wonder in their descriptions of light, water, fragrance. More real, you can practically hear them murmur, more real than anything we've ever known, even on our most real days.

Tolkien and Austen

File this under the category of too funny not to post.

It's a cartoon captioned Ents and Sensibility.

Click and enjoy!

(Hat tip to AustenBlog)