Q: What is the link between Chesterton and Tolkien? Teaching Tolkien in a course along with the writer G. K. Chesterton’s fantasy novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, made me aware of how similar their view of reality is. Chesterton gives a very courageous positive view of being and life itself as a good thing, and his stories are fantastic but always bring you back to the ordinary seen freshly as wonderful and exciting. Anyone who knows Tolkien’s essay, On Fairy-stories, will recognise the similarity to Tolkien’s second function of fantasy as escape from the world we know to a world of golden and silver trees, so that we may return and see ordinary apple trees as having a depth of being we never before perceived. We recover a clear view of things as we were meant (by God) to see them. - See more at: tolkienlibrary/press/Chesterton-and-Tolkien-as-Theologians.php#sthash.9a9vOQag.dpuf
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 21:12:37 +0000