Haven't been too terribly active in recent months; my honors thesis and other schoolwork has been taking up a lot of my spare time!
Lhunardawen said:
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Now what does the Citadel remind you of? Minas Tirith! And the people of the City were known to be learned in lore, some in healing, still others in something else...all definitely using their human reason. But I was not able to find any connection to the "without the light of God" part. Unless they have forgotten Eru in the Third Age! (But then, that's another story...)
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I think I could find a connection with the "without the light of God" part. According to Tom Shippey (in
The Road to Middle-earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology), Tolkien was fascinated by the idea of virtuous pagans:
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Tolkien did not believe in 'old religions' or 'witch-cults'; C.S. Lewis wrote a paper called 'The Anthropological Approach' which damned the learned variety of that error beyond redemption. Probably a major cause for their intolerance was that both, but especially Tolkien, had some idea of what genuine old paganism was like....Tolkien had grounds to suspect simple views of 'the noble pagan'.
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Shippey goes further on to say,
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Above all, to Tolkien's mind, there must have been present the problem of Beowulf. This is certainly the work of a Christian writing after the conversion of England. However, the author got through 3182 lines without mentioning Christ, or salvation, and yet without saying specifically that his heroes, including the kind and honest figure of Beowulf himself, were damned--though he must have known that historically and in reality there were all pagans, ignorant even of the name of Christ. ... The Beowulf-poet's dilemma was also Tolkien's. His whole professional life brought him into contact with the stories of pagan heroes, Englishmen or Norsemen or Goths; more than anyone he could appreciate their sterling qualities. At the same time he had no doubt that paganism itself was weak and cruel. .... The Lord of the Rings is quite clearly, then, a story of virtuous pagans in the darkest of dark pasts, before all but the faintest premonitions of dawn and revelation.
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(All of these quotes are taken from Tom Shippey's book, Chapter Six, "When All Our Fathers Worshipped Stocks and Stones," pages 198-199.)
Hopefully I've gotten my point across without rambling. Does anyone think I'm on to something?