Tolkien - some thoughts

Here are some thoughts on the possible use of The Lord of the Rings by homeschoolers.

The first thing is not to impose the book as a lesson, but introduce it naturally at an early stage. Reading to a child every day, for example as part of a bed-time ritual that can start as soon as the child is capable of gazing at a picture, is the foundation of everything. (You know this already.) In the case of Tolkien, there are books that can be used much earlier than LoR – his Father Christmas Letters, Smith of Wootton Major, and of course The Hobbit – as well as dozens of books by other authors that can be read in conjunction with these, books by the other Inklings, traditional folklore from all over the world, and of course many wonderful passages from the Bible. It doesn’t matter that one is reading a book where the vocabulary is difficult – the meaning of a word can often be gleaned from context, although you should encourage questions and have a dictionary to hand.

When it comes to LoR, reading aloud continues to be important long after the child can read for himself. The sound of the words is important. Spend a bit of time getting the pronunciation of the Elvish words right (the Appendices contain some guidance) – something I never did. The magic is in the language, as Tolkien would be the first to tell you.

Once the story itself has come alive in the child’s imagination, and perhaps after it has been read more than once, it becomes possible to explore a range of topics suggested by the book. Let’s consider Language, Philosophy, Religion, Nature, Geography, History, Mythology, and Art.


First, Language. Many children try their hand at making up a secret language or code. Why not give them a helping hand, and use the game to teach them gradually about the basic rules and reasons for grammar and syntax, the possible use of word endings, and the shapes of letters? You could take a side-trip into the art of calligraphy, in which Tolkien was adept. Keep a good dictionary, and perhaps especially an etymological dictionary, to hand, and talk about the ways words have evolved. Often children’s spelling and also word-comprehension can be massively improved by paying a little attention to the composition of the words we use. It is, by the way, extremely helpful if a child can be taught to speak at least one other language while very young. It becomes much harder later on. Some children might like to try learning Elvish.

Philosophy. We are fortunate in having Peter Kreeft’s excellent book, The Philosophy of Tolkien, to refer to. This will open up the whole world of philosophical thought to anyone who loves the story. (Children, of course, are as much philosophers as anyone else, and more so than many adults, whose ability to wonder and to question has long since atrophied.)

Religion. As my own book, Secret Fire (in the USA, The Power of the Ring) pointed out, not to mention Joseph Pearce and many other authors, Tolkien’s work is permeated with religious themes and “atmosphere”. I don’t think it would be a good idea to treat LoR as a mere religious allegory and attempt to decode it – apart from anything else, this would be contrary to Tolkien’s intention (he had a “cordial dislike” of allegory). Rather the way to connect the book with Religion is by subtly directing attention to the plot, which illustrates the way Providence works in the real world, to the characters and how they develop virtues by struggling against temptations of various sorts, and to the moments when beauty reminds us of the transcendent. It should be possible also to talk about the way we find meaning in our own lives by answering the call to become a hero and following a quest of our own. Each of us is different, just as each member of the Fellowship of the Ring is different and has his own unique part to play. Our lives have a purpose, and we are part of a Great Story. But it might be better to let the book communicate these ideas in its own way and not turn them into a Lesson Plan.

Nature. Tolkien describes the natural word of Middle-earth with great love and attention to detail, so that one feels one has actually been there. You could examine his descriptions, study the flowers and plants and birds he refers to, and try to find places that remind you of parts of the book. Tolkien loved to go on walks in the countryside, and was always dawdling to look at the flowers and trees (unlike his walking companion C.S. Lewis, who liked to walk faster). Trying to draw or paint flowers or landscapes is the best way to get to know them.

Geography. Start with the maps. A fascination with maps and how to read and draw them will stand children in good stead later. Make similar maps of your own neighbourhood or places you visit. Pore over atlases of the real world, and try to see how Tolkien thought Middle-earth might have evolved into the Europe that we see today. Compare the maps of Middle-earth at the time of the War of the Ring with maps in some of Tolkien’s other, posthumously published works, of Beleriand and the other kingdoms in the earlier Ages. (The Encyclopedia of Arda might help.) Discuss how the forces of nature can gradually or suddenly reshape a landscape, raising or levelling mountains, drowning islands and plains, eroding new valleys. Convey something of the fascination of Dwarves with the “bones of the earth”, and if possible take your children to see some “glittering caves”.

History. LoR is about nothing if not history, and the “long defeat” of our exile from Eden, and the yearning for paradise which keeps us building civilizations, and our need for redemption (the “healing of Arda”, as it is called in The Silmarillion). To explore the history of Middle-earth using the Appendices, creating time charts and writing little essays on each of the invented cultures, might be a good way to get children interested in real history. With older kids you could look at what inspired Tolkien – the Anglo-Saxon culture, especially, and to some extent the Celtic. Connect Numenor with Atlantis, and read a bit of Plato.

Mythology. Here you have a golden opportunity to go on from LoR to the Norse and Icelandic sagas, and then to compare Tolkien’s “Ainur” (described in The Silmarillion) with the pantheons of gods not just in the Norse mythology but in Greek and Roman too. Read the tales of King Arthur and his knights, and the legend of Troy, which have so many echoes in LoR. Compare the creation story in The Silmarillion with those of other mythological traditions. Reflect with older children on the relation of mythology to truth – that these are not just failed attempts to explain the world scientifically, but contain poetic insights into truth, and a kind of symbolic metaphysics.

Finally, Art. There are numerous examples of drawings and paintings in different styles inspired by Tolkien’s writing, so it would be easy to look at these and develop an interesting Art class. Tolkien himself illustrated many of the events and scenes in the books, and even designed colourful heraldic designs for the different Elvish “houses” or families. Why not show these, and encourage children to design similar symbols for their own family and friends? Move on from there to look at heraldry and coats of arms, used not only in feudal Europe but in the modern Church. This can help to awaken an appreciation of symbolism, as well as a sense of colour and design (as well as connecting back to History).

I hope these sketchy hints are of some use. Do feel free to comment or submit other ideas. These are just initial thoughts, but I hope to include a more developed version of this essay in my new book eventually.

The Lord of the Rings for homeschoolers

 At a recent Tolkien-related event in Italy I was speaking about the theme of "friendship" in The Lord of the Rings. In a way it is could be called a central theme, since the story is all about a Fellowship. Of course the novel is about many other things as well. Tolkien himself said it was about Death and Immortality, and on another occasion that it was about "the ennoblement of the humble" (e.g. Sam Gamgee and the Hobbits). But it is also about Marriage, Myth and reality, Heroism and Virtue, Temptation and Freedom, Power (true and false), Beauty, Technology, Nature, Creativity, Social Order, the Fall, and Language.... The novel could also be used quite naturally by home-schoolers to get children interested in and thinking about Geography, History, Ethics, Politics, Language, Poetry, Natural History, Mythology, and Philosophy. Is anyone interested in hearing more about this idea?

New Evangelization through Drama

The Quality of Mercy

In his Letter to Artists, Pope John Paul II spoke of art as a bridge to religious experience: “I appeal to you, artists of the written and spoken word, of the theatre and music... I wish to remind each of you that you are invited to use your creative intuition to enter into the heart of the mystery of the Incarnate God and at the same time into the mystery of man.” The late Pope himself had been a playwright and keen patron of drama, and worked with the “Rhapsodic Theatre” in Poland. Thus the beatification of John Paul II on Divine Mercy Sunday (1 May 2011) was both the occasion and the inspiration for Léonie Caldecott’s play, “The Quality of Mercy”, performed over three nights preceding the beatification at Oxford’s Catholic Chaplaincy. Part Theatre of the Word and part Ballet of the Word, it was a multi-levelled theo-drama about youth and age, despair and modernity, vocations to marriage and celibacy. The play was the second from Divine Comedy Productions, set up at the Oxford Oratory last year. In London, Sarah de Nordwall’s "Bard School" is also concentrating on poetry and drama as a way of expressing and communicating faith. In the United States, Fr Peter John Cameron OP is also an accomplished playwright and director. An article by him on this theme is available online here.

Philosophy is unavoidable, of course. As Chesterton long ago noted, everyone is a philosopher; whether you unconsciously absorb your philosophy from somewhere else (such as the newspapers) or think it through for yourself. And how you think about things shapes the way you act and behave, so nothing is richer in practical implications (even for art). Do you believe in God? But what kind of “God” is being talked about? What does the word mean to you? I have tried to address that question online here, and the main Second Spring web-site contains many useful articles on philosophical topics. Nevertheless, philosophy is never going to be a very effective means of evangelization. People open their minds, or change them, for other reasons than a good argument. “Heart speaks unto heart”, not head unto head, as Newman realized. The Christian faith places us under an obligation to communicate it where possible. But effective communication involves the imagination and the spirit, not just the reason or the intelligence.

Just as we cannot separate the virtues of faith, hope, and love, so we cannot separate truth, goodness, and beauty. It is the heart where they join together. The way we live and the beauty we produce are the most eloquent expression of the truth we believe. You cannot communicate a truth that has not changed you, and we are changed only by a truth that we recognize as in some way beautiful.

Paying attention

Attention to the child is the key to the teacher’s success, and the child’s own quality of attention is the key to the learning process, or so Simone Weil asserts in her essay “Reflections of the Right Use of School Studies”. She almost goes as far as to say that the subject studied and its contents are irrelevant; the important thing, the real goal of study, is the “development of attention”. And why? Because “prayer consists of attention”, and all worldly study is really a stretching of the soul towards prayer.

“Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.” An attempt to grasp one truth – even if it fails – will assist us in grasping another. “The useless efforts made by the Cure d’Ars, for long and painful years, in his attempt to learn Latin bore fruit in the marvellous discernment that enabled him to see the very soul of his penitents behind their words and even their silences.”

Attention is desire; it is the desire for light, for truth, for understanding, for possession. It follows, according to Weil, that the intelligence “grows and bears fruit in joy”, and that the promise or anticipation of joy is what arouses the effort of attention: it is what makes students of us.

Newman on Higher Education

When Archbishop Cullen appointed Newman as Rector of the proposed Catholic University of Ireland in 1851, it was to spearhead the Church’s response to a scheme designed to enable Catholics to obtain degrees within the secular, utilitarian system devised by Sir Robert Peel: the Queen’s Colleges of Belfast, Cork and Galway. As Newman wrote, the University was intended to attract American as well as Irish students, and to become a centre of Catholic cultural renewal for the whole English-speaking world, “with Great Britain, Malta (perhaps Turkey or Egypt), and India on one side of it, and North America and Australia on the other.” It was an extraordinary vision, and even if this first Irish Catholic university was reabsorbed by the secular system after Newman’s departure, it had provided the occasion for a series of discourses on education (The Idea of a University) which continue to influence Catholic thinking today. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), defining the basic constitution of a modern Catholic university, clearly bears the mark of Newman’s thought. 

Today, Newman’s ideas are more urgent and relevant than ever. Zenit has recently published a useful series of articles on this theme by Fr Juan R. Velez ("Newman's 'Idea' for Catholic Higher Education", Part 1, Part 2). The tensions between “liberal” or progressive and “conservative” or authoritarian elements in the Catholic academic world tend to come to a head over the

question of whether faculty should be obliged to take an oath of loyalty to the Holy See. In Newman’s vision of a Catholic university, loyalty to the magisterium was presupposed. No one can accuse Newman of infidelity (even if he famously, and rightly, put conscience before the Pope in an after-dinner toast). The insistence on a formal oath may have a function in weeding out dissenters, but it betrays that the essential spirituality of a Catholic institution has already been lost. The mere taking of an oath, by itself, is not the way to restore that spirit.

To understand this, we need to reflect on what the Church (and by extension any Catholic community, including a community of scholars) actually is. A eucharistic ecclesiology views the Church not exclusively from the side of the “people” or from the side of the “authorities”, but from the “inside”; that is to say, as an extension of the Incarnation.  It recognizes the Church’s deepest reality in the love which is the source of her unity. In that love is inscribed the Trinitarian dynamic which alone enables us to overcome dualism without falling into monism (totalitarian or socialistic corporatism).

The Church has the nature of a sacrament. The place to start renewing the Catholic spirit of an institution is therefore with the liturgy. Daily Mass and regular opportunities for prayer should be the axis around which the life of the Catholic community turns, cultivating both the sense of the sacred and the sense of the community, the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, the love of God and the love of neighbour, all at the same time. As far as possible, the curriculum should follow the liturgical year. Students should be offered opportunities to participate in a pattern of prayer, meditation, good works and fasting that will assist them in living more in the spirit of the evangelical counsels. The experience of (moderate) asceticism could in fact be seen as an essential component of a Catholic education, since it engages the will in the transformation of a way of life. The advertising industry expends large amounts of energy, creativity and time in manufacturing artificial needs, or channelling natural desires towards particular commodities: education in a Christian institution should assist students to discriminate between true and false needs, even as it strengthens their resolve to pursue creatively the task of fulfilling their own real needs as human persons, through loving service.

Newman emphasized consistently from his Evangelical days that Christianity is much more than a set of doctrines or institutions.  At its heart is the love of a Person, Jesus Christ, who alone fully reveals to us the source and purpose of created reality and of our own lives. Ex Corde echoes Newman: “the human being can come to a unified and organic vision of knowledge” (section 85). The healthy human mind aims to see things first in their natural wholeness and integration, and it does so by loving reality or the truth of things per se; by being receptive to it, in such a way as to form a kind of living communion with it. A Catholic education therefore has to be founded on the love of truth, on respect for reality that transcends us, and on the capacity of the human mind to know the “essences” of real things. This stands in contrast to the prevailing philosophy of our age, which makes the choosing self the creator of meaning.

As Christians, we know by faith that it is in Christ that all truth finds its home and fulfilment; but that does not mean that all intellectual problems can be solved with a doctrinal statement.  Each and every discipline has its own legitimate autonomy; a Catholic university is not one in which the teachers of physics or biology or history must report to the professor of theology in fear and trembling.  Nevertheless, the theology professor in a Catholic university does know a secret.  He knows that in the end, if you press physics or biology or history to its own deepest level, if you pursue your intellectual quarry to its ultimate lair, you will find love. What is magnetism, asks the poet Coventry Patmore in The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, “but the echo of the senseless rock to the very voice of far-off Love, and the effect of the kiss of God transmitted through the hierarchies of heaven and earth to the lips of the least of beings?”  In some form or expression, the theologian knows that it is love that will turn out to be the force that moves the sun, the stars and the heart of man.  It is in this sense that Christ -- who reveals the nature of love -- is implicitly at the centre of the curriculum even of secular studies in a Catholic university.

Fractals

Fractals are infinitely complex and beautiful patterns produced through the repetition of a simple formula or shape, patterns which often appear rough or chaotic and which can be found everywhere in nature (the surface of the sea, the edge of a cloud, the dancing flames in a wood fire). I have written about them briefly before.

What appeals to us in such patterns, perhaps, is the combination of simplicity and complexity. They allow our minds scope to expand, and our imaginations to take off in the direction of the infinite, but at the same time to rest in a unity. It is similar to the reason we love science. Scientists are seeking the simple secret at the heart of the complex - the formula or combination of universal laws that governs all of reality and explains why it works or appears the way it does.

Something similar is happening in art, when the artist seeks unity of concept or meaning or mood in a complex scene or sight or landscape.

Not all beauty is produced by these "recursive algorithms" or the repetition of self-similarity at different scales of magnitude. Sometimes a pattern is just there in the thing and does not repeat itself. But beauty always has something to do with order, which means the finding of a unity of form in something complex - a balance between the Many and the One. The finding of unity gives us joy (which is why we call it beautiful) because it enables us to recognise the Self in the Other, outside ourselves. It causes us to expand our boundaries to include the other thing as grasped and understood, or at least as situated in a relationship to us. Fractal patterns are a version of that experience. We sense the unity, but because it is expressing itself as never-ending complexity, it never gets boring.

Therefore all beauty, including fractal beauty, reminds us of God, who is both infinitely simple (in himself, as pure love) and yet infinitely complex (in what he contains and creates).

Child-centred education: 3

We all know there is a child still within us. That child has many aspects. It is ignorant, selfish, immature, confused. It may be desperately in need of love it has never received. But it is innocent and pure. I think it was in that sense that Georges Bernanos wrote, “What does my life matter? I just want it to be faithful, to the end, to the child I used to be.”

Christianity has given a particular importance to childhood. It certainly transformed, over time, the way children were perceived in classical civilizations. From the statement of Christ, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mk 10:15), it followed that there was something valuable and to be imitated in the state of childhood. Normally children are told to grow up and become like adults, not the other way around. Childhood is an undeveloped stage, but in some ways it also represents a more perfect state, in which we
can see more completely what it is simply to be human. Until Mary Immaculate, no one had lived that human existence perfectly, but in her and in her newborn Child we see what it is to receive one’s being straight from the hand of God and to show forth what it is to be loved and to love.

This is not to romanticize or idealize childhood, but to understand it in the light of a new fact: the Incarnation of the second person of the divine Trinity. God has a Son. We are made in God’s image. The child from its first moment is the paradigm for the image of God, as well as a revelation of the meaning of being – its meaning as pure gift. This primordial meaning of the child is present even in fallen man, but clouded over and confused as time goes by and as the child grows.

The great educators have learned to appreciate the various stages of childhood and adolescence as the unfolding of human potential. Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” was welcomed by many teachers (if not by most psychologists) because it seemed to confirm their experience of the multi-faceted nature of that potential, and gave them a vocabulary in which to discuss it. But intelligence, even in the plural, needs to be integrated within a broader theory of the human person as the manifestation of Being.

The child who has not yet sinned – or in the case of Mary and Jesus, the child who never sins – lives partly in eternity even while on earth; he has the fragrance of eternity around him. Purity is the reason childhood is so fascinating. To be pure is to be simple, in the sense of undivided. Impurity involves a loss of integrity, of integration; it is a dissonance, a crack in the mirror of the soul. (Every sin sets part of me against the rest.) The pure gaze of innocence is one that does not secretly look for what can be got out of something or someone. It sees things as they are in their own right. The energy behind the gaze is not diverted by a variety of passions. When a baby wants something, it wants that thing completely. Thus the child lives each moment more intensely than those who have grown old in sin. His eyes are clearer, his ears keener, his energy stronger. He lives in a wider universe, one that seems to go on forever, for he has not had the experience of many winters and summers, and of the flickering parade birthdays coming and going through the years. He has no yardstick against which to measure his life. This intensity of experience is partly a function of the way memory and imagination work. It is the memory of time that makes us old; remembering eternity makes us young again.

The first priority of the Catholic school must be to preserve and nurture the spirit of childhood in this sense – to preserve and help to restore (through the sacraments, especially the sacrament of confession) the purity that alone enables us to “see God” (Matt. 5:8). The rules of morality are not there primarily for the sake of social order, tradition or convention; they exist for the sake of the order of the soul, its spiritual development and happiness. Yet an overly moralistic approach would be counter-productive. Not only can we not rely on rules and the policing of corridors for the preservation of purity and the development of conscience, these are not even the best way to begin. The soul needs love, as the positive force around which all its powers will congregate. It needs a degree of tenderness, if it is to flourish without fear. It needs attention, in the sense that others – the teacher especially – must listen to it and be receptive to what it has to offer, if it is to discover for itself what that is.

This was the third of three extracts from a work in progress.