"I have become worried, however, in recent years, that the movies have come to replace the reading of 'The Lord of the Rings.' Yours is an imminently visual culture, you receive the world through screen. Someone has said current students are like toadstools, they grow at night under a dim light of the flickering screen.
Reading is a moral act. A deeply moral and religious act. Because it is an act of concentration. It's an act of imagination. It takes you out of yourself, takes me out of myself, into a larger world, which I only have to imagine myself into as a sympathizer of that world, but where I have to form the images that the words on the page enable me to form. By contrast, most films form images for us, and for that reason I think film is a lazier medium than the written word.
I thought I would talk about Tolkien as a writer, so to speak, of 9/11. A writer who addresses the world that's blowing up in the Middle East, even as we speak. A writer who helps us to think about what it would happen if the terrorists were to strike Boston, as they struck New York. To help us confront how we're to live in the face of ongoing terror that has become, whether we acknowledge it or not, the background noise of our lives. It's there. It's there. It's there.
You may know, if you don't know, you should know, that the 20th century was the deadliest century in the history of the human race. So if you get one statistic today, get this one: more people were killed by violent means in the 20th century than in all preceding centuries combined. Roughly, 190 million. And, of course, we Americans did our share of that killing. And we Americans have done our share of that killing prior to Hiroshima, prior to Nagasaki. We have our own holocaust, as Wendell Berry puts it. It began right here in Massachusetts. If you don't know the book called Mayflower, I urge you get thee to the book store in a hurry. It's a book about King Philip's war, and about the slaughter of Native Americans by our Christian forebears. We have had our holocaust. Not to mention what we did to the slaves, whom we brought over from Africa under coercion, the power of the Ring, so to speak. . .We have inherited a horrible, horrible history of massive death.
I was on my way to Duke to give a lecture in 2001 before the events of September 11, picked up a newspaper that gave the statistic that in just the first 9 months of the 21st century 1.6 million had died. So you see where we're going. We're on our way, it seems, toward a new century of fire and blood. An age incarnadine, to use Milton's phrase. How are we to live in the face of that? What are we to do?
It seems to me that Tolkien's immense popularity as a writer is precisely because he doesn't dodge that question of how we are to live and what we are to do. And he does so as a Christian. Many people do not know that Tolkien was a Christian writer. There are some who dispute whether he was a Christian writer. Not only was Tolkien a Christian writer, Tolkien was a Catholic writer. You must be honest about the Catholicism, the deep Catholicism that underlies The Lord of the Rings." - Professor Ralph Wood, from his lecture given on February 22, 2011, called, "On Tolkien—The Lord of the Rings—A Book for our Time of Terror."
"We are a death-fearing, death-denying, death-escaping culture. And Tolkien nails it by giving the Ring the power of deathlessness." - Professor Ralph Wood, from his lecture given on February 22, 2011, called, "On Tolkien—The Lord of the Rings—A Book for our Time of Terror."
"So, today's war on terrorism seems a war to own the Ring, rather than a war to destroy it. Neither Bush's nor bin Laden's supporters fight for liberty; they all fight to strengthen their own power. One can hardly choose to join one or the other – and should only ask whether there is still a place for common, peaceful people in the lands of the opposing war lords. Indeed, the only rational position is that of Treebeard: "I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me... And there are some things, of course, whose side I'm altogether not on; I am against them altogether." (Tolkien 2001, p.461)" - Carlo Stagnaro, "Tolkien’s Lesson for September 11," July 25, 2002.Sauron's army in The Lord of the Rings consisted of orcs, trolls, and other beastly creatures. His power seduced many. But Sauron's power is nothing compared to the power of the mighty sorcerers of Washington, Tel Aviv, and London, who have seduced not just orcs and trolls to join their ranks, but also hobbits, dwarves, and others. This is surprising because we don't expect good-natured hobbits to fight on the side of evil and darkness, but this is exactly what has happened in the Evil Global War on Terror.
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