It seems hard to remember now that there was a time when the American counterculture embraced J.R.R. Tolkien and his masterpiece. Groovy dudes in pipe-weed jerkins yelling “Go Go Gandalf,” walls covered with graffiti proclaiming “Frodo Lives!”, and election-year “Gandalf for President” buttons were all popular sights on college campuses from Harvard to Berkeley.

The author himself was properly repulsed by the hippie movement (and indeed, by what he saw as the entire slovenly depths of American culture in general), and late in life began referring to their nightmare world of antiwar riots and hedonism as “this Fallen Kingdom of Arda, where the servants of Morgoth are worshipped.” But it was not only our side of the pond that gave him grief: he watched aghast as his work became so superficially popular and grossly misunderstood among the hip and the mod in Great Britain that the Beatles expressed a desire to star in a film version of The Lord of the Rings, complete with Stanley Kubrick directing!

It was Gandalf himself who warned Saruman that, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” But that little nugget of common sense, and virtually everything else that made the book special, was passed over by those who were trying to snort, smoke, and screw their way out from under the thumb of The Man and Western Civ. Tolkien considered the free-love drug mob and its associated subgroups “cults of faineance and filth” that mindlessly smashed everything Old and Noble and Sacred while simultaneously embracing everything New, Hip, and Easygoing, all in a foolish, futile attempt to deconstruct and experiment their way to an earthly Utopia. Unlike so many from that crazed era, the man who decades earlier had laboriously penned Frodo’s arduous journey to Mount Doom knew better than to grant hippie pipe-dreams intellectual or spiritual credence.

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At heart, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and even the often bleak and sad Silmarillion — are kindly works, not bitter and cynical ones. He was not interested in leaving his readers holding onto the last page of his books feeling empty, hopeless, cheated, or confused. Nor did he leave vast parts of his plots deliberately obfuscated and unresolved in order to claim an unearned depth and complexity for his work and thoughts. Quite the contrary: Tolkien took immense pains to give his tales not only spiritual and literary but dramatic satisfaction. He attempted — at great expense of time and effort, over a period of many years — to fill his work not just with questions but with answers, right down to carefully detailing the fate of Sam’s horse Bill (although, alas!, not the Entwives or Radagast!).

By graciously satisfying his readers’ insatiable curiosity in as many ways as possible, Tolkien puts himself at odds with many of today’s authors who, in an attempt to be ostentatiously arty and edgy, delight in leaving their readers with a sense of dramatic emptiness and thematic pointlessness. Just like in the film world, stories that ultimately resolve nothing and leave important plot threads hanging are in increasing vogue. Providing a paying reader with such basic dramatic tenets as resolution and closure is so last century, dont’cha know? Many books are so egregious in this regard that they leave readers saying, “Forget about happy endings, I’d be willing to settle for an ending of any kind — just tell me what happens!”

In the fantasy arena, a reader can easily wade through the swampy sludge of three books, five books, ten books, and even more, all spaced out over a period of many, many years, without ever reaching that terminus. Many fans die every year waiting for our fallen fantasists to achieve some sort of climax in their work worthy of the name.

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In 1944, J.R.R. Tolkien was tickled to receive a charming letter from a twelve-year-old Yankee praising The Hobbit, released seven years prior. It was, said the lad, “the most wonderful book I have ever read. It is beyond description. Gee Whiz. . . . ”

“It’s nice to find that little American boys do really say ‘Gee Whiz’,” the author joked to his son Christopher when he mentioned receiving the note. But surprisingly, his prevailing mood was somber:

I find these letters which I still occasionally get. . . make me rather sad. What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop.

Those are words, humble and true, that evoke the New Testament, conjuring an image of lost souls looking to quench an almost spiritual thirst. At the very time he wrote them, Tolkien was already deep into the agony and the ecstasy of the creation of The Lord of the Rings, and the intersection of the literary and the spiritual was on his mind. “God bless you beloved,” he told his son by way of signing off, but then tagged on a final, lingering question, one weighing heavily on his work: “Do you think the ‘Ring’ will come off, and reach the thirsty?”

It should be clear now to even the dimmest of critical bulbs that Tolkien’s own craving for heroic romance was hardly unique. Millions of others, equally parched in the modern world, were in dire need of the potent drought he was brewing. After The Lord of the Rings finally appeared, it inspired fan letters from grown adults that matched the enthusiasm of the little boy writing from America decades earlier. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien we are mostly denied the original missives, but can frequently read Tolkien’s reactions to them.

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“It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?”

Those are words spoken by a superstitious old woman to Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Fearing for the outsider’s safety, she gives him a crucifix. “I did not know what to do,” Harker writes, “for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind.”

But later, overcome with terror in the bowels of the Count’s Transylvanian castle, he has reason to be most grateful:

Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! For it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my mind about it. In the meantime I must find out all I can about Count Dracula. . . .

Over a century later, Stephenie Meyer managed to write four bestselling books concerning vampires (later translated into a quartet of popular movies) without the word crucifix appearing even a single time in her hundreds of thousands of words. The toothsome undead in HBO’s True Blood (based off of Charlaine Harris’ popular, sex-drenched “Southern Vampire” novels) are similarly unconcerned with the possibility of their nocturnal bacchanalia being interrupted by the appearance of a cross. In these movies, it’s not God but other bloodsuckers who provide supernatural support for the good guys. (more…)

So according to an article in England’s The Daily Mail, Muslim doctors and nurses will be allowed to opt out of strict hygiene rules aimed at stopping the spread of deadly superbugs. Apparently the change was made after female Muslims resented having their arms exposed below the elbow under new laws enacted in 2007. Some Muslims may be allowed to use disposable sleeves, although some say this “compromises patient safety.” If you don’t change the sleeves, you spread superbugs, which kill thousands of patients yearly.

Now, I don’t care what religion you follow: if it compromises your job, and the safety of others – that blows. I mean, if Catholicism required that you wear a crucifix over your left eye at all times – I’m not hiring you as a pilot. Or a table dancer.

This decision to sacrifice hygiene to appease religion arrives just as our own government decides to remove the terms “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” from national security policy. Obama feels that linking Islam to terror is hurtful to non-terrorists. My philosophy is simple: I don’t care what you call homicidal maniacs, as long as you kill them.

Which Obama’s been doing, so cool. (more…)

The name was Fleming, Valentine Fleming. But to his four young boys, Bond creator Ian Fleming among them, he was “Mokie” — a baby-talk bastardization of “Smokie,” so called because he always had a pipe dangling from his lips, the same way Sean Connery would one day sport a cigarette in his debut appearance as James Bond in Dr. No. Curiously, no one in turn-of-the-century England thought to arrest Mr. Fleming for smoking in the presence of his children, nor did social services batter down his door to cart the poor cancer-threatened kids away. He was their Pop, and they adored him, smoke and all.

Child-abusing barbarians, I know.

They were rich, the Flemings. Grandfather made his fortune pioneering investment trusts, and when Valentine came of age he inherited hundreds of thousands of pounds. Thus it was that his second son Ian, born in 1908, grew up in a world of wealth and privilege. Mother was a typical socialite, a lover of status and all the good things that money could buy, but Father was different. He ran for government office as a conservative, and was by all accounts a thorough patriot of crown and country much admired by everyone who met him. When war became imminent, there was never any question whether he would use his money and influence to weasel out of the fight. Valentine joined the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars of his own volition and trained for combat, counting among his friends a fellow officer named Winston Churchill.

Ian and his family watched with dread as their Dad headed off to the front in 1914, and for the next three years they saw him but seldom. Valentine sent his family cheery letters to lift their spirits, but his missives to Churchill laid bare the truth: (more…)

“Have mercy on the souls in purgatory, and especially on those that are most forsaken. Do Thou deliver them from the dire torments they endure. Call them, and admit them to Thy most sweet embrace in paradise.”

Devout Catholics might recognize this as a prayer for those lost souls who, as penance for the sins committed in life, have not yet ascended to heaven. Others might view it as just another silly superstition in desperate need of squashing by the enlightened mythbusters of our time.

As stated earlier, in his teen years Herzog had a deeply affecting flirtation with Catholicism that has echoed down throughout his life. “I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years,” he says. “The characters in this story are all desperate and solitary rebels. . . They know their rebellion is doomed to failure, but they continue without respite, wounded, struggling on their own without assistance.” Herzog maintains, and I agree, that when the history of his career is written Grizzly Man “will be a centerpiece” of his canon. But it was only after many viewings that it occurred to me (a veteran of eight years of Catholic grade school) that one of Grizzly Man’s chief virtues is that it’s a supremely decent film, acting as a kind of extended novena for the lost soul of Timothy Treadwell. (more…)

In November 1974, Werner Herzog received a most distressing phone call. Lotte Eisner, the beloved doyenne of German cinema, was dying. Part film historian, part published critic, part heroic preservationist, and part muse to the filmmakers struggling to piece together the broken shards of German culture left in the wake of the Nazis, Eisner was a legendary figure in Herzog’s eyes, and had inspired him to persevere through a decade of near-poverty as a struggling director. Now, at seventy-eight years old, she was deathly ill and not expected to survive.

Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”

Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died. (more…)