"Cliff Notes - the hobbit & the lord of rings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tolkien J.R.R)

^^^^^^^^^^THE HOBBIT & THE LORD OF THE RINGS: ON TOLKIEN'S CHRISTIANITY

The Lord of the Rings, then, although it presents no "God," no "Christ," and no "Christians," embodies much of Tolkien's "real religion" and is a profoundly Christian work. No "God" is required in this story.... Gandalf and Aragorn need not turn our thoughts to... Christ... but they persuade us that if we are to have hope in our lives and in our history it must be hope for the kind of power and authority revealed in Aragorn the king and on the basis of the kind of power revealed in Gandalf's "miracles" and in his rising from the dead. What Frodo does and undergoes speaks to us of what a man's responsibility, according to the Christian faith, must always be: to renounce the kind of power which would enslave others and ourselves and to submit to that power which frees us all.

-Gunnar Urang, "Tolkien's Fantasy: The Phenomenology of Hope," in Mark R. Hillegas, ed., Shadows of the Imagination, 1969

^^^^^^^^^^THE HOBBIT & THE LORD OF THE RINGS: ON HOBBITS

His Hobbit is both a bridge and a being more like Man than are the heroic, familiar, mock-human counterparts that appear in adventure stories. Moreover, the hobbit is... more of a human than if he were one, as petit-bourgeois as if he caught the 8:15 commuter train....

The rather jolly virtues of the Hobbits are raised to solemn magnificence when it is realized that these virtues endow their possessors with the power to face and subdue the terrible and soul-destroying opposition of Evil that besets them. It is the reluctant choice to face or not to face Evil... that raised Bilbo and more so his heir Frodo, above even great Beowulf.

-William Ready, The Tolkien Relation, 1968

^^^^^^^^^^THE HOBBIT & THE LORD OF THE RINGS: A DETRACTOR'S VIEW

What we get is a simple confrontation--in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama--of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good, the remote and alien villain with the plucky little homegrown hero.... For the most part such characterizations as Dr. Tolkien has been able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped: Frodo the good little Englishman, Samwise, his doglike servant, who talks lower class and respectful, and who never deserts his master. These characters... are involved in interminable adventures the poverty of invention displayed in which is... almost pathetic.

-Edmund Wilson, "Oo, Those Awful Orcs!" in The Nation, April 14, 1956

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