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J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King with Kirsten Sanders · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: In 1937, an Oxford University professor of Anglo-Saxon, who had spent his life studying the most obscure aspects of philology that only serious academic experts can ever understand, published something non-academic.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was a fantasy novel for young readers, titled The Hobbit.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Already at the time, this writer, J.R.R.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Tolkien, was mulling an idea for a much longer book set in that same fantasy world.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: That longer book, The Lord of the Rings, took him another decade to complete.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it was finally published nearly two decades after The Hobbit.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Although not everyone was a fan right away, it became an international bestseller.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Tolkien today is considered the father of the modern fantasy fiction genre.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: He had intended The Lord of the Rings to be one book, but his publisher split it into three.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: The edition in my house reunites all three parts into one book, 1,008 pages of text.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: That is, before we even get to the appendices that Tolkien had intended to be part of the text, too.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps the publisher had a point there.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now the third and final installment of The Lord of the Rings is titled The Return of the King.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was finally published 70 years ago in 1955.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Appropriately, it opens in the midst of action.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: He wondered if he was awake, was still sleeping, still in the swift-moving dream in which he had been wrapped so long since the great ride began.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: The dark world was rushing by and the wind sang loudly in his ears.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: He could see nothing but the wheeling stars.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And away to his right, vast shadows against the sky where the mountains of the south marched past.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sleepily, he tried to reckon the times and stages of their journey, but his memory was drowsy and uncertain.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a new podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: I am Nadia Williams, and today it is a delight to speak about Tolkien's Return of the King with Kirsten Sanders.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: She is a theologian, Tolkien fan, and a writer.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: She holds a PhD from Emory University and lives with her family in Massachusetts.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, Kirsten, thank you for being here.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: So this season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary this year.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to open with a somewhat more abstract question before we get to Lord of the Rings in particular.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: What is a classic?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is it enough that we're still reading this book 70 years after publication?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or what other criteria would you add?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's in some ways a difficult question, Nadia.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think to make something a classic, it has to endure because the themes themselves remain resonant in some way.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: What's interesting, you could do a whole series, I think, on that question, right?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's not necessarily self-evident.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: There has to be interest, continuing interest in reading the text.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: And what can constitutes the interest is usually some sort of symbol system or set of themes that continue to mean something to the readers.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um whether that meaning shifts over time itself is another interesting question.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: How would you answer the question?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's interesting because I've spent my career studying older classics.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of um, so the joke uh in my like undergraduate department was if it has BC next to the number, it's a classic.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: But um like, but obviously uh we're broadening the definition here and saying there are still classics that are being made today.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: But the question is, how are they um how are they different or how are they similar?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you touched on something significant there that like those themes, there's something about those works.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Classics, whether published in uh, you know, 100 BC or 70 years ago, um, share certain characteristics that appeal to all of us.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess the shared nature of human experience um comes through.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess the nature of good and evil is perhaps a big theme that we see repeatedly.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that question remains so current and it remains so it's a juicy question theologically.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was rereading, I'm I was a reluctant Tolkien reader.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I'm not sure if you'd like me to talk about this now or or later.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Go for it.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: But the Lord of the Rings has such a vast reputation, and it's developed a kind of uh cult status, I think, among its readers.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so my experience of Tolkien came largely through the people who were like rabid fans, the kind of people that would dress up for anniversaries and film releases and things like that.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that just wasn't my style.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they weren't, it was so obsessive.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And um I'm not a fantasy reader.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've never had that skill for the world-building literature.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: I lose track of the histories and the names and the origin stories.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not, I think it's the same reason I don't like board games, like the really intensive ones.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: I just can't keep track of all the details.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: The things that are interesting to me about literature tend to be the emotional themes or that kind of character development.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I assumed that I wouldn't be interested by the literature.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I was somewhat turned off by it because of the refutation of its readership.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it can be intimidating, I think.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like you said, it's a very long book, but it's also brought to itself people who are so devoted to the literature, you can be kind of afraid to step your toe in because you don't want to offend anyone or you don't want to get something wrong.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so even when you asked me to talk about Tolkien, I was quite nervous because I still there's there's so much about these books that I just don't understand.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't ever tipped into the Cimmerillion and intended to figure out, you know, the origin stories of many of the characters.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: And folks can be quick to correct you if you do get something wrong.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I was trying to find a writerly voice that wasn't an academic one, which is why I decided to write through it as an exercise.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I did have a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it would annoy the people that I was friends with who loved Tolkien to have a complete novice attempt to write about it.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I was really surprised pretty quickly how resonant the book was for me.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I mean, you're a theologian, which means you study a lot of texts that everybody disagrees about and fights about, and it's uh very serious because I mean it has to do with salvation uh in connection with some of the issues.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I feel like you're you live in the world of those sorts of fights.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I and at least this one doesn't have to do with salvation.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you misinterpret the Lord of the Ring, you're okay.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're not going to Although you will hear from people, absolutely, uh, when you get things wrong.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: I I think what's different about me is I like the fights.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: I find it ex I find that it energetic.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I wouldn't be interested in studying something that was settled or that had a clear um, you know, set of I guess theology definitely does have a clear set of rules for dealing with certain texts, but I tend to like the messy parts.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that might be part of I I liked the idea of um stumbling onto a text that had quite a literature around it, blind.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: I hadn't seen the movies, I didn't know what happened.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know secondary reading on purpose, and I just kind of wanted to see what would happen.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Funny um bit of trivia.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my first job out of grad school, one of my colleagues was a professor emeritus uh who Douglas Parker at the University of Texas at Austin, he had reviewed The Lord of the Rings when it first was published.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: What did he say about it?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: He loved it.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: He was one of the first fans of the work.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so funny because like he had been um a very well-re-regarded translator.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: He passed away about a decade ago, but he was very, very old like when I knew him.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, it's so funny, like the fame of the Lord of the Rings, that like now, if you Google his name, Douglas Parker, uh, what comes up is that he was one of the first people who uh one of the first academics who read The Lord of the Rings and thought this is brilliant.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's so cool.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Even though he himself, uh Parker himself was brilliant and was a finalist for like the National Book Award for his translations and so on.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, like the fame, your true fame, comes from reviewing The Lord of the Rings.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's, you know, what's interesting about The Lord of the Rings too is that you you mentioned in your introduction that it was intended as young adult literature, but the kind of the sophistication of Tolkien's treatment of the characters and of the themes far surpasses what I would consider young adult literature, especially the literature that's published currently.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the fact that it's drawn to itself such of uh readership and a secondary literature says so much about his ability to really get inside some of these theological concepts and narrate them for his readers.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's dive in.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So since The Return of the King is the third part of this longer work, let's start with a basic orientation.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we don't want to totally spoil the plot to the readers, but or listeners who might not have read it already, but um at the same time, it's probably kind of unavoidable.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so let's give you some background.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what should someone know when reading this book, especially if they pick it up for the first time?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm gonna say something that else first, which is that you're in the middle of a story.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: So the first volume is already set in a universe that Tolkien's imagined.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we're in the the middle of the unfolding of this broader contest between good and evil.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Middle-earth, where we are in the volume, is a good and beautiful place, but there's great uh threats at hand, and you don't feel the threats early on.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's very idyllic and pastoral when you start.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: But there's kind of this looming uh danger that appears in the form of this ring.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the ring itself has great power, but it's been um it's been um held for a while by um by Bilbo, who passes it to Frodo, who inherits this ring and is kind of how would you describe Frodo's personality, Nadia?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's I mean, it seems like it changes over the course of the book, the whole point of like being because it's he starts out as a little more carefree, it seems like.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then the the weight of responsibility, kind of like I see my children, you know, the older you get, the more you realize like I it's more than just me in the world.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like there are other people who expect me to behave in particular ways.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the the responsibility of of okay, so the ring holds great power, and Frodo, the power is evil power, right?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's not um and so the only way to protect um the ring is held by was originally created by Sauron, who's the dark lord, and who's whose intense uh hunger for power is kind of unstoppable.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the ring would allow him to to get more and more power and to final finalize his defeat of um the whole the whole world.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so keeping the ring from him is one way to prevent the total destruction of um the world that they inhabit.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the story starts with well, we pick up the story with this quest to get rid of the ring so that it stays out of evil hands.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Does that seem fair to you without spoiling too much?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Have I gotten anything wrong?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's the broad brush strokes, yes.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that so it is very much a novel about the fight between good and evil, the most basic.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's a couple things that is already like theologically.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking this morning when I was thinking about the ring, because evil, when we when when when we ask what evil is, it's such a tense question.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's so so rich.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: But with the ring and with Sauron, we see that evil has a a hunger to it.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't just sit in the corner waiting to be discovered, right?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's its desire is to rule over you.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is the the language for sin in Genesis.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea that we might that we might have a evil power that's desire is to destroy actively is already like in the ring.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien got that and somehow conceptualized it.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we see that the battle between good and evil is not passive, right?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you do nothing, evil will win.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's also striking.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's hungry, it's aggressive.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: It just occurred to me, you know, like the unusual.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um how do you explain to people like what is good, what is evil?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And here you have this simple, like, well, this ring, like you can see it, you can touch it.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't, we don't normally as adults perhaps we don't think about it, uh, those abstract thoughts as having like physical nature.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And and it, and it's the it's the ring itself, you know, is a neutral material artifact, right?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: It you might have a the piece of uh metal or whatever it's composed of, it's not itself evil, but it contains this like desirous obsession within it.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: It holds this power to it.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And when we think about evil in the world, it has that same kind of hunger, that same kind of insatiable quality to it.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Tolkien does such a fantastic job throughout the book speaking in language of light, speaking in language of dimming light.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um the way the description of the totality of evil's grip um occurs, you can see the light going out, right?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: The light getting dimmer and getting darker.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the our ability to conceive of evil and sin as metaphysical powers that exceed discrete acts is something that Christians sometimes struggle with.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: We want sin and evil to be bad things that are done.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: And expanding Christian vocabulary so that sin and evil are these powers that that seek to destroy, right?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Is one of the tasks that I have when I teach about sin and evil.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I was already early on in the book thinking, gosh, he did it just with a ring.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's brilliant.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the metaphors of light, I was reminded of in the Nicene Creed, like God from God, light from light.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: That sort of language that is very Trinitarian.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Very much.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and it's it's essential, right?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: God is this thing, it's not, it's not something that God does.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's in itself is theological vocabulary.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea that we might obscure it or uh or or dim it to our own minds or our own civilizations, I mean, that's like it's it's basically biblical theological concepts that are coming out early on here.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and um, if for listeners who might not know Tolkien's faith was very important to him, and we'll get to that um in a minute, also.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to say one more thing about Frodo.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I was asking you.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I again I'm uh let's see, I'm in my early 40s.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: I have three kids.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I did this PhD.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not exactly sure how I relate to the world of theology because I tend to come at things sideways and my interests are a little peculiar.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I resonated so much as a creature with Frodo, who was this small person, right, who was quite satisfied with his life and yet found himself written in to this story of good and evil that was much larger, larger than him, for which he had grave accountability, his actions had significance, and yet he had no earthly idea how to begin.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um that to me feels like as good of a theological anthropology as we could ask for.
• 18:48
  unknown: I love it.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's so fumbling, and and they're carried on by this sense of history, this this commitment to a story that's not their own.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: I also read a lot of Stanley Howerwas, who talks a lot about the ways in which we don't choose our own story, but we're cast into it.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien got that terribly well.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Tradition, the way that the task of the creature is to be bound to the past and the future.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like it's all there.
• 19:17
  unknown: Yeah.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and for a writer who had lived through World War I, World War II, yeah, like we don't choose the world that we are cast into.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: It somehow chooses us.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Or rather, up to us at all.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're not these little hobbits are not good at much of anything.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's part of the thing early on.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're good at preserving, like they have like these little curiosity cabinets of artifacts that they've saved and shined for various reasons.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: They cook really well.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: They like to eat, yeah.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: They like to eat, they like to celebrate.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna joy.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: They're really good at joy, but it's almost like um carefully collected uh jubilance.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, it's it's it's so small and and homely.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I related so much to that.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um because I think one of the grave dangers for Christians especially is to think that our task is grander than it is, and when we do that, we miss the task.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like we actually miss the thing because we're trying to do big things instead of small ones.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: So at the same time, sometimes as a mom, I think like we forget that small tasks are big tasks in God's eyes.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: They are without spoiling things too much.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into like the story of the return of the king.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: What is going on here?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, there's this evil ring, what happens now?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: So the Hobbits have been on this journey to cast the ring in the fire, apart from uh evil's ability to retrain it.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they're trying to enter Mordor, which is sort of the dark city.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And at this point in the third book, there is lots of fighting, right?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's lots of heroic uh battles and heroic attempts to uh defeat the darkness.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I don't know what else should I say without spoiling anything, Nadia.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: How would you what would you add?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it is probably okay to tell the readers that everything will be okay, but the okay will be different.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not it's a tragic book, right?
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's a deeply tragic book, and I think Christians um struggle with the trag the tragic imagination.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think we struggle with it a lot.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the tendency to think that creation fall redemption is this tidy narrative both doesn't speak truly about the world.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, But it doesn't reflect the the the feeling of living in the world either.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a true account of the the world that God came to and that kind of experience Christ Himself had in it.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the promise of eschatology, too, isn't this necessarily this undoing of the tragedy.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's somehow a working through it.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a it's it's not a story with a happy ending.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really sad ending.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: It is, but it's also sort of, but there is a sort of like wellness to it.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: But what is the tragedy throughout?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: What would you say?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well I think there's one passage especially that I think for me gets to the tragedy.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's this story about Denethor who has lost a son.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to talk.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Should I can I say much more?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Should I say Go for it?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so he's lost a son in battle.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he has a second son.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: He's supposed to be the steward.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: So he's supposed to be taking care of the city and looking out for danger and keeping the bad guys out.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's pretty clear that he's not up to the task, right?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: He's failing at it because there's battle going on at the gate.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: And um he's lost one son to battle already.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And his second son is very ill.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he's got this terrible fever, and Denethor is struggling to figure out how to go forward because his instinct is to build this funeral pyre and burn himself and his son alive on it.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because he can't figure out how to live in a world that he's not the king of, that he's not successful in, that he doesn't have agency over, that he did not choose.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um he says, um, his son will not wake again, said Denethor.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Battle is vain.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Why should we wish to live longer?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Why should we not go to death side by side?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh authority is not given to you, steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death, answered Gandalf.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: And only the heathen kings under the domination of the dark power did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Come, said Gandalf, we are needed.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: There is much that you can yet do.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, what's happening in this scene is that Denethor is tempted to suicide because it's a way to save his honor, but it's also a way for him not to have to live into a future that's full of pain that he did not choose and that he cannot control.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the psychological truth of that was so weighty and resonant for me.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if you walk with people who've been through grave suffering or loss, um, figuring out how to move forward into a future that they don't want and didn't choose is a real Christian problem.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's a theodicy.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: So both the development of Denethor's character, that he was to be a steward and he wanted to be a king, he wanted full agency, and Gandalf's reminder that you can yet do good in a world that's full of grave sorrow.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that admonition is something that Denethor ultimately resists.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: He can't.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't want to live in such a world.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like that has so much resonance, much more than the kinds of messages that we give to Christians about how to live after they've lost things.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: We tend to give platitudes, right?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus is with you.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or everything will work out in the end, or everything happens for a reason.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: And this one admonition from Gandalf that there is still good that you might yet do.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um it take it has that same characteristic that I love from the Hobbits of these small plotting measures of good that still matter even when the end is not ensured.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I mean when I say it's a tragic book.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: It'll break it just will break your heart.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think the more life experience you have of suffering things, um, some of these passages just stick out.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I think about it, um, Tolkien writing this during World War II, where everybody had lost someone.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that, I mean, there's a lot of talk about the greatest generation and about our younger generation's lack of emotional maturity and resilience and such.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote about this a bit recently as well, thinking about some of the philosophical movements that arose between the first and the second world wars and the way that women were able to kind of grab by both hands some of these big questions without losing themselves to them, without losing themselves to despair or to nihilism or whatever.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that we're so in our current moment, so easily lost to despair and nihilism when our problems are comparatively smaller is a is a kind of theological question that I wrestle with a lot.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: How are we so willing to be lost to our own funeral pyre like Denethor and so unwilling to do the small things of faithfulness that are actually, according to Tolkien, the only things that that matter in the end.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: The I mean, not the only things, but the the things that conserve the things that are are worth saving.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the faith of hobbits.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: I love, I mean, I love they became very tender um image to me because I think the older you get, the more you see your work as quite small.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the right anthropology.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is recognizing we are so small.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and yet, it's that so small, and yet, you can't give up.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so these stories of people who who are tempted to give up and then who are upheld by elves and dwarves and trees and such, it's just very beautiful.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and again, it takes us outside of ourselves.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like so much of the contemporary secular imagination is very narcissistic, like find the power within, or uh almost like that spirituality of like find unleash the goddess within.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, how about we not?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: It really is.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's what the doctrine of sin, I think that's one of the things I'm really passionate about is the doctrine of sin, because I find it to be such a comforting story.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is, um, I increasingly think we need literature to tell it because the kind of thing we see in Denethor that he refuses his mortality is one of the chief sins that is accounted in scripture, but somehow we can see it more uh clearly here that he he will not be a creature to whom such things have happened.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: He refuses that.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's you can you can follow that up with tons of theological literature, but it's it speaks more clearly with that story.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's um to get back to the very first question we talked about, like what is a classic?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the classics wrestle with those very questions, and that's their value in giving us that language.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the most impressive things for me, at least, um, about Tolkien's writing is his ability to balance this big vision, like a novel of over a thousand pages, with the tiny, tiny details.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we've already been talking about some of them.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but among these tiny details that um he brings in, he gives so much depth to characters.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about a couple of them already, and you've written at length about a number of them.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Can you talk about some more of these characters who have stood out for you and why they've stood out?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think Gandalf's character was one that I wrestled with a good bit, trying to figure out um who he represented.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, at times he himself is seems to be tempted by the powers of evil, right?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: He's not completely innocent or completely impervious to evil's weight.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought a little bit about um a little bit about him, what kind of figure he was.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: The one that is the most divisive, I think, is Tom Bombadil.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I've spent a little I I like I said, I read this um book blind, and so I didn't know that this figure was a really, you know, much discussed character.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I still don't know how I read it.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Some people feel that he's like a I wouldn't say a mistake, but that the the narrative doesn't rely directly on his presence, that he's kind of just an addition, a funny addition.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Some people feel that he's more integral.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: I did I did when I read him uh find myself really reflecting on the presence of an individual who is unaffected by evil.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: What are what kind of characteristics?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the psalms talk about such a man, right?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: Who can who can somehow remain, Proverbs does too, remain far from evil or at least remain removed from it.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: What are the what's the quality of his life like?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: What's the quality of his the way he uses his time, the way he relates to other people, the kind of solace and rest he can provide to them in his presence.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I I I I thought a lot about who he was.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: He almost looks, he's almost like, he's jolly, but kind of in a silly way sometimes, you know, he's kind of like lumbers through the through the countryside and he has these trees and these giant boots.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I I thought a lot about like what's that levity?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And is it related to the way that evil doesn't affect him?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: But then also why doesn't evil affect him?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Did you ever think about Tom Bombadil Nadia?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't really stood out for me in that way.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he has this like fairy tale nature to him.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's very childish, but in a different way than the hobbits, yeah.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Who very much like seem like small children, the innocence, the innocent heart of a child.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess this reminds me, we also have elves.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's there's this whole magical world, like all these creatures.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: We have people, we have hobbits, we have elves.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: What do we do with the elves here?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: What are they there for?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I honestly never figured that out.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Would you answer that question for me?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: Who are why do the elves exist in the story?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's um, I was thinking about this one coming in, and perhaps they're a counterpart to the hobbits, where the hobbits are so innocent and have no experience of the world.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so it just sort of rushes at them, and suddenly it's like, wow, here we are on a quest to defeat evil.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: Why us?
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the elves have known about this.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: They've they're supposed to be more kind of like eternal in that sense, and they have all this knowledge.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but they also seem to have this humility, the realization that they still need other people to work with them.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like actually.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: So they're like angels, really.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: Almost, you could say, huh?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's an interesting thought.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: So because angels would have the prehistory and the ability to appear materially, but not to be bounded to matter the way that creatures are.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so one of the things that I really thought about, and again, you can see that I haven't gone deep into Tolkien's writings and appendices and prehistories, but the the role that history and our knowledge of history and prehistory had in the telling of the story and the unfolding of it was really interesting.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because the Hobbits felt themselves, like I said, bound to this longer, older story.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: And there were messengers along the way who reminded them of parts of it or um oriented them to it, feels to me to be a really deeply Christian theme.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: But also when Christians talk about tradition, we often think about it as church teaching or as settled theological arguments or ideas.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea that tradition might be this kind of accompanying presence was something else that I thought Tolkien did really well, that I oftentimes lack the ability to speak about in non-dramatic form, non-storytelling form.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's talk a little more about the theology in this book.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we're kind of dancing around it because it's unavoidable.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, everything in this book is theological, uh, which is appropriate because Tolkien's faith mattered very deeply to him.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so why has this book appealed to you as a theologian?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd like to know kind of broader, like what are the big questions that fascinate you as a reader, writer, and thinker?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we've talked a good bit about good and evil, but I think that is one of the core questions that people come to theology with.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: However, good and evil themselves are vested in these other larger theological categories that have to do with what kind of being God is, what kind of world God made, and what the role of creatures are in relation to that world.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we come into Christian theology, we often want to talk about why evil exists as if that were a discrete question.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: When that is a nested question, um it's nested inside these other larger questions.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: The reason the story works to talk about evil is because it gives you at a glance a person who is set in time with a certain set of constraints and yet a certain kind of task in a certain kind of world in which the conditions exist such that only some things are possible and some things are not possible.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea of the inbuilt limits um and the potential still was really powerful for me.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Just everything everything is theological.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: I I really like how you bring that out.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that everything around us, every big question we face is a theological question.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you just finished one book project and you're starting another one.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Can we get some scoop?
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the first book is about difference.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I was very interested in why creatures are who they are and are uninterchangeable.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, what is it that makes me me?
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: And how does that relate to my vocation or task as a creature?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's a tendency I was afraid of when I read in creation and theological anthropology to see only difference as either a result of the fall or as tightly tied to a creature's mission in the world.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: And though both of those instances might be the case, it seemed to me that there was a third reason that difference might exist, which was simply for the creature to be itself, that something about the creature's is-ness, who they were, was good for its own sake.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that felt to me both deeply Christian and important in our cultural moment where I see difference being recruited for its political task, for its utilitarian purpose, um, even for like cosmetic reasons, our sense of aesthetics, our sense of interior design, our sense of what's beautiful seems to be filtered through algorith algorithms that make us more the same and not more different.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, how to speak about the good of difference as for its own sake felt to me really important.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I'm revising that book right now because it's it's it's been kind of like I've been trying to grab it by the tail the whole time, and I still am not sure I got it quite right, but that's what that's what I'm finishing.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm starting a second book that's really a pastoral um attempt to narrate this something similar to what Tolkien talks about, this great defeat.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: What kinds of things are worth doing even if they may not work?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think that we as Christians are kind of obsessed with things being accomplished, things working, things scaling, things being successful.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me that's not a not a Christian way to think about our work or our lives.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: So, what's the good of things that might fail?
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: The faith of hobbits.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's our theme today.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I haven't, I didn't write about the hobbits, but maybe I should write them in at some point.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: You should, yeah.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: The faith of hobbits.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just thinking like the faith that after first breakfast there will be a second breakfast.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: I know, isn't it?
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: So and the fact that it's even breakfast, like the the valuing of the small things is so so poignant to me.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: I just thought that part of the book was beautiful.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of those things, like as a mom, also, where I feel like my kids are always asking for food.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: But also, like it's it's kind of like that.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, they have faith that if they ask mom for a snack, they will get a snack.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: But second, also at the end of the day, it always feels like I I find um those housekeeping tasks kind of productive.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like even on a day if if I feel like I haven't done a lot today, but I did make meals and I did laundry.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's like tangible.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's a way, it's a way to offer care, and I think and it's tangible.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: Visible, it's just so tender, yeah.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: So again, that desire, like the invisible things are so difficult to talk about, to understand, like that good and evil.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: But hey, we can understand an evil ring.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: So as we conclude, I have a final question for you.
• 41:45
  unknown: Okay.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: What classic book, whether fiction or nonfiction or even theology, which I guess would be nonfiction, um, do you wish you had written and why?
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'd have to say Kristen Lavrins Daughter because I think that book.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's a feminist classic, but it's also anti-feminist in interesting ways.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's so high conceptually, though uh it's this multi-generational saga that follows one person um through a lifetime and the emotional resonance of kind of getting the stages of a woman in a mother's life, but also identifying the effects of personal choices and the way that those choices shape us beyond our choosing.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: That is such a theological category, too, that that sin has a shape that takes greater power than the original choice or uh act itself.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's just so it's so poignant that I've only read it once.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm kind of afraid to go back because I think it would emotionally just destroy me at this season of my life, and I'm not ready to read it again.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: But that's the one I would have written.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have anyone talking about that novel?
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: No, because it doesn't have a milestone anniversary this year, but we probably should.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a wonderful one, but we should talk about it at some point.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we should.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate that.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's the beauty of even just devastating novels.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess that's again like devastating.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I need to read it.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've heard enough about it to know kind of the basics that it is devastating.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: You need to read it.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we should do a podcast.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we should together.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: That would be fun.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: That would be fun.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know what we should do?
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: We should do a series of readings of what we call feminist novels, and then we should blow the lid off what constitutes a feminist novel.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because I have a I have a little bit of a uh, you know, I collect, I collect the classic feminist novels, but I collect the novels I wish were considered feminist novels because feminism itself is such a funky little.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Little to read.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: Especially for Christians.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what is this?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: What do we do with it?
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: But also like the fear of big books.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that's something, you know, we didn't really get into it, but why, why do we why are we afraid of big books?
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I think there's at least uh, let me say three reasons.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: One is because you feel sometimes when you start one that you have to like commit to finishing it, and you don't know if you have the ability, either the time or the intention.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um I would say for me, I I think we all talk about attention issues, but I notice in myself particularly when I'm reading a novel, any kind of novel that has this many characters, and when I'm interrupted as often as I am as a mother in this season of life, I do find it very difficult to track the storyline across so many characters.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, I I sometimes keep an index card in the front and you know, some kind of uh device to help me remember who's who.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you put it down, you know, say for a week or two and then you pick it up, it can be hard for me to remember where I was and what was happening.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, this is pretty dumb, but I I do think it's best to have Tolkien split into three or four volumes.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think a thousand page.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at a huge volume of middle march right here.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's just I can't put it in my purse.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: I can't take it in the car.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it does feel daunting, just the physical copy.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: I have this lovely, there's a lovely volume though of Middle March that's like a supposed to be a pocket version.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little the prints, not too bad.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: So somehow making the artifact itself feel less imposing can help.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: I also think, like for me, I don't mind being wrong, I don't mind being corrected.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I was happy to kind of take on Tolkien blind.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: But for people who are insecure about their preparation or about their training, they might feel like there's one thing they're supposed to learn from a book, or there's one thing they need to know before they start it, or they have to be an expert on Russian literature or whatever.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think freeing yourself from the expectations of what the novel means um can help you just approach it as a reader.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much, Kirsten.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.