Posts Tagged J.R.R. Tolkien

General Introduction
- Spring Breaked, Spring Breaking, Will Spring Break
- No listener feedback

The Old 100^th
- Which tune?
- A happy coincidence
- Defining our terms
- Words to frame God’s glory
- Biblical doxologies

Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow
- A broadening experience
- Our international outreach
- Our own relationships
- Three poles

Praise Him, All Creatures Here Below
- Is this project a form of praise?
- Nathan gets postmodern
- Geist and human consciousness
- A verbal act of resistance
- The God of the dilettantes

Praise Him Above, Ye Heavenly Hosts
- The Sacred Academe
- Our influences
- Getting universalist
- The monastic order of rhetoricians
- Baptizing the imagination

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
- Nathan talks about the Trinity
- Functions of the scriptural narratives
- Apophatic tap-dancing

Amen
- Let it be so
- A type of submission through assent
- More linguistics
- Praise as a method among methods
- A bout of sincerity
- Specificity is the soul of praise

General Introduction
- Grubbs is back!
- Old English
- Snow
- Listener feedback

Etymology
- Not promising
- Madness and wood

Biblical Forests
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- Wildernesses and deserts
- Man-eating forests
- Trees clapping their hands
- Joseph the stonemason

Classical Forests
- Forests and mountains
- Centaurs
- Categories of dryads
- Satyrs and the wildness of the forest
- Dionysus’s origin story
- Not just another biome

Medieval Forests
- Nothing changes
- A place for adventures
- No clear borderline
- Wandering without navigation
- The king’s ownership

Renaissance Forests
- The dark wood of error
- Spenser’s catalogue of trees
- The demythologized forest
- Flexibility of identity
- Allusions and illusions

American Forests
- The errand to the wilderness
- Manifest destiny
- Site of deliberate living
- Woods vs. civilization
- The closing of the frontier
- Wild at heart

Conservation and Ecology
- How are our notions changing?
- Ward of the human race
- The role of photography
- Specimen to ecosystem
- Anthropocentrism
- East vs. West
- The forest at war

Theological Turn
- Loss of awe
- Outliving civilizations
- God’s woods

General Introduction
- Being-towards-the-end-of-semester
- Emmanuels far and near
- Thanks, Theology Nerd Throwdown!
- Chess update

What is a Dystopia?
- Topos
- Utopias and dystopias
- The great temptation
- Distinctions

Premodern Dystopias
- No, not really
- Pre-dystopian Thebes
- Gods and ideologies
- The role of technology
- The Persia of Xerxes

Historical Contingency
- Incredulity toward metanarratives
- Hegel and Marx
- Human feeling vs. ideology
- Why the Enlightenment is necessary

Notable Examples
- The mutability of 1984
- Cybernetic dystopias
- Putting yourself in The Hunger Games
- Tolkien’s dystopic Shire

Outdated Tropes
- The dystopian catchphrase
- Matching outfits
- Run-down cities
- We bash The Matrix
- Utopias

Fueled by Dystopias
- Turning your brain off
- Here we are now; entertain us
- We bash Margaret Atwood and Ayn Rand

The Use of Dystopia
- A mixed reaction
- Altered consciousness
- Self-condemnation
- The grimness of ultimacy

General Introduction
- What’s not on the blog?
- Thus begins the triptych of spring 2012

New Testament Humility
- The ethics of humility
- The Golden Rule, further
- Christ’s kenosis and ours
- Greatness requires great humility
- Gregory the Great Servant

Thomist Humility
- Aristotelian balance
- Seven virtues
- The interconnectedness of virtue
- Humility as check on magnanimity

Dante’s Terrace of the Prideful
- Exemplary statues
- The triple humility of the Annunciation
- David’s humble showmanship
- Trajan as model for Christian humility
- Justice needs humility
- The trials of the proud

Nietzsche Deconstructs Humility
- Return to pagan morality
- Inversion of master and slave
- Socratic and Christian humility
- Freud’s Neurotic Humility
- Modern self-esteem

Literary Humility
- The quiet hobbit
- Whitman’s egotheism
- Rebel rebel angels join the chorus

Humility as Tool of the Powerful
- Philippians as cure
- Quiet oppression
- The example of Africa
- Thomas’ pre-solution
- What isn’t humility?
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Christian Classics, 1981. Five Volumes.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. Three Volumes.

Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography. New York: Norton, 2012.

Milton, John. The Complete Poems. New York: Norton, 2004.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Adrian del Caro. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Seattle: Mariner, 2005.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Modern Library, 1993.

• Chris Gehrz of CWC the Radio Show joins the blog scene
• The role of the humanities in the university and why we’ve failed
• Two visions of democracy and why one of them is poison
• On legal briefs as literary texts (or episodes of 24, at any rate)
• As it turns out, that graduation speaker wasn’t serious about going out and changing the world.
• The fine art and eternal duty of educating hobbits
• An endangered species: the economist who finds economists silly
• 

General Introduction
- New segment: Michial Farmer’s world of women’s fashion
- Thanks for not writing in
- Why Nathan is the left-leaner amongst us
- What’s on the blog?

Aesop Ipsa Loquitur
- Is the country mouse a rube?
- Other Greek notions about the polis
- Plato’s suburban pharmacy
- The importance of human contact

Contrasting the Hebrew Perspective
- Cities and corruption
- Solomon’s urban fervor
- That curséd wilderness
- Garden as Hebraic ideal
- Gilgamesh civilizes the wild man
- Moses goes out beyond the boundary of imagination

The New Testament and the Early Church
- Christ the vagrant
- Equal-opportunity parables
- Augustine and Rome
- The heretical countryside

The Middle Ages and The Renaissance
- Churches and urban centers
- The origins of pagan
- Snookering-slash-correcting the rubes
- Langland gets sympathetic
- A new kind of pastoral
- London as hell

The Romantics
- Hegel and the city
- The Romantics fight back
- The country laborer and the university Marxist
- The rise of industrialization

America!
- The errand to the wilderness
- Puritan commerce
- The early decay of Boston
- Continual westward expansion
- Sister Carrie’s ambiguous ending
- The urban pushback and the abandonment of small towns
- Make the noise stop, please

The Cynical Midcentury
- The suburbs take over the shire
- The American dream gets transplanted
- American re-creation
- The stultifying suburbs
- Farmer on On the Road
- The vanishing rural
- All God’s children are terrible

The Takeaway
- Automobile culture
- But let’s not romanticize
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aesop. Fables. Trans. Laura Gibbs. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York: Norton, 1995.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 1729-1867.

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Blake, William. Poetry and Designs. Ed. John E. Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson. New York: Norton, 2007.

Bunker, Nick. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History. New York: Knopf, 2010.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Felix. Life of Saint Guthlac. Trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1999.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman. Ed. Elizabeth Ann Robertson and Stephen H.A. Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2006.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

—. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Picador, 2005.

Sidney, Philip. The Major Works. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Mariner, 2005.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Music this week is “Isn’t That What Friends Are For?” from Bruce Cockburn’s 1999 album Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu.

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- All hail Craig Farmer (no relation)
- Old Man Gilmour tells us all to get off his lawn

Friendship in the Ancient World
- Aristotle’s friendship between equals
- Can friendship exist without sexual contact?
- Cicero’s common pursuit of good things

David and Jonathan
- David Grubbs’ personal connection
- Why were David and Jonathan friends at all?
- (LACUNA)
- The “homosexual” reading of David and Jonathan
- (Please pardon our oscillating fan during this segment)
- Exploding the dichotomy of sexual identification
- In which we cast David and Jonathan in a Judd Apatow movie

Christ and His Friends
- Nathan gets technical
- Jesus shakes things up
- A new kind of philia and agape

The Friendship of the Inklings
- Michial admits that he ripped this episode off
- Who were the Inklings?
- The friendship of common interests
- When friendship gets brutal

Michial Extemporizes About Existentialism
- Seeking a jingle for this segment
- The glory of the isolated individual
- Why is hell other people?
- How religion solves the problem
- Buber’s I and Thou, and Marcel’s testimony
- Let’s get linguistic

Literary Friendships
- Jeremy Irons speaks some sense!
- Achilles and Patroclus
- Watson makes Holmes more human
- Tolkien’s interracial friendships
- American literature and friendship
- Ishmael drops Queequeg
- Huck and Jim vs. Marlowe and Lennox

Ephemeral Friendships
- MICHAEL W. SMITH LIED TO US?
- Grubbs invokes Old English (as usual)
- Do you have real friends in high school?
- The we and the that
- (Sorry—I can’t make this edit sound natural. Blame Skype!)

Friends and the Internet
- Michial’s 221 Facebook friends
- No offense if you like The Matrix
- Mutual pursuit of intellectual excellence
- The illusion of mutuality
- Getting rid of Aristotle
- David endorses South Park blanketedly

A Specifically Christian Friendship
- Let’s talk ecclesiology
- Radical inclusivity
- “In Christ There Is No East or West”
- “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
- “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 1729-1867.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1970.

Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Cicero. Laelius, on Friendship and the Dream of Scipio. Trans. J.G.F. Powell. Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 1991.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 1991.

Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy of Existentialism. Trans. Manya Harari. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1956.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 506-536.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1956.

—. No Exit. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1989. 1-46.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.

That’s the end of Season 2, folks. We’ve had a great time doing the show, and we’re glad you listen. We explain our summer plans in the show itself. Keep listening, and keep reading!

General Introduction
- So long, Season 2
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog?
- Our summer plans and our love for decimal places

Beginning Apophatically
- Literary criticism vs. critical theory
- The Academy and the newspaper
- The professor and the amateur
- The unconscious and the conscious
- Literary criticism vs. book reviews
- Why age is more than a number
- The bleeding edge of criticism

Auden Makes the Rules
- Historical context
- Overcome evil with good
- Subjectivity
- How to tell if a critic is any good
- Development of taste
- The pleasures of the text

Old Stuff
- The extreme POETIX! of  Chuck “Ham-Bone” Aristotle
- Dorothy Sayers’s internalization of Aristotle
- The gaping hole of the Anglo-Saxon period
- Boethius and his epic, tragic harlots
- Philip Sidney to the rescue!
- Milton’s dismissal of fiction
- The Calvinist aesthetic defense of Scripture

The Aesthetes and Decadents
- The critic as artist and the artist as critic
- Creation vs. criticism
- Rules for independent critics
- Why Wilde would like Lester Bangs
- Complicating, not explaining
- What does “art for art’s sake” actually mean?

A New Kind of Criticism
- Connection to the Southern Agrarians
- Reaction to the Old Historicism
- Text as self-contained and unified
- Why the New Critics overreacted
- New Criticism as all-consuming blob

Mythological Criticism
- Deeper into Tolkien
- The Mythography Project
- Finding patterns in mythology
- Frye’s embrace of archetype
- The Gospel’s role in myth criticism

Heroic Criticism and American Studies
- The Heroic Critic as true believer
- Defining the newly emergent America
- Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination
- The difference in seriousness
- Intellectual decline
- [] you, you bourgeoisie pig!
- Defining Americanism(s)

Jiving Criticism and Art
- Why poets can’t write well about poetry
- Historical moments
- The need for critical distance
- A fist-fight breaks out!!
- Artists who do great criticism
- Is this a difference in eras?
- The problem with self-accounts
- Michial prepares for hate mail from creative-writing students
- Does scholarship create better writing?

Getting Personal
- To what extent is our academic output literary criticism?
- Auden makes David self-aware
- Nathan’s Hegelian synthesis
- Michial tries to complicate, not simplify

Post-Theory Criticism
- The Emmanuel Laboratory
- Nathan as the singular Voice of Criticism
- David fights to stay in the middle
- The non-academic return to Auden’s world

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Auden, W.H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Mariner, 1956.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Ed. John T. McNeill. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Two volumes.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. San Francisco: New World Library, 2008.

Chesterton, G.K. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. 47-59.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor, 1992.

Frazier, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Frye, Northrop. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004.

Jung, Carl. Jung on Mythology. Ed. Robert A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Two volumes.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 619-669.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Three volumes.

Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: Greenwood, 1979.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 212-251.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 5-48.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Waking Lion, 2008.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 241-297.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. New York: Penguin, 1996.

I do not recall when I first encountered the notion of a pathetic fallacy: a literature course, doubtless, but I’ve had many of those. I was almost certainly an undergraduate, because the pathetic fallacy was introduced simply as a term, with a plain, dry definition; I was told nothing of its connotative implications, and we certainly didn’t read John Ruskin’s essay, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy.” The definition I was given was very like the one provided by Wiktionary at the link above: “[T]reating inanimate objects or concepts as if they were human beings, for instance having thoughts or feelings.” It was, I was taught, synonymous with such terms as anthropomorphism and personification. What I was not told was the attitude implicit in the term, expressed in the bit I omitted from the definition above: the pathetic fallacy is “an error in logical argumentation.” Thus does the Victorian Ruskin employ the word “fallacy,” because, for him, art’s paramount concern is to be true, to see the world as it is, so that personification is a frivolous fiction or a lapse of sanity:

[i]t is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. (5)

Not that the pathetic fallacy is not pleasing, but “it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it,” while “the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness” (6). Such poets rise above the mind-bending caprice of emotion:

[T]he intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating ; even if he melts, losing none of his weight. (8)

The rational, unpoetical man sees autumn leaves moved about by the wind; the irrational, poetical man sees dancing autumn leaves; but the rational, poetical man sees autumn leaves move as if dancing, his logical mind careful to preserve the self-awareness of simile.

But all of this Ruskinage is preamble! Let’s move on to Tolkien, shall we?

Awakening Metaphor and the Song of Willows

The moment to which I wish to draw your attention, dear reader, occurs about halfway through Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring, as Frodo and company begin their furtive journey to Rivendell by way of the perilous Old Forest. The Old Forest, says Merry Brandybuck, is “very much more alive” than the tame woods of the Shire (121). This “aliveness” is referenced many times as they ride fearfully through the forest, yet Tolkien carefully hedges the hobbits’ perceptions with the language of subjectivity: they “got an uncomfortable feeling” that the tree were watching them, “the trees seemed constantly to bar their way,” “it seemed to them that the Forest relented,” etc. (122, 123).

Having been prepped throughout childhood with spook tales of the Old Forest, the hobbits are emotionally overwrought, alternately panicked and despondent as they get more and more lost. They are, according to Ruskin, in a state particularly susceptible to the pathetic fallacy: “[T]hat of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion” (8). Tolkien’s emphasis on feelings and “seeming,” accompanied by the hobbits’ mounting anxiety, encourages readers to be skeptical of these perceptions of “aliveness”–we sympathize with the poor little guys, but they seem only to be lost hikers freaking themselves out.

When, in the end, they leave the deep woods and find themselves in the Withywindle Valley–not the place they’d meant to go–the hobbits’ paranoia about the Old Forest has peeked: they are convinced that the trees have driven them to the Withywindle River for some sinister purpose. However, Frodo and company are also exhausted. After emerging from the stuffy woods, they walk for a time in the cool shade of the willows, then all begin to feel drowsy. This seems natural enough: it’s been a hard journey, and the combination of shade, a cool breeze, and the lulling rustle of willow leaves make for an ideal outdoor nap. The hobbits process these conditions as they have all phenomena in the Old Forest: they personify them.

There now seemed hardly a sound in the air. The flies had stopped buzzing. Only a gentle noise on the edge of hearing, a soft fluttering as of a song half whispered, seemed to stir in the boughs above. [Frodo] lifted his heavy eyes and saw leaning over him a huge willow-tree, old and hoary. Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissure that creaked faintly as the boughs moved. [...]

[...] [Merry and Pippin] looked up at the grey and yellow leaves, moving softly against the light, and singing. They shut their eyes, and then it seemed that they could almost hear words, cool words, saying something about water and sleep. They gave themselves up to the spell and fell fast asleep at the foot of the great grey willow. (127-8)

If one is unaware of what happens next, this is actually a pleasant scene, and also a poetically apt description of napping under a willow tree, which I’ve done and can recommend.

Unfortunately for Frodo and company, the scene continues: the willow flings Frodo into the river, then seals up Merry and Pippin within the fissures of its massive trunk. The old willow is alive. The hobbits’ pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, but precisely descriptive. Their fears are not irrational projections on inanimate nature, but completely justified. The rustling leaves were not like a voice: they were a voice that “rustled and whispered, but with a sound now of faint and far-off laughter” (129). The willow is alive, aware, and active; Tolkien’s emphasis on feeling and “seeming” is a trick, lulling readers as surely as the leaves lulled the hobbits. He permits us to get comfortable in the familiarity of metaphor–and then he wakes the metaphor up, and we find we were never safe, that we walked in Faërie and knew it not.

Rejoicing or a Passable Simulation Thereof?

I certainly admire this as a literary technique, but it’s also made me think about how I read poetry, especially the poetry of scripture. Consider, for example, the following excerpts from two very similar psalms, Psalm 96 and Psalm 98:

¹⁰Say among the heathen that the LORD reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously.
¹¹Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof.
¹²Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice
¹³Before the LORD: for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth: he shall judge the world with righteousness, and the people with his truth.

⁶With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the LORD, the King.
⁷Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.
⁸Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together
⁹Before the LORD; for he cometh to judge the earth: with righteousness shall he judge the world, and the people with equity.

Seems to be an awful lot of anthropomorphizing going on here: rejoicing heavens, roaring seas, applauding floods. Still, it’s effective: I imagine crashing waves and swaying trees, and feel I know what it is like for nature to “rejoice before the LORD.” But then comes that kill-joy John Ruskin: the crashing waves just sound like applause, which is also suggested by their movement; the grain that bends in the breeze looks like it’s dancing, but it isn’t, and the susurration of stalk on stalk is most certainly not quiet song. It’s just a lot of inanimate stuff, moving randomly because of the wind or gravity or whatever, which are themselves random and animate. So, no actual rejoicing, really: just an impressionable psalmist caught up in the moment, unaware of his silliness.

But if we read these psalms in this way, what is left? If creation is not rejoicing, but instead doing a passable simulation thereof, at least for those susceptible to such crudities–do these verses say anything meaningful at all? No, if this is our hermeneutic, these verses are nothing but artful filler: there seems to be no room in Ruskin’s conception of nature for a rejoicing creation.

Perhaps, then, we ought to try another conception of nature. I’d like to take a stab at that, taking Tolkien and the psalmists as my guide. That will be the project of another day, though; and, like as not, this post will grow into a Gilmourian serial. For now, I am content if I have made our readers look uneasily at willow trees, unsure whether they will attack or rejoice.

Works Cited

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring. London: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

And so he did: Bilbo Baggins, that is. However, the opening sentence of Tolkien’s story could just as easily describe another hobbit–a girl hobbit, who is now referred to be the name “Flo”. Unlike Bilbo’s hole, Flo’s hole was indeed nasty, dirty, and wet–a muddy cave on the little island called Flores. And, also unlike Bilbo, Flo was real.

The story is too big to recount fully here, so I’ll hit the high points. In 2003, a band of intrepid scientists, digging about on the island of Flores in Indonesia, discovered something they hadn’t been looking for: the skeleton of what appeared to be an adult human, except that it was only about three feet tall. The stature of the skeleton was not terribly unusual–genetic dwarfism can produce people of that scale–but the size of the skull was very unusual: it was the size of a grapefruit and it possessed physical features very unlike human skulls today, especially in the jaw and the brow region.

The researchers concluded that this was a new kind of human, not simply a deformed, but otherwise ordinary, human. They named it after the island on which it was discovered–Homo Floresiensis–and dubbed the single complete specimen “Flo”. However, since many of the scientists were New Zealanders, the countrymen of Peter Jackson, the tiny skeleton reminded them of another cultural phenomenon, and so Homo Floresiensis acquired the nickname “Hobbit”.

Of course, the scientists still argue about whether Homo Floresiensis was really a separate breed of human or just an anomaly: skeptics cite such genetic defects as dwarfism and microcephaly as possible causes for Flo’s stature and proportions. (Also there was bad blood between the Indonesian scientists and the New Zealanders, which further complicated research.) However, the arguments supporting the idea of Homo Floresiensis as a distinct type of human seems dominant at the moment. They were not simply apes: though their brains were on a smaller scale than ours, their brain structures associated with higher level cognition were much like ours in size and shape (“The Brain of LB1″). The caves Flo was found in also contained stone tools scaled to her size and the remains of butchered animals, both signs of higher order (i.e. human) intelligence. (This is the most recent research on the subject, and the article that returned my thinking to the matter of hobbits.)

So, it seems as if there was, at least at one time and in one place, a race of people roughly half our size. This excites me. If little people were in Indonesia, where else might they have been? Were they, perhaps, the original brownies, huldufolk, and menehune? I don’t know, given that there’s been no physical evidence of a distinct group of little people anywhere else, but the notion seems more possible now than it did ten years ago.

(Not that the possibility has never been considered: it was a common theory amongst Victorian folklorists and anthropologists that British fairy lore stemmed from dim memories of a more primitive race that once inhabited the British Isles: a race notable for its small stature relative to that of the invaders. For a scholarly take on this, consult Silver’s Strange and Secret People: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, especially the chapter on “Little Goblin Men.” For a literary imagining of such things, read Arthur Machen’s The Shining Pyramid.)

I must confess, however, that the possibility of hobbits also stirs anxiety in me. What sort of folk were they? Were they our kind of people? In short, were they human in the senses I see myself as human, not only biologically but also theologically? I don’t think this is a question science can answer. Certainly they can comment on the size and shape of brain structures–and they have–but they cannot find a soul in those old bones, anymore than they can find one in a living brain. All we are left with are the physical remains of a creature very like us and very unlike us. Hobbits live in the Uncanny Valley, always a distressing place to visit.

Sadly, I can’t offer answers on this subject. Still, I’m hardly the first to ask it, and perhaps steering our readers to the answer of a wiser man than myself is better, anyway. So, how did Augustine handle this question?

Chapter 8.— Whether Certain Monstrous Races of Men are Derived from the Stock of Adam or Noah’s Sons.

It is also asked whether we are to believe that certain monstrous races of men, spoken of in secular history,  have sprung from Noah’s sons, or rather, I should say, from that one man from whom they themselves were descended. For it is reported that some have one eye in the middle of the forehead; some, feet turned backwards from the heel; some, a double sex, the right breast like a man, the left like a woman, and that they alternately beget and bring forth: others are said to have no mouth, and to breathe only through the nostrils; others are but a cubit high, and are therefore called by the Greeks “Pigmies:”  they say that in some places the women conceive in their fifth year, and do not live beyond their eighth. So, too, they tell of a race who have two feet but only one leg, and are of marvellous swiftness, though they do not bend the knee: they are called Skiopodes, because in the hot weather they lie down on their backs and shade themselves with their feet. Others are said to have no head, and their eyes in their shoulders; and other human or quasi-human races are depicted in mosaic in the harbor esplanade of Carthage, on the faith of histories of rarities. What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men? But we are not bound to believe all we hear of these monstrosities. But whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast. We can distinguish the common human nature from that which is peculiar, and therefore wonderful. (CoG XVI.8)

So, there you have it: Homo Floresiensis was mortal–the bones prove it–as well as rational, so far as we can tell from the skull and tools. Ergo, hobbits are people, too! (But so are dog-headed men, and monopods.)

Perhaps not the most satisfying answer, really, but Augustine’s logic can be readily connected to his theology. The marks of humanity are mortality and rationality, thus distinguishing humans from angels (immortal and rational) and beasts (mortal and not rational). Why are humans rational? Because we were made in the image of God: “God, then, made man in His own image. For He created for him a soul endowed with reason and intelligence, so that he might excel all the creatures of earth, air, and sea, which were not so gifted” (CoG XII.23). Rationality is, therefore, what distinguishes the human from the animal. Why are humans mortal? Because, claims Augustine, death is penal, and all who are of Adam’s race die:

For God had not made man like the angels, in such a condition that, even though they had sinned, they could none the more die. He had so made them, that if they discharged the obligations of obedience, an angelic immortality and a blessed eternity might ensue, without the intervention of death; but if they disobeyed, death should be visited on them with just sentence. (CoG XIII.1)

Note that for Augustine, humanity and Adam’s lineage are an identical set, two ways of saying the same thing. Those who read Genesis differently from Augustine, and those who don’t consult Genesis at all, will certainly object to the equivalence of hominids with the Adamic lineage. Still, I think Augustine’s definition of humanity is worth examining, because it isn’t biological, but in fact an interesting blending of the metaphysical and the experiential. The quiddity of the human is found not in the number and orientation of one’s limbs and organs, but in a particular relationship to time and eternity, to matter and spirit, to entropy and order. To live at the nexus of those contraries is what it is to be human.

Apparently, hobbits lived at that nexus with us, though we may have forgotten them,  or never even knew them.  Which leads me to a concluding question, to which I also lack an answer: will we meet hobbits in Heaven? I certainly hope so!