Old Traditions, New Conversations

From ISI:

Now, I admit that I prefer the imagination of the Tolkien or Lewis variety. Narnia takes traditional fairy tale themes and weaves them into a new story, and Lewis’s own Christian faith is evident in the works themselves. Tolkien’s epic is even more clearly Christian in formation and structure; in addition, his language creation introduced generations of readers to Old English, Old Norse, and other languages. And some of the set pieces, such as the siege of Gondor, echo historical events, in that case the siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in 1683.

So in a real sense these more recent works are clearly in conversation with the older tradition in a way that allows us to enter into a larger moral universe. Aragorn is the same kind of person as, say, King Arthur; the temptation of the Ring is like the doctrine of original sin, and so forth. Indeed, in his recent book Beyond Tenebrae, for example, Birzer argues for a tradition of Christian humanism that includes Tolkien and extends to writers like Flannery O’Connor, Walter Miller, and even to a degree Margaret Atwood.

And the examples need not only be contemporary. I often think of a collection of Sicilian folk music I listened to: one selection, recorded in the 1950s, featured a traveling puppeteer reenacting scenes from Orlando Furioso to an audience of largely unlettered paesani. A conservative must be able to articulate why that is more enriching than the same person reenacting, say, the destruction of Alderaan or Wakanda.

But while I would like to think that Narnia and Middle-earth will outlast some of these more ephemeral cultural products, I am not sure that will be the case. How long things last relates in some sense to how true they are to human experience, but history has a long arc. It’s possible that in the near future you may use Slytherin as an adjective for a certain type of person the way we now say “doubting Thomas.” And we won’t remember the genealogy of either.

We see that already in some online political commentary, where everything is related to the Harry Potter “universe” rather than some older touchstone. And conservatives have long admired Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and what is that book other than an exploration of how even the strongest pillars of a civilization get forgotten, reworked, or lost?

Nor do I think the “organic” argument works. Organic is too freighted with the idea that cultures have “natural” forms, usually coincident with some variously defined people or race. But that is not the whole or even the entirely true story. Culture is derived from many sources, some as gift or by adoption as much as through internal growth. In the case of Europe, parts of Africa and elsewhere, Christianity is a core component, although it is an import that originated in the Near East.

Beowulf may serve as an example. That poem exists in only a single manuscript copy, and was rediscovered and published in a first edition only in 1815. Before that, evidence of its influence and circulation is almost nonexistent. To say this poem is “organic” is not particularly illuminating about its value or role in our culture. (Read more.)

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