released 8/30/2019
Our re-visiting of archive interviews about J. R. R. Tolkien continues, this time with Ralph C. Wood, author of The Gospel according to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth (2003) and Bradley Birzer, who wrote J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth (2002). Wood explains why he has been drawn to J. R. R. Tolkien’s moral Middle-earth since his first reading of The Lord of the Rings in the 1960s. It is a world ordered by heroism, friendship, loyalty, and hope. These ties alone, he states, enable the hobbits to complete their quest and go where no one else can. And Birzer examines Tolkien’s understanding of myth, which in its best form is a way of knowing beyond fact.
33 minutes
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