Julie and Scott, feeling the heavy weight of the One Ring, happily accept Seth Wilson's kind assistance in a discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This conversation could not be contained in a single podcast! This is Part 1 of 2. See Episode 77 for Part 2.
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More stuff:
- Corey Olsen, The Tolkien Professor
- Michael D.C. Drout
- Rob Inglis, Narrator of the Recorded Book version of Lord of the Ring, on Goodreads
Haha! I just finished reading it last night...except for the Appendices. Does that count?
ReplyDeleteAnd I have vowed to never read the Appendices (or the Silmarillion) ...
DeleteHeck yeah, that counts! Don't tell anyone but I haven't read the Appendices either! But I will.
ReplyDeleteBest day ever! LOTR podcast and a snowday! :)
ReplyDeleteEh, it's okay.
ReplyDelete... Kidding.
More on LOTR later when I have more time, but as for C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy... I really don't know how to describe That Hideous Strength, but it's not very much like the first two. I actually think his portrayal of evil in that one is fairly dead on especially in the modern age and contrasting it with Perelandra. It's obviously still Christian in its intent but his constant contrasting of good and evil in the modern world makes it fascinating to me.
I doubt Julie would be able to get through any of Wither's speeches without falling asleep, though. They just make me laugh :)
I'll be giving it my best shot! Thank goodness for audio! :-)
DeleteAnother discussion full of awesome and even better I can look forward to the second part.
ReplyDeleteI never read any Tolkien until I was about 40. So references to it from some of my fav bands such as Led Zeppelin & Rush passed me by.
For quite a while I was adverse to the Fantasy genre for not being scientific. I prided myself on liking hard SF. Conversely though I loved movies based on mythology/fantasy.
My turnaround came about when at a library I just wanted to read a series that the base library had the whole thing of. It turned out to be the Thomas Covenant series Stephen R. Donaldson. Later R.A. Salvatore became one of my favorite authors and he writes that Tolkien's book were his start and inspiration. Still I didn't read Tolkien. I remember in High School seeing a parody book called "Bored of the Rings", which I think biased me against it. Seeing the cartoon version of LOTR didn't help.
During my conversion to the Church I kept running across references to Tolkien and his books over and over again including on a Catholic home school list. That finally got me to read them and I was totally stunned. What if I had never read them? An agonizing thought. In the last decade I think I have reread the full series 5 times and now that I have the audiobooks I have put it on the annual cycle and have just finished the Hobbit again. My only other annual book is Chesterton's Orthodoxy.
What I love about the series is that I get more out of it every time I read it.
By the way have any of you listened/read Joseph Pearce's commentary on the series? I have one course he gave on audio that was excellent called The Hidden Meaning of The Lord of the Rings. It had cool information like the fact that the nine companions begin their fateful mission on December 25 and their story climaxes exactly three months later, on March 25 the feast of the Annunciation. I've read his Tolkien biography which I really enjoyed and have his books regarding The Hobbit on my wish list.
I haven't heard Pearce's commentary but that talk I mentioned, which I will find and link to, goes into the date information. There was never a good time to bring that up but I loved the fact that it is another "hidden in plain sight" Catholic symbol which does not intrude upon those who don't need it.
DeleteI have been resisting the urge to put the audio on my iPod again (LOTR twice a year? is this formational or addictive? haha!), but in listening to Lewis's trilogy I was wondering if it also was going to become an annual audio for me. It goes hand in hand with LOTR, albeit more obviously (a la Orthodoxy).
My experience is quite close to Jeff's only I read The Hobbit as a kid and never got to LOTR probably because I was lazy. Then the movies came out and one viewing of Fellowship made me question why that was. Nothing went the way I was expecting it to, all the characters had more to them than I thought they would, and the story (yes, I also loved the council) kept me totally enthralled. Tolkien did everything with these stories and effectively ruined epic fantasy for me. Nothing in the genre comes close on an epic scale and few stories portray the battle of good and evil (and "Good and Evil") anywhere near as well.
ReplyDeleteYou guys covered so much in this one part that I don't even know what else to add. I can't wait for part 2!
Tolkien almost ruins all other fiction for me (Dickens excepted). His writing style is such that it leaves me not wanting to sully the purity with other works ... leaves me having to read nonfiction for several days afterwards.
DeleteWe got to two hours and I kept saying, "Oh no, we've only covered the first book." The last two hours we began just hitting main points and bouncing around more. And there was still so much more to say.
The beauty of participating in something like this is that when I listen to it later I can enjoy it while thinking about it differently. When you are conversing, you are thinking about your contributions and just don't catch everything the same way. I really enjoyed this one and am going to come back to it again.