|
Post by Cascador on May 10, 2014 18:58:47 GMT -6
Me and Stardancer were talking about Tolkien and C.S. Lewis today and I find it interesting that Tolkien had a better idea about mythology. Because C.S Lewis thought myths were lies. Lewis is known to be a lot less subtle in his work than Tolkien. But Tolkien however didn't think they were lies. He didn't get it exactly right, but he was so close. He thought that myths were misguided truths.
|
|
|
Post by Midnattblod on May 10, 2014 21:44:51 GMT -6
You have to remember that a lot of his work was based off of WWI, which he fought in. What's very interesting about this is that he always denied that LotR was an allegory for WWI, although it can be seen so clearly in his works. However, Tolkien drew his inspiration from a number of sources which he cleverly interwove with his very own ideas. This is what I consider to be his greatest achievement. it was actually WWII that people thought LotR was an allegory for. people thought that Sauron was a lot like Hitler and that the free people of Middle Earth were the allies, which is very understandable since WWII was only about a decade before the books were published.
|
|
|
Post by Liadan on May 11, 2014 16:40:32 GMT -6
Me and Stardancer were talking about Tolkien and C.S. Lewis today and I find it interesting that Tolkien had a better idea about mythology. Because C.S Lewis thought myths were lies. Lewis is known to be a lot less subtle in his work than Tolkien. But Tolkien however didn't think they were lies. He didn't get it exactly right, but he was so close. He thought that myths were misguided truths. I'm also pretty sure that Lewis changed his tune later in life, after Tolkien successfully converted him to Christianity, if not Catholicism. He was quite the medievalist in that he believed that "God had given partial visions of the truth to Greeks and Romans, and that their myths reflected part of that truth. The pagan gods were not, thus, demons to him; stories about them, at least, could be prefigurations of Christ" (Edward James, p. 70, "Tolkien, Lewis, and the explosion of genre fantasy," The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy). The same essay later goes on to quote something from one of Lewis's letters, in which he was tempted to pray to Apollo the Healer for his dying wife: "Somehow one didn't feel it wd. have been very wrong - wd. have only been addressing Christ sub specie Apollinis" ('under the guise of Apollo,' Letter 23 May 1960). And of course he later published Till We Have Faces, a retelling of Cupid and Psyche, a "classical myth which had been seen in the Middle Ages as expressing profound truths about the nature of Christian love" (James, 70).
|
|