The League of Bearded Catholics

Happy Birthday, Professor!

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, that is.

Born this day in 1892.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading The Hobbit in the wee hours of this morning. I rang in his birthday in style, without even knowing it.

Join me in toasting him at 9:00 pm, with the traditional toast of the J.R.R. Tolkien society:

"The professor!"

It's Durin's Day!

Thanks to Jeff Murray for the reminder via Facebook.

 

 Durin by J.R.R. Tolkien

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
... When Durin woke and walked along.
He named the nameless hills and delles;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stopped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.
The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away.
The world was fair in Durin's Day.

A king he was on carven throne
In many-pillared halls of stone
With golden roof and silver floor,
And runes of power upon the door.
The light of sun and star and moon
In shining lamps of crystal hewn
Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
There shown for ever fair and bright.

There hammer on the anvil smote,
There chisel clove, and graver wrote;
There forged was blade, and bound was hilt;
The delver mined, the mason built.
There beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
And metal wrought like fishes' mail,
Buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
And shining spears were laid in hoard.
Unwearied then were Durin's folk;
Beneath the mountain music woke:
The harpers harped, the minstrels sang,
And at the gates the trumpets rang.

The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dum.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep.
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

Bearded Holiday Fun

I know, I know... I should have been alert and taken some photos, but I was too taken up with the job at hand last week, as my neighbor and all-around building-and-loan-pal Steve and a gathering of friends made a bonfire of Christmas trees, set off fireworks and drank booze to wave goodbye to the old year and welcome the new.

Fire + Explosives + Liquor. I try to set a good example.

It was just the kind of thing neighbors here in teh U.S. ought to do much more often through the year. It was cold as brass lingerie, but around the fire it was quite pleasant, and we all stayed out there talking and joking for hours, and I only saw one tech junkie who could not manage to keep away from his cell phone. He did carry a dandy silver flask, though, which improved my estimation of his overall character. I've been hunting around for a silver flask at flea markets and antique shops, but it has to be the right one, and I haven't found it yet.

I had it on my Christmas list, but buying a flask is almost too much responsibility for anyone but the individual him/herself. Very personal. And, as comic Jim Gaffigan says, giving a flask as a gift is like saying, "Yeah, you look like a drunk on the go."

It was a marvelous time, and one of those little events that ties together all the strands of life, spiritual, physical, emotional. A fully human experience.

Anyway, since I didn't get any photos... it was kinda like this;

 

... only sans the constant terror of gate-crashing Nazgul.

Via Moderna

Scott Hahn is one of the guys I had in mind originally when The League of Bearded Catholics first popped into my brain. He is certainly an Honorary Bearded Catholic, if he will have the title. Below, he and Fr. Robert Barron discuss just what the hell happened with modernity;



I'm grateful to have so many - really, a bumper crop - of wise and inspiring voices in the Church in such a challenging age. We miss the saints in our midst, sometimes.

Since my youth I have been, it's no good to deny, somewhat at war with modernity, and have spent my adult life discovering why. Partly, largely, it is because the modern age is and has been so self obsessed, myopic and amnesiac. It's not so much that we reject the wisdom of ages past - what Hahn calls the Via Antiqua - we simply (the great mass of us, very much including our ruling elite) don't know anything about "ages past", and what we think we know is mostly dead wrong. When we take any trouble to look back (which is not often) we see history in a fun-house mirror. Modernity is a kind of disease of the mind, very much like that suffered by many teenagers. We are not only sure we know everything worth knowing, we are almost sure that no one else - especially anyone older - knows anything at all.

This is why, I think, Tolkien worked on me like a kind of spell when I first read LOTR in college. It was the first beachhead the Via Antiqua really firmly established in my imagination. I had read the bible off and on my whole life, but it had remained mostly opaque to me. Though I gave it my best, Bible reading (I'm sure the language had something to do with it) was like looking at a frieze in some Greek temple. The figures were solid enough, but did not seem to be really alive. With Tolkien, the air of Middle Earth blew in bearing the scents of pastures and woodlands, and carrying faint voices and music. There was life here.

I had sensed early on that there was something just nuts and upside-down about the world (I mean as I knew it... the American suburbia that could not recall a time before television), but Tolkien awakened in me the perception of all that had come before, and which, with breathtaking suddeness (less than a century), had been left behind in a fog and become barely the memory of a memory.

Chesterton happened to be especially awake and alert during this process. We in the modern West grew up in a landscape shaped by the footprints of giants. We have known nothing else, and so the landscape seems normal enough, to us. But Chesterton and the other TLBC patrons were around, thinking and writing, when these giants - great steaming, clanking metal giants, belching smoke - were still striding around. They could smell them at breakfast and see them from their windows. The Four Patrons had a foot in each epoch - ancient and modern - and could articulate the characteristics of both because the contrasts were so vivid and stark. This is the common thread that runs through their art, and that makes them so compelling to me.

Many others caught the same whiff of living air in Tolkien, but so few of us knew what to do with it. I was in college (as are many of his readers when they first find him) and though I was deeply moved - shaken, even (not shaken as in "upset", but shaken as in "shaken awake"), I had no idea where to go from there. I knew I did not want to become one of THOSE Tolkien fans... the ones who dressed funny and learned Elvish and would talk of nothing else. It was harmless enough, mostly, but there was also a kind of sadness to some of these desperately seeking people. They (like me) knew they had found something in Tolkien, but did not know what. Some seemed adrift in the flotsam of Tolkiens tale, all the incidentals -  runes and armor and architecture - and never found the solid footing underlying it all, the riverbed under Tolkien's flowing current.

And many never will. I just finished watching a National Geographic documentary on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings wherein Tolkien's Catholic faith, the Catholicity and religiosity of so much of the story, was either studiously ignored or completely missed. There was a great deal of talk about Finnish saga and something about the rain forests and Cate Blanchett said some things about, well... courage and friendship and all. But the essential spirituality of the work was mostly absent.

One lady got very close, however, in saying that LOTR asks the question, "Could we, today, do this? Could we un-make something that never should have been made?"

It seems an easy enough question when we are talking about un-making (destroying) something clearly horrible like, oh... a giant robot that shoots death rays, or a mutant sewer alligator, or Jersey Shore. But LOTR asks whether we can - whether we have the will - to destroy something we find very useful and powerful and even lovely, in a way... whether we will destroy our precious. What are we willing to sacrifice in order to put the genie back in the bottle... and then destroy the bottle?

Tolkien Toast

 

Heigh-ho, bearded brethren, and a bodacious new year to you all!

It is, of course, the birthday of TLBC patron J.R.R. Tolkien, born on this date in 1892.

From the title of this post, one might wonder if it consisted of a recipe for Toliken Toast (toasted on one side), or maybe a story of someone having seen the professor's face in a piece of toast, but no. It concerns a growing new tradition - promulgated by the Tolkien Society - of toasting professor Tolkien on his day;

To make the birthday toast The Tolkien Society say you should stand and raise a glass of your choice of drink (it doesn’t have to be an alcoholic beverage) and say the words “The Professor.”

Wow, what could be easier? I like the way they allow that the beverage "doesn't have to be" alcoholic, implying that, ya know... it really ought to be. We here in the sovereign nation of Squirrelandia will definitely take part this evening, and mayhaps will read out a bit of The Lord of the Rings for good measure. I may take the occasion to declare January 3rd a national holiday.

(The Toast story comes from The Hobbit Movie blog, via Jen Pierce on Facebook)

Inklings Cage Match!

A while back there was a string of posts on the Christian Pipe Smokers forum, each pitting one sort of thing against another in an online poll. Kind of a Que Es Mas Macho? sort of thing. For those of you who don't remember, Que Es Mas Macho? was a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Bill Murray as the host of a Mexican TV game show by that name. He would ask contestants "Que es mas macho?" ("What is more macho?") and then they had to choose between two seemingly completely random and unrelated things, like "knife, or pineapple?". The answer was always seemingly random, too, except that where famous people were concerned, Ricardo Montalban was always more macho than anyone.

That's the way I feel about a lot of such contests, which is why a show like Spike's Deadliest Warriors fails to hold my interest. It's all fantasy. It sounds for all the world like the concept was hatched by two potheads in their dorm room, "Okay... okay, like... Samurai vs. Viking... who would win?... No! No!... Ninja vs. Spartan. Ninja? No way. Yer so wrong. A Spartan would totally OWN a ninja...". Of course, it's on Spike, so that's about what one would expect.

So when "J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis?" came up as a poll topic, I kind of rolled my eyes, but weighed in anyhow;

Unfair! This is like asking me which Siamese twin I will allow to live.

That being said, I voted for Tolkien (though I love Lewis).

I certainly owe my reversion to Christianity more to Lewis, since his books were a big influence and were more openly apologetic works. I actually discovered him and Tolkien at about the same time, and had no idea they were friends or that they influenced one another so greatly.

I just had to take into account that Tolkien wrote one of the pivotal works of fiction of the twentieth century, a model for what Christian culture should be like, as opposed to the hamfisted, lowbrow kitsch that is so often foisted upon us (and on a watching world) in the name of JAY-zussss.

Tolkien's tales soak into an unsuspecting heathen's bones and begin to convert his subconscious mind before he ever begins thinking in concrete terms about religion or philosophy. Lewis articulates a meaningful universe, but Tolkien makes you long to live there.

Not everyone makes these connections, of course, or follows through on them, but I think Tolkien's work prepares the soil for those who may later cultivate and harvest.

That's an over-simple analysis, of course. Lewis wrote some marvelous passages that made heaven seem almost palpable. What thinkest thou?

(incidentally, I'm beginning to figure out that part of what has cut into my blogging of late has been a growing Facebook habit, as well as the CPS forum. I react more readily than I invent. I will endeavor from now on to save more ascii and precious brain power for TLBC)

2 Years...

... to get ready for seventy-fifth anniversary of Tolkien's The Hobbit!

 

The book jacket of The Hobbit as I first read it. It belonged, as a matter of fact, to my wife, who bought it before she met me. It has her maiden name written on the inner cover, which is cool.

Things are snowed under at the homely office at present, but couldn't let the day go by without some acknowledgement. This calls for some Navy Flake in the old Churchwarden!

(That's pipe-smoking talk. Navy Flake is supposed to be pretty much the same kind of tobacco Tolkien smoked, and "churchwarden" is the style of pipe with the long stem everyone seems to smoke in Middle Earth. BTW, I don't remember any huge protest about all the smoking going on in the movies... you know, the dangerous example for the young sprouts of the nation, yada, yada... are the anti-smoking puritans falling down on the job?)

Take a Hobbit to Lunch

 

As this is the anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien (1973), I thought I'd pass along this book recommend from one of the stalwarts at the Christian Pipe Smokers forum.

The book is The Gift of Friendship, by Colin Duritz.

It's a sort of twin biography, specifically about the friendship of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (and more broadly, the Inklings).

While this selection has not been *officially* vetted by the Homely Office, it seems to have pretty solid reviews. Anyone know if there is any similar book about Chesterton / Belloc?

When I get a little breathing room, I have been reading The Dialogues of Plato. I'm hoping to build up to a real, by-golly study of the Summa, and it seems one ought to be familiar with Plato and Aristotle first.

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Oh! I've also been bluffing my way through an interview with Gilbert magazine (coming to a Distributist newsstand near you!) They seem to think I might have something cogent and helpful to say about art, though I purchased my degree from a door-to-door entrepeneur (who was also selling frozen meat out of the back of a pickup), and have been paying a small village of Chinese artists to do my painting for over a decade. In short, I have had to lean on some obfuscation skills I developed and had not used since college, but have high hopes that the harrassed and sleep-deprived staff at Gilbert will not catch on to the depth of the fraud until after the issue has gone to press.

Tolkien on Tolkien on Film

Thank you, BBC, for posting this short (26 minutes) 1968 documentary about J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, featuring interviews with the author himself, some of his fans, students and a couple of amusingly tedious detractors. The film is also kind of a neat time-capsule of 1960s culture. I was seven at the time. I wonder what became of those fresh-faced college kids?

You might need to pay close attention, and ear buds might also help. Tolkien was a notorious mumbler, I'm afraid.

There was quite definitely a Tolkien craze in the late Sixties ("Frodo Lives!"). Then, as perhaps now, a large number of fans didn't get much past the flashing swords and fantastic creatures to what Tolkien was ultimately driving at. That's okay. As with fairy tales and nursery stories, the moral might slip in the back door and do some good down the road, just as there are many atheists who have been deeply influenced by the Gospel in ways they will never know or wish to acknowledge. They might one day be surprised to find themselves acting with heroic self-sacrifice and not completely understand why. It's in the air more than we might imagine... especially in America, I think. I hope.

"Tolkien's Catholic Imagination" - Jason Boffetti

This link to Jason Boffetti's article on Tolkien's Catholic Imagination, at Inside Catholic was sent to me by one of our local Chestertonians, but I had not had a chance to read it until now.

It is a well written introduction to and summary of the Catholic inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien's literary work, most especially The Lord of the Rings. Boffetti very economically presents an encapsulated biography of Tolkien that highlights those features of his life that most shaped his thought;

To the outside world, Tolkien was the picture of the obscure Oxford don: bright, jovial, a bit on the chubby side, a fastidious dresser who alternated between sweaters and waistcoats beneath his Oxford tweed jackets. Although he was personable enough, students and other trespassers claimed they could barely understand a word he spoke because he mumbled everything through his omnipresent pipe. In many ways, he was the very picture of the hobbits he wrote about, who preferred the comfort of home to grand adventures.

A very worthwhile read, whether one is already familiar with Tolkien or not.

I still find it interesting how very vocally opposed Tolkien was to allegory, especially considering how often he unconsciously fell into it. Perhaps it was the idea of the conscious use of allegory he found so distasteful... but then the earliest chapters of The Silmarillion are clearly intentional allegory (Iluvatar = God, Melkor = Lucifer, etc...).

This is of more than passing interest to a Catholic artist who has been growing increasingly anxious to paint something more symbolically substantial than bowls of fruit. Being a realist, this entails models and costuming, if not some set building, and these things are a bit beyond my reach, at present.