There are some things that Tolkien loved

Did Tolkien Hate...Everything?
Jess of the Shire | 11 Oct. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLmvQtnaUKg

I think there may be a solution of part of the mystery of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry.

Obviously, in Fauns chasing Nymphs in C. S. Lewis, there is some gallantry.

In Silenus providing wine and Bacchus destroying the bondage of a bridge, next book, there is some revelry.

And in Tolkien there just may be a hint of "this is how a Christian writes that kind of thing" ...

8:40 Ball point pens are not all that much a question of technophilia or technophobia.

1) CSL had his ingrained writing routines. In rules for writing well given to aspiring authors among his child fans (forget if it was the god-daughter Joan or the family who were Catholics, I think including one Lawrence) two are all about this: a) turn off the radio; b) always read your text out loud. I can imagine that the feel of a filler pen on paper was also part of how he wrote. Obviously, a type-writer would have done too much noise.

2) The first ball point pens were not the best ones. I think Biro and Eversharp were inferior to Bic when it came to avoid ink leakage and things.

12:03 As long as "a little bit" really is a little bit and not Stephen King style graphic, and as long as the war, blood and death happens on paper and not in the lives of the young.

14:15 Someone (I think the guy who is behind Into the Wardrobe) claimed:

• Tolkien considered realistic Greco-Roman fauns totally inappropriate for children
• Tolkien considered inauthentic remake versions of Greco-Roman fauns inappropriate for anyone.

Pretty famously, there is a faun and a girl in the first chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

In this case, I think we can have a notion that not just Catholicism, but also a partly Methodist upbringing (the relatives of his mother were not Catholics, and he wasn't staying with Fr. Morgan all the time) made JRRT perhaps prone to reacting a bit stronger than some others would.

20:16 Tolkien didn't like Dante?

That could very much explain why he didnt like Narnia. CSL was, famously, an admirer of Dante basically as much as Dorothy L. Sayers who, once she had earned lots of money off Lord Peter Wimsey, also made a good translation of Dante.

It's certainly not just that it's about the afterlife, he did enjoy Pearl (which he translated from a West-Midlands' Middle English more remote from Modern English than Chaucer's London Middle English), and he himself wrote a story in a similar vein basically about Purgatory. And in some way, he did put some studies of Hell into Lord of the Rings, like the Barrow Wight.

Probably, he may have felt that what he enjoyed and did was individual case studies (Pearl being a child gone to Heaven, and appearing to console her griefstricken father, Niggle being a somewhat unflattering self insert), and Dante was too much panorama.

26:09 I have nothing against celebrating what Tolkien loved.

• beer
• tobacco (even if I've ceased smoking myself)
• rurality
• taters (you know what Tolkien fan with a youtube channel has a T-shirt with TATERS on it?)
• and (to the measure my poor version of a Catholic life allows me) the Eucharist and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

And adding on afterthoughts into letters by PS and into essays by footnotes.

28:04 And as Tolkien loved Latin and St. Thomas Aquinas, I think you can make an educated guess about what I studied most at university (more than other subjects singly, if not taken together) and what extra course in that language subject I took without getting university credits for it, just because ...

As a mythology buff on my own, I feel the Ulmo chapters in Silmarillion really won't do. I read Hippolytus and concluded a devil really did appear to Theseus in Troizen, and later on sham warn him (but secretly goad him) to the murder of his own son. To Tolkien, no doubt, that was a perverted memory of sth purer, to me it was a real actual event with an actual devil involved. And if you want more on that note, ask an Exorcist about what he thinks happened to Hercules, supposing it was a real person (which I obviously do).

(And yes, a devil could make horses stampede over Hippolytus, just as devils could make swine stampede into a lake near Gadara).

30:00 Let me guess.

Humphrey Carpenter died in 2005, so the extra letters are not his pick?