“If vacillation dwell within the heart the soul will rue it.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzival [1st sentence of book]

“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

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the reason for having one day set aside for Thanksgiving is to help us be more grateful every day… and act on it.

“In the second half of A Preface to Paradise Lost, [C.S.] Lewis defended his approach to literary criticism and the artistry of Milton against the recent trend in literary theory represented by I.A. Richards, D.G. James, and T.S. Eliot. His opponents deplored the stock responses to moral questions they found in Paradise Lost. Lewis countered that society would do well to recover Milton's stock responses to pride, treachery, pain, and death.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that our politicians are dangerously helpless in the face of explicit support for antisemitic terrorism not from active malevolence but because it’s a form of evil their woke “paradigm” or worldview can’t process… yet.

“It was not the use of science that bothered [C.S.] Lewis but its misuse. The danger lay not with the sciences but with the humanities, which had fallen to pieces after World War I and abandoned their function in preserving the concepts of right, wrong, true, false, and beautiful. Poetry no longer made sense, music no longer had melodies, novels no longer had plots, paintings no longer were pictures, and the vast public ceased to be interested in the arts.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“It is impossible for someone like me who is not totally immersed in these questions to judge to what extent Aboriginal people sincerely wish to perpetuate in large measure, though with modern benefits, the lives of their ancestors. I doubt if the alternatives were clearly laid out, a majority of Indigenous people would choose to live nomadic lives tribally and eating fish and game. But whether it is a tactical masquerade to maximize compensation and reparations or a sincere commitment, native Canadians at the very least have a right not to be treated as if they were immigrants from a foreign and much different country. It hardly needs emphasis that they and their ancestral civilization antedated the arrival of the now overwhelming majority of Canadians of overseas ancestry, and as a now well recognized natural right, they’re entitled to preserve as much as they wish of their traditional civilization, as long as it does not violate fundamental principles of Canadian life.”

Conrad Black in National Post April 6, 2024

“Idealist: a cynic in the making.”

“Irving Layton Canadian poet (1912-2006)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 19, 2013