Platypus of Truth

With the year wrapping up, it's time to take stock again and see what's been going on here at the quiet end of "Lake Internet." Daring to peer above the surface... It looks like it was a good year for Tolkien and the Inklings: Hearing the Inklings Pilgrim's Regress Versus Firefly Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien Tolkien's Dark Tower The Platypus and Even More Secondary Sources One of my Personal Favorites: Out in the Rain or Platypus Weather Jane Eyre Makes a Deserved Come-Back: Something, Dear Reader, Besides Shannara Thinking About An Ancient Christian Hymn and What it Tells Us About Their World-Picture: St. Patrick's Breastplate And While We're on the Topic of the Supernatural: Reviewing "The Storm and the Fury" Hellboy in Mexico and Christological Echoes Theological Localism Helps Me Understand the Golden State: California's Strange Gods The Platypus and Theological Localism The Summer of Shannara Retu...

Books on The Lord of the Rings are getting to be a dime a dozen these days, but books on J.R.R. Tolkien's first published masterpiece, The Hobbit , are still rare as, well, a hobbit.  Imagine my delight, then, when I found out that Washington College's self-styled " Tolkien Professor " was publishing an entire volume exclusively on The Hobbit .  The book is called Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit , and it very much lived up to my expectations. I was in fifth grade when I first read The Hobbit .  I had no idea what the book was about.  The only impression I had to go on was the cover, an old Balantine Books edition with an image of Bilbo in Gollum's cave, and the rather impressive sounding name of the author.  I can't admit to having been a very great reader at that point by any stretch of the imagination.  The Hobbit hooked me, and I've been reading ever since.  As I've gotten older, however, I've been a little saddened by the short sh...

Strong Son of God, Immortal Love Who we, who have not seen Thy face, By Faith, and Faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove. Alfred, Lord Tennyson Frank Pastore was a man who took issue with the divide the Enlightenment placed between Faith and Reason.  Though precipitated by personal tragedy, his conversion to Evangelical Christianity was primarily intellectual.  He set out to prove his Christian friends wrong and ended up arguing himself into the belief that Yeshua bar Yosef, the minor itinerant preacher from first century Nazareth, was in fact the Logos incarnate; the primordial Wisdom behind the kosmos become a living, breathing person.  To be less literary, he came to believe that Jesus was God and, in Evangelical-speak, accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior.  The fruit of that was an academic quest to learn all he could about the proofs for Christianity and eight years of sharing them on the air-waves of LA.  That's where I encountered...

Today I spent the morning with my students and colleges viewing the first part of Peter Jackson's film interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit .  Whatever you may think of the movie as an adaptation or as film proper, it was a lovely experience to be surrounded by an entire community enjoying themselves.  The fact that we're in the Christmas season just made it that much better, adding an extra level of gaiety to both mood and dress.  I, of course, was in the row with the Inklings club. The best part was that for the students the whole thing came as a complete surprise.  Gandalf simply showed up in the middle of their first period classes and ushered them out the door on an unexpected journey.  The look on the students' faces as what was happening slowly dawned on them was priceless. Bilbo liked surprises (so long as they were happening to other people) and he came to like adventures.  Today, we had a happy adventure.  ...and yes, it did make...

Reading about the Inklings, the informal literary circle that gathered around C.S. Lewis in the thirties and forties, gradually begins to feel like adjusting the focus on a camera lens.  You start with a single figure in hazy focus, say J.R.R. Tolkien.  Picking up Humphrey Carpenter's biography draws the professor in a few stark lines.  A person, a personality begins to emerge.  To begin to see Tolkien, however, is for others figures to become perceptible on the edges of your vision.  C.S. Lewis enters into the picture, and Charles Williams hovers, indistinct around the edges.  Seeking to know the relationship between the three men better, you may pick up Carpenter's second work, The Inklings .  Suddenly, Lewis and Williams jump sharply into view as characters and Tolkien continues to take on life and weight.  New personages flit through the frame: Hugo Dyson, Humphrey Havard, Dorothy L. Sayers, T.S. Eliot, Warnie Lewis.  Carpenter's Lewis do...