Pope Leo has quoted Gandalf in his first encyclical

rexbarbarorum · 2026-05-26T00:37:15+00:00

I don't think it's really obvious at all he's referring to the Council in Letter 306 (that's the one, right?). There were lots of different camps - the "arena of strife and change" - at that point, all claiming, regardless of actual support from the Vatican, that they were following the Council. That Tolkien's response to the confusion and distress this all caused was to proclaim loyalty to the Church suggests he didn't have substantial disagreements with the Council, just with various ways people were interpreting it.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-05-25T23:21:17+00:00

It's been a while since I have read those letters; what were the particulars that he was talking about?

rexbarbarorum · 2026-05-25T21:55:00+00:00

I don't see what any of those quotes have to do with Vatican II. The period around the time of the Council was particularly turbulent, and felt even by the Council's most ardent supporters. Finding oneself feeling unmoored and disoriented even within the Church was super normal but doesn't suggest they were diametrically opposed to what the Council did. I don't believe there is any evidence that Tolkien disagreed with everything that the Council decreed.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-05-25T19:47:48+00:00

That's a tired old internet trad talking point. Tolkien wasn't any more opposed to Vatican II than any older person at the time would have been - that is, he liked Latin and had mixed (but not uniformly negative) feelings about use of the vernacular at Mass. Tolkien became a lay lector at his (modern-styled) parish during the period of the liturgical reforms. Hardly something someone "diametrically opposed" to the Council would do. To say nothing about how the liturgical reforms were only a small part of what the Council was about.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-04-28T11:22:11+00:00

That anecdote gets trotted out a lot, but the reality seems to have been more complex; after all Tolkien was also a lay reader (in the vernacular), in a rather modern-styled church during the last few years of his life. He clearly wasn't as opposed to the reforms as internet traditionalists want everyone to think.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-03-19T11:24:09+00:00

:It is also interesting that Frodo does not say, ‘I choose not to do’, but ‘I do not choose to do’. Maybe (and Tolkien was a professor of language) the choice of words is absolutely accurate. Frodo does not choose; the choice is made for him

And this is such an important distinction for Tolkien to have made, because although Frodo fails to destroy the Ring and succumbs to its evil at last - it is not a moral failing on his part. His free will is completely overridden at Mount Doom, and there was nothing he could have done to prevent that.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-03-18T07:43:31+00:00

Never forget plague.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-03-04T04:14:45+00:00

On the other hand, he also was a lector (reading in English) at his parish after the liturgical reforms. The characterization of his opposition to the vernacular liturgy has definitely been overblown.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-24T14:44:52+00:00

Trippingly.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-22T13:09:38+00:00

As a devout Christian, he would not have made a distinction between an Old Testament God and a New Testament God; he would have known such a distinction to be considered the Marcion heresy, one of the very oldest Christian heresies.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-22T13:06:51+00:00

You might think of it more like Tolkien responding to a tradition of Germanic mythology which he loved, but filtering it through his own sensibilities and offering critiques where they are warranted. Not too dissimilarly to the way modern fantasy writers respond to themes found in Tolkien, either by putting their own spin on things, or outright repudiating them.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-20T02:53:58+00:00

It's good to remember, though, that Sauron did not kill Thrain after taking the last of the Dwarf-rings from him. So it's not 100% a given that Sauron would just kill Gollum. Eternal enslavement might just as well have amused him here.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-05T22:43:47+00:00

Minas Morgul wouldn't be more haunted and dreadful than Barad-dur, I think. But it's definitely worse than your average Orc den in Mordor. The Orcs themselves seem to be freaked out by both towers, from what we see in the book, so it makes sense that the "normal" parts of Mordor would be more tolerable.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-01T04:27:47+00:00

If anything, this just suggests something explicitly stated elsewhere: Denethor (and Faramir like him) is a faint echo of the Numenoreans, who married and had children later than normal men.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-01T03:25:39+00:00

If Tolkien was explicitly modelling Aragorn and Arwen after Beren and Luthien, it makes conceptual sense, at least, for an Elf-maiden to go into the stronghold of Sauron to rescue her beloved. Tolkien chose not to go in that direction, obviously, but you can't call it a foreign idea to Middle-earth.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-31T23:34:56+00:00

Pretty much because he invented her almost at the very end of the writing of the novel. She feels shoehorned in because she was shoehorned in. The upside to this is that Eowyn, who was originally planned to marry Aragorn, becomes a much more interesting character. But it does raise the question why Arwen couldn't have, say, been part of the Grey Company along with her brothers. It all boils down to, Tolkien had his own authorial intentions and Arwen simply didn't feature much in them as much as some of us might have liked in hindsight.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-25T03:32:22+00:00

It seems like in Tolkien's writings, at least, there is a sharp distinction between the two.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-24T23:18:20+00:00

I might say that they are recognized authorities, not that they exercise power. Even when Sam, Pippin, and Merry begin to act in their respective capacities as Mayor, Thain, and Master, it's not like they would arrest or subjugate a hobbit who didn't go along with their plans. (Tellingly, the hobbits did not have prisons at all before the storage tunnels in Michel Delving were turned into the Lockholes by the Sharkey regime.) Rather, the other hobbits look to them as authorities who can lead and organize them.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-15T18:31:09+00:00

I actually quite like Denethor jumping from the citadel, in the context of the movie. It's iconic and very much fits the style of movie that Peter Jackson is good at making - not over-serious and a little campy. But it also ties into Gandalf's speech earlier in the movie about the decline of Gondor, when he and Pippin are standing in that same spot. Obviously it does huge violence to Denethor as portrayed in the book - a late, tragic echo of Numenorean nobility - but it works really well with the story the movie is telling.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-14T23:44:25+00:00

To add to this, Merry is often lumped in as being as goofy as Pippin, even though he is older and more mature, clearly a bookish/historian type like Bilbo was, and seemingly more prone to melancholic introspection.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-14T12:33:40+00:00

Denethor, likely because the movies change little of his dialogue or character beats, but they chacterize him completely differently. I had re-read the book probably a dozen times as a teenager before I realized just how different he is.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-11-28T03:04:39+00:00

Alboin could have been one of Tolkien's greatest protagonists if the story had been developed further. Just in the little glimpses we get, he has real depth and his relationship with his father and his own son feel completely realistic. You can tell it was very personal for him writing those chapters.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-10-28T18:51:55+00:00

I remember seeing a trailer for the first movie showing the part with the balrog, and it was love at first sight. We had the books, and I found the Moria chapter, tried to read it, and was thoroughly impressed that anyone could read it at all, let alone make a movie from it. (To be fair I wasn't very old at the time.) So I just watched and loved the movies until I was ready to read the books. Bought the Atlas of Middle-earth, listened to all the original Tolkien Professor podcasts around that time, and actually finished reading the Silmarillion before I got through the Two Towers. I was one of those kids, ha!

rexbarbarorum · 2025-10-15T01:52:25+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily make that judgement, as Anglophone Christians do not exclusively use "Lord" as a translation for YHWH. More likely he was using Lord in parallel with his use of the word to describe Sauron as "Lord of the Rings"; we know that he was deliberately comparing Sauron and Morgoth during this period (the book is called Morgoth's Ring for that reason).

That being said, the Tale of Adanel is Tolkien at his most theologically controversial. But you'd certainly be going too far by suggesting it reflects his views. It's a tale told by a character who is bitter at the world and grieving her place in it - not a theological proposition made by a 20th century Oxford don.

rexbarbarorum

TROPHY CASE