Dragaera

A question re: Beginning Fantasy for Youth

Mon Nov 25 17:55:43 PST 2002

On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 07:26:08PM -0600, David Rodemaker <dar at horusinc.com> wrote:
> > Well, yeah. Except that for Lewis, the Christian mythos is absolutely
> > true about the universe. The fair question, as I see it, is: Did Lewis
> > expect the series to hit people this way, or could he reasonably have
> > expected it to? And if so, how did he feel about it? -- Not necessarily
> > questions we can answer.
> The same argument could be made about LOTR, it's certainly as Christian as
> Narnia is...

Um, no.  Narnia is very much a direct analogy, and the author 
admits it.  Tolkien in LOTR denies any allegory along those 
lines, and it's a much weaker connection.  

I don't deny there are some parallels, but Narnia is several 
large steps closer to Christianity than Middle-Earth.

> The argument can be made that both T. and L. were Christian mystics (not in
> the occult sense but in the religious one) and were quite aware of what they
> were doing.

Tolkien was certainly such, but their works are not necessarily 
the same in that respect.

-- 
Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org)
Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp
Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt