Tea at Trianon: The Reality of Grace in 'Rings of Power'

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 14, 2023

The Reality of Grace in 'Rings of Power'

From US Catholic:

Catholic tradition has always held evil to be a privation of what in origin is fundamentally good. The Book of Genesis tells us that God looked out on the world when God finished forming it and declared it good. Evil as a force of its own forms no part of creation.

This is a key theme underlying Amazon’s much anticipated Lord the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s interesting to consider how the series’ producers fleshed out the origins of evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, staying true to Tolkien’s own Catholic sensibility. “Nothing is evil in the beginning,” as one of the chief characters states in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Of equal importance to Tolkien in his fantasy world is a fundamental diversity of races. As a Catholic in early 20th-century Britain, Tolkien grew up aware of the prejudice against his faith and church throughout his life. He was careful to reveal and dramatize this awareness through the tensions between the elves, dwarves, men, and hobbits that populate Middle Earth.

It’s all the more ironic, then, that even before the first episode of Amazon’s series premiered, controversy arose about what Tolkien purists complained was the producers’ forced inclusion of people of color in major roles to make Middle Earth appeal to members of a wider audience, many of whom were not even born when Peter Jackson’s spectacular film adaptations were released 20 years ago.

But series producers J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay have succeeded in assembling a marvelous troop of believable actors, staying true to the diversity at the heart of Tolkien’s work from the earliest of his writings. For example, by starting with the darker-skinned hobbits (the Harfoots), the series sets up the future meeting of these rustic travelers with their more adventurous and fairer-skinned Fallohide and Stoor relatives. Indeed, Tolkien deliberately modeled the three ethnic groups of hobbits on the three major ethnic groups that established England in the early Middle Ages: the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. (Read more.)