Polar Bear
03-22-2008, 08:33 AM
For about three years, I've been telling a few of you about an article on Silver Age comic books, Tolkien, and religion I was working on. Yes, it got sidelined for a while. But it's finally done and online!
Here's the first bit from the article:
J. R. R. Tolkien spent nearly 20 pages defining fairy tales in his 1946 essay "On Fairy-Stories" (found in The Tolkien Reader). This essay, a favorite of his friend C. S. Lewis's, summarizes many of the attitudes toward storytelling that guided his creation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Tolkien's insights provide general guidelines not only for the reasons behind the trilogy's popularity, but the popularity of fairy tales in general: Through these stories, we satisfy "certain primordial human desires," including the desire "to survey the depths of space and time."
Oddly enough, that doesn't sound like a fairy tale to me -- it sounds more like an average issue of Fantastic Four. Tolkien also discusses "the longing for the noiseless, gracious, economical flight of a bird," bringing forth, for comics readers, images of Superman, while "the desire to hold communion with other living things" is reflected in telepaths from the X-Men's Jean Grey to the Justice League's Martian Manhunter.
Part of the appeal of the 1960s Batman series was obviously to make readers wish they were themselves Robin. "If [fairy-stories] awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded," points out Tolkien, and Batman comics in the mid-1960s succeeded -- to the tune of millions of copies a month.
But the greatest desire in our hearts is often deeper than the wish to fly, or even the desire to become someone else: It's what Tolkien calls"the consolation of the Happy Ending," a meaning he assigns to the word "eucatastrophe." Tolkien argues that our natural attraction to this eucatastrophe reflects our innate desire for justice, for mercy, and, in fact, for virtue.
Click here (http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3138&Itemid=48) to read more. Hope you like it.
Here's the first bit from the article:
J. R. R. Tolkien spent nearly 20 pages defining fairy tales in his 1946 essay "On Fairy-Stories" (found in The Tolkien Reader). This essay, a favorite of his friend C. S. Lewis's, summarizes many of the attitudes toward storytelling that guided his creation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Tolkien's insights provide general guidelines not only for the reasons behind the trilogy's popularity, but the popularity of fairy tales in general: Through these stories, we satisfy "certain primordial human desires," including the desire "to survey the depths of space and time."
Oddly enough, that doesn't sound like a fairy tale to me -- it sounds more like an average issue of Fantastic Four. Tolkien also discusses "the longing for the noiseless, gracious, economical flight of a bird," bringing forth, for comics readers, images of Superman, while "the desire to hold communion with other living things" is reflected in telepaths from the X-Men's Jean Grey to the Justice League's Martian Manhunter.
Part of the appeal of the 1960s Batman series was obviously to make readers wish they were themselves Robin. "If [fairy-stories] awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded," points out Tolkien, and Batman comics in the mid-1960s succeeded -- to the tune of millions of copies a month.
But the greatest desire in our hearts is often deeper than the wish to fly, or even the desire to become someone else: It's what Tolkien calls"the consolation of the Happy Ending," a meaning he assigns to the word "eucatastrophe." Tolkien argues that our natural attraction to this eucatastrophe reflects our innate desire for justice, for mercy, and, in fact, for virtue.
Click here (http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3138&Itemid=48) to read more. Hope you like it.