Students and teachers showed up at the Union Theater Friday to hear more about J.R.R. Tolkien and the “Lord of the Rings” novels, which recently have gained a wide fan base because of the popular film series.
Ralph Wood provided an insight into the mind of Tolkien. Wood, an English professor at Baylor University, spoke to a large audience on J.R.R. Tolkien, and mainly the “Lord of the Rings” novels.
Wood’s lecture revolved around Tolkien’s “unaccountable popularity,” many readers’ escape from reality into the solace of Tolkien’s books, and the Christian undertones within the novels.
“I am often asked in my lecture series, why hasn’t there been a new Tolkien,” Wood said. “No one has taken the trouble to learn what he learned.”
Tolkien’s professors at Oxford University often struggled to keep up with his knowledge, Wood said.
Tolkien will be remembered and re-read forever. He intricately placed layer after layer in his novels, each being a new discovery, Wood said.
“Carol Bloom described a classic as ‘a work that requires us to permanently re-arrange the furniture of our lives,'” Wood said. “That is exactly why ‘Lord of the Rings’ is a great classic. It makes us permanently re-arrange the furniture by what Bloom calls ‘its arresting strangeness.'”
Readers of Tolkien’s tend to want to get away from the real world, leading him to be labeled as an “escapist writer,” Wood said.
“Tolkien created a world for people who cannot stand the real world, who are in terror of the world of horror and death,” Wood said. “Tolkien said the world was a gigantic prison, a jail-house. He called the world the “Culture of Death.”
To some, this may sound excessive, but Tolkien may be right. Wood said in this century, more people were violently killed than in any of the previous centuries.
“It is a horrific statistic,” Wood said. “Tolkien is oppressing the horrible thing. He himself was a victim of that death. He was a soldier in World War I.”
Tolkien gave himself the job of creating an escape, a new world — Middle-Earth.
Much of the language used in “Lord of the Rings” is derived from the ancient languages Tolkien studied as a young man, Wood said. The trilogy is regarded as a “pre-Christian epic.”
“There are no chosen people, no kings or profits, there is no messiah named Jesus,” Wood said. “All of this is yet to come. He is in a pre-existing world, yet Tolkien injects the stories with Christian ideas.”
Tolkien tried to drive out the common fear of death by bringing for the idea that death is a blessing, Wood said.
“Death is the new curse word,” Wood said. “If you ask the average American, ‘What is the purpose of life?,’ the average American will say the purpose of life is not to die.”
Without death, life would have no point, Wood said. The point of life is to eventually die.
Vice Chancellor of Research and Graduate Studies Kevin Smith presented Wood with the Chancellor’s medal.
The lecture came at a time when “Lord of the Rings” has been gaining more fans because of the release of the last film installment, “Return of the King.” However, Wood was not asked to speak about the movie.
“He was invited because of his books and his scholarship,” said Smith. “Tolkien is getting a big infusion of interest; right now turned out to be coincidental.”
Lord of all things Tolkien
February 10, 2004