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Document Type
Paper
Event Website
http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm
Start Date
31-7-2021 12:00 PM
End Date
31-7-2021 12:45 PM
Description
In “The Arch and the Keystone,” Mythlore 38:1 (Fall/Winter 2019), 5-17, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argues that the conflicts and contradictions she sees in Tolkien’s essays and fiction do not call for harmonization but rather should be embraced for what they are: “two opposing and conflicting sides of one person, whose contention makes him who he is as well as what he is, the keystone that creates the arch” of The Lord of the Rings out of the friction of the two sides (16). Unfortunately, the alleged contradictions, e.g. between the despair of the Beowulf essay and the hope for eucatastrophe in the essay “On Fairy-Stories,” reflected by light and darkness in The Lord of the Rings, are created by her failure to understand Tolkien’s biblical worldview, where the impossibility of salvation in this lifedoes not contradict, but is the logical setting for, the hope of a redemption not fully realized until the next. Thus an understanding of Tolkien’s biblical eschatology dissolves the alleged tension and lets us replace Flieger’s keystone with the cornerstone of faith in Iluvatar and the true hope of Middle-earth.
Tech Mod: Jessica Dickinson Goodman.
Included in
The Keystone or the Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged “Conflicting Sides” of Tolkien’s Singular Self
In “The Arch and the Keystone,” Mythlore 38:1 (Fall/Winter 2019), 5-17, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argues that the conflicts and contradictions she sees in Tolkien’s essays and fiction do not call for harmonization but rather should be embraced for what they are: “two opposing and conflicting sides of one person, whose contention makes him who he is as well as what he is, the keystone that creates the arch” of The Lord of the Rings out of the friction of the two sides (16). Unfortunately, the alleged contradictions, e.g. between the despair of the Beowulf essay and the hope for eucatastrophe in the essay “On Fairy-Stories,” reflected by light and darkness in The Lord of the Rings, are created by her failure to understand Tolkien’s biblical worldview, where the impossibility of salvation in this lifedoes not contradict, but is the logical setting for, the hope of a redemption not fully realized until the next. Thus an understanding of Tolkien’s biblical eschatology dissolves the alleged tension and lets us replace Flieger’s keystone with the cornerstone of faith in Iluvatar and the true hope of Middle-earth.
Tech Mod: Jessica Dickinson Goodman.
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythcon/mc51/schedule/8
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Recorded Session