Artistic Musings: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

That there is a "time" for every "purpose" makes one doubt whether or not anything is truly 'outside' of the pattern, outside the whole. Everything, from that which we desire (birth, healing, laughter, love, etc.) to that which we abhor (death, killing, weeping, hate, etc.), all is a part of the pattern, the music, the tapestry of God.

Perhaps (just perhaps) we err when we say (or when we suppose to say) that God 'controls' everything, the image usually being that He grapples everything to the ground and dominates it with his foot on its neck. Answer me this: does God 'control' all things as victor over loser, or as master over composition? Is the glory of God's sovereignty the immutability of his iron fist or the beauty of His flowing hand? To put it on a (somewhat) more personal level, is God merely the tyrant of the universe, or is he my mother at the piano, whose fingers flow so smoothly and seamlessly over the keys that artist and instrument seem absolutely one in being and purpose?

Perhaps God gave us art so that we could understand Him better, not only in capturing those beatific revelations of Himself, but also in understanding that He deals with the universe of space and time (and consequently its inhabitants) as does an artist with their magnum opus. God is 'in control' in that all the beauties of His work (though some beauties look ugly when focused on solely themselves) spring forth from Himself, for in Him we live and move and have our being.

Tolkien the Modernist: "Beowulf" and Monsters

From Verlyn Flieger's book Splintered Light:

For all his sympathy with the poet [of Beowulf], he adds the perspective of his own century to his understanding of the Middle Ages in defending the poet's use of monsters as Beowulf's opponents. His reading of the monsters is psychological rather than allegorical. Grendel and the dragon are both monsters, true; but they are not the same kind of monster. In distinguishing between them, Tolkien is a modern, however powerful his inclination toward the past. "In a sense," he says [...] "the foe is always both within and without.... Thus Grendel has a perverted human shape.... For it is true of man, maker of myths, that Grendel and the Dragon, in their lust, greed, and malice, have a part in him." The monsters are within us as well as outside us. The hostile dark is a part of man, not just his besieging foe. The dragon may be the instrument of final defeat, but Grendel carries his own threat to humanity, for he moves in the shape of a man. And though the youthful Beowulf is victorious in his meeting with Grendel, that inner darkness, no less than the dragon's external threat, is always there to be battled.

The recurrence of these references to darkness, to the precariousness of the light, to the monsters, is forceful evidence of the emotional pull of the dark for Tolkien. His own reading of Christianity tends to emphasize the tragedy of the Fall and its consequences. [...] Tolkien's ability to enter in to the mood and spirit of Beowulf is persuasive evidence that he was acquainted firsthand with the battle [against the dark] and that, as Humphrey Carpenter comments, his experience had taught him that "no battle would be won forever." He could not have seen so deeply into the poem or experienced such near-identification with the poet unless Beowulf had struck a sympathetic chord in his own nature. It would seem clear that however he may qualify the pagan point of view, his heart is with the tragedy.

Tolkien the Modernist: "The Sea-bell"

From Verlyn Flieger's book A Question of Time:

The pairing of fairy-stories and war is more complex, for they would seem to be opposites. The easy, surface reading builds on the opposition, inferring from Tolkien's words a purely escapist impulse, a retreat from the horror and boredom of the trenches into the magical world of Faerie. Beneath the surface, however, his words suggest a deep but unmanifest connection between these apparently unlikely things. In the way that extremes can sometimes meet, War and Faerie have a certain resemblance to one another. Both are set beyond the reach of ordinary human experience. Both are equally indifferent to the needs of ordinary humanity. Both can change those who return so that they become "pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness," not just unable to say where they have been but unable to communicate to those who have not been there what they have seen and experienced. Perhaps worst of all, both war and Faerie can change out of all recognition the wander's perception of the world to which he returns, so that never again can it be what it once was. [...]

"The Sea-bell," then, can be read and comprehended in several mutually reinforcing contexts. Generically it can be ranged alongside Coleridge's "The Ancient Mariner," Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," Elliot's The Wasteland as once of a number of romantic and modern poems of desperation and loss, as a statement of despair. Artistically it is a powerful expression of the dark side of Tolkien's work,
standing as both as a corrective to [James M.] Barrie and as the bleak, alternative fate that might have haunted Frodo's dreams [in the house of Tom Bombadil]. On a personal level it can be read as a statement about his own bereavement at the loss of Faerie. And in a larger context, one both personal and historical, it can be understood as an echo and a reminder of all the loss that war and peace and change and living in the world can bring.