Words Worth Noting - October 20, 2024

“Yet The Hobbit is unlike Beowulf or any of the tales in The Silmarillion in its published form. The Hobbit represented departure from the kind of story that Tolkien loved and that he had been trying without success to write in the Silmarillion. Beowulf and all of the Norse stories that Tolkien loved shared a common plot. Simply stated is it is this: the hero fights against impossible odds and dies. The culture out of which Beowulf appeared was grim and dark. The Celtic world, which included the Germanic and Norse peoples as well as the Britons and Irish, indeed most of pre Christian Europe, believed in dreadful gods who demanded human sacrifice. The Celtic peoples offered their own children, and eventually their slaves, as human sacrifices, which they then devoured in ritual cannibalism. They did not love their gods, but feared them. The gods themselves had nothing to look forward to except their own destruction. Alliteration can be a pleasant literary device unless overdone, but it is impossible to overdo the nature of the Norse mythologies. Thus, their stories are characterized by darkness, doubt, depression, dismay, dread, despair, destruction, and death. The stories set a mood of stubbornness, suffering, sorrow, shadow, and sadness. The characters experienced treachery, torment, terror, trouble, tears, threat, and treason. The stories are tales of futility, faithlessness, foulness, fear, and folly. These disquieting words are the words used by Tolkien throughout the Silmarillion. In the Norse tales, the heroes make their journeys to death and ruin. The Hobbit represents an entirely different kind of plot. The plot, and later that of The Lord of the Rings, comes from a different culture. It is the plot that C.S. Lewis learned to love as a teenager and never outgrew. It is the story of the struggle, against all odds to the end of the world for the great prize that ends in victory and a return to home as a changed person. It is a story that comes from a culture with an entirely different kind of God – a God who journeys into time and space as a man in order to battle death itself and rise victorious. It is a story of hope rather than despair.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis