A few days ago, I stumbled across a new unabridged audiobook version of JRR Tolkien's seminal essay On Fairy Stories, published on the website of Catholic Culture Audiobooks.  The superb performance is by voice-actor James W Majewski; who really seems to understand what he is reading, so that it is expounded with great clarity. Even better, he reads at a measured pace yet with a quietly-passionate intensity that revealed the essay to be - itself - one of Tolkien's greatest works of imagination.   I have read and re-read OFS more times than I can count (including the annotated sc ..read more

I have been re-reading that most inspiring of essays: On Fairy Stories, by JRR Tolkien; and considering the need some of us feel (in the 'modern world') for enchantment.  Tolkien describes how this can be found in the best of Fairy Stories - or what we nowadays, since Tolkien's essay, term 'fantasy' literature.  But what of 'real life' - of our lives outside of fairy stories? What of our disenchanted mundane lives? Is there any kind of 'cure' for disenchantment - something in-addition-to our leisure-time and recreational immersion in artistic recreations of faery? What should we do w ..read more

What follows is a guest post by commenter WW which I invited him to contribute on the basis of several very interesting comments on this theme: **  Could Tolkien’s orcs be incarnated demonic spirits? It was hard for Tolkien to describe the history and nature of orcs to his own satisfaction; and the problem has continued among his commentators. I will suggest that orcs were constructed from material bodies made to house Melkor/ Morgoth’s demon followers in a form that could procreate on Middle Earth. Sauron, as the heir of Morgoth, Sauron was later able to accelerate, expand, and modify ..read more

Don W King. Inkling, historian, brother: a life of Warren Hamilton Lewis. Kent State University Press: Ohio, USA, 2022. pp 300.  I am delighted to read a biography of CS Lewis's beloved brother 'Warnie'; coming fifty years after his death; long after I had resigned myself to being permanently starved of detailed information on this most warmly genial participant in the Inklings club.  I have read and re-read the published 1982 selection from Warnie's superb journal Brothers and Friends, until my copy fell to pieces and I had to buy another. What appealed was the eye for detail rooted ..read more

I was always struck by CS Lewis's hardline attitude to happiness or self-gratification in relation to Christianity - the way he emphasized the problem of mixing-up the 'therapeutic' aspect of belief with the business of what is actually true.  In the Screwtape Letters and Great Divorce (as well as his more abstractly theological works) Lewis negatively depicted people who fluently excused whatever they wanted to do - what they currently enjoyed doing, or what made them feel better - by making arguments that linked these to Christianity.  In the Narnia chronicles; this was encapsulate ..read more

From Surprised by Joy by CS Lewis, 1955.  Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing....   With that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country... the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly bec ..read more

There is always, eventually, a finite amount given us of what we most like and find most important.  For example, it seems as if not much more will be discovered about The Inklings; and The Notion Club Papers is incomplete, inconsistent and tantalizingly brief.  So, apart from re-reading the same material; what can we do? The classic answer within academic English Literature is some combination of scholarship and criticism.  Scholarship such as 'editorial' activities - especially examining the primary source material (the actual manuscript evidence). For example, there is ..read more

Tolkien's Notion Club Papers completed by Bruce G Charlton (a speculative, summary 'treatment' - as if for a movie)  Having brooded (some would say obsessively - and they would be right!) over Tolkien's Notion Club Papers for a couple of years, I am now going to speculate about where the NCPs were tending; what the NCPs would have been about and what they would have been like - if ever Tolkien had finished the novel. In a nutshell, I believe that the Notion Club Papers were intended to serve an extremely important purpose: to rescue modern England from its spiritual malaise. At least ..read more

The BBC Radio dramatized version of The Hobbit came out in 1968 at the crest of the first phase of Tolkien's mass popularity; and the whole thing was an ambitious piece of work, done with considerable zest and and attention to detail.  There is a complex, high quality, medieval-style musical score; played by top-notch musicians on ancient instruments such as Crumhorns - which, immediately and throughout, sets the tone of the drama.  This sonic landscape is reinforced by the involvement of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop to provide sound effects and voice treatments: mostly good, but s ..read more

The most important evaluation of the 1981 BBC Radio Lord of the Rings is that I have listened to it many times - most recently over the past few weeks. There is a lot to enjoy, and that enjoyment is enhanced by repeated listening; and some aspects absolutely excellent.  Ultimately; I do not think it possible to adapt LotR for radio in a wholly satisfactory form, due to the constraints of the medium - but this version does very well those kinds of things that radio does best; which are the small scale, inter-personal dramas of the story.  That, indeed, seems to have been a guidi ..read more