Re: Lord of the Rings, there is a great book called _SECRET FIRE_, which talks about the religious content of Tolkien's Middle Earth. I'm pasting in a blog post I did about this, but if you want the links you can get them at my blog here:
http://storyspell.blogspot.com/2007/02/light-in-darkness.htmlIn my first entry in this blog, I noted that stories that refresh the spirit are not always all sweetness and light. Some people think that darkness makes the light brighter-- but really, it is only that our perception is altered. Daylight we generally take for granted; just as we take food for granted until we fast to the point when we can actually feel our hunger again. As for darkness, however-- we can take it for eight hours or so in our own beds; but let an unexpected blackout fall and we become anxious until we can find the flashlight and turn its comforting beam on.
In pre-Edison times, the moon had a significance for people, especially travellers, that we postmoderns simply cannot fathom. When my elder daughter was about a year old, her father and I showed her a bright rising moon out the kitchen widow one night. She gasped and cried out "DA MOON!", instantly smitten, and we suddenly understood how the ancients fell into worshipping the lamp of the night. A light that shines in the darkness arrests our attention with its beauty and scatters the evil things of night.
Galadriel's phial plays this vital role in The Lord of the Rings. This book, perhaps the most influential fiction of the 20th Century, is a rich, deep lode of refreshment for the spirit, and this will surely not be the last time I blog about it. But it is, in many places, a very dark book indeed, and the darkness is at its deepest in Shelob's lair. And this is just where the light of Eärendil's star, caught in Galadriel's phial, shines out to wound the nightmare spider.
There is much more to the story of Eärendil, and I haven't room for more than a little here. The tale is to be found in the Silmarillion, Tolkien's pre-history/mythology of Middle Earth. A partial summary, from Stratford Caldecott's Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien:
"....Eärendil is permitted to plead before the Valar on behalf of all the free peoples of Middle-earth. His plea is answered, and the Valar descend upon Middle-earth in a war of wrath that destroys the power of [the personification of evil in Middle-earth ] Morgoth. The Silmaril is set upon the brow of the immortal Eärendil as he sails the darkness of space in a silver ship fasioned for him by the Valar. "
Further exploration of Caldecott's excellent study reveals the seed of Eärendil in the work of Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf's "Crist":
Eala Earendel engla beorhtast
ofer middangeard monnum sended!
Hail Earendel, brightest of angels,
above the middle-earth sent unto men!
In the Book of Lost Tales, we find Tolkien's own song to the Morning Star:
"Earendel arose where the shadow flows
at Ocean's silent brim;
through mouth of night as a ray of light
where the shores are sheer and dim
he launched his bark like a silver spark from the last and lonely sand...."
"It is in this form," Caldecott concludes, "as a beam of light from the Morning and Evening Star, captured in a crystal phial, that the same light much later comes to Fodo as a gift from...Galadriel." This is the light that shines for our hobbit heroes as "A light when all other lights go out."
Light runs like a bright thread through the often-dark history of Middle-earth, as it does in so many of the great stories of our darkened universe.
Posted by matushkadonna at 9:29 AM
[is this too long to post on a discussion thread? I've made the opposite mistake of just directing people to my blog before]