Have just started reading The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and can't put the book down (I literally find myself taking every small opportunity to delve into the book).
Already, only 130 pages in, what I like about the book is the clear distinction between good and evil with Tolkien's Catholic faith shining through.
Find the hobbits fascinating, they're like small human figures with a few cat-like features (e.g. a powerful sense of hearing and deftness of movement).
My favourite part so far is when Frodo, Sam and Pippin hear singing "in the fair Elven-tongue", which, in effect, saves them from being directly confronted by a Black Rider who is pursuing them:
"... O Lady clear!
O Queen beyond the Western Seas!
O Light to us that wander here ..."
Couldn't help but view this as something of an echo from a famous Catholic Marian hymn (Hail, Queen of Heaven):
"HAIL, Queen of heav'n, the ocean Star
"Guide of the wand'rer here below ..."
Used to love listening to this hymn at St. Joseph's Junior School in Bury, Lancashire as a child during the mid-1970s, and occasionally get to hear it when I attend the old Latin Mass in England.
Yes, I think that I'm going to really enjoy the rest of The Lord of the Rings, as I need some straightforward literary enchantment after years of reading the (admittedly beautiful) disenchantment of Thomas Hardy (still my favourite writer).
From what I've seen already, I also sense that The Lord of the Rings offers an appropriate antidote to the Sodom and Gomorrah agenda of the monstrous politically-'correct' macro-ideology that discolours and destroys a once Christian Western world.
No comments:
Post a Comment