Jay Dyer (continued or secondary speaker) (33:33)
It's like learning some other languages, not like English, as we think of it today. But we noted, as you guys recall, the. The danger of machinery, the fact that the ring itself is Kind of a technology, a magical technology that transcends time and space. It allows you to see far away. It expands, extends life. We know that Bilbo ends up living longer. And as he gives up the ring at the beginning of Lord of the Rings, he seems to even kind of age quicker. That's noted very early on in the text. But anyway, we saw the different wizards, their elemental connections and structure. We saw oblique references to the neuromancer at Dol Guldur, which is of course later revealed to be Saruman. Excuse me, Sauron, but something I noticed that I don't think anyone else has noted. And I am aware that at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings, in the introductory essay, the Little Prologue, Tolkien says he is not a huge fan of allegory. And he likes history over allegory. And I think that's important to mention because a lot of people will take issue and have this sort of default, there's no allegory, there's no symbolism in Lord of the Rings. Now, there's a difference between allegory and symbolism and something being set against history allegorically. So a lot of times in literature, allegory is seen as something ahistorical and non historical. In that context, Tolkien is, I think, telling us that he's writing a story that's kind of like historical fiction. It does not mean he's necessarily always opposed to symbolism. It's rather that he's not interested in writing something that is not historically grounded or not historical fiction. Does that make sense? Because a lot of times allegory just simply means ahistorical or not literal. But you could have something in biblical hermeneutics, for example, be history and allegory. This is the quadraga, or the fourfold sense of scripture. You have the literal, you have the anagogical, you have the spiritual, and you have the allegorical or the tropological being the moral. So you got these different senses of scripture in the classical medieval formulation. And certainly as a medievalist, Tolkien would have been aware of this. I say this because, again, many people will take issue with the Christian symbolism and Christian symbology that I think is everywhere in the text. Obviously, I don't think the texts are only Christian or only some sort of Christian symbolism. Certainly it pulls from the Eddas, it pulls from Celtic, you know, mythology, etc. There's a lot of different areas that he pulls from. I had a class on Nordic and medieval texts in grad school, so I am aware of the Eddas and these things. And I'm aware of Tolkien finding a lot of influence and inspiration from those texts. And certainly those texts are not very allegorical. They're very sort of one layered or mono tiered. But that doesn't mean that there's not a profuse amount of Christian symbolism and Christian history packed within the Lord of the Rings. And I think that that's absolutely the case. In fact, I'm going to again argue that Tolkien even relied heavily on deuterocanonical texts. And nobody else that I've seen has even made this connection. For example, the Oliphants. The Oliphants are very reminiscent of a scene in the Maccabees where you have elephants coming into battle. The magical swords that we see throughout Lord of the Rings, right, those recall the shards of Narsil, or this recalls the magical sword that we see appearing, for example, in the Maccabees. And these are just texts that a lot of people forget because they don't spend a lot of time reading the Deuterocanon. There's a lot of things in the Deuterocanon that are relevant because Tolkien translated, if not Jonah, it might have been Jonah, but one of the other texts, if not Jonah, for the Jerusalem Bible. So he was aware of obviously Old Testament minor prophets and would have read obviously the Deuterocanonical text as well as the Deuterocanon as part of the Roman Catholic canon of Scripture, as well as orthodox. So these are texts and traditions that most people don't look to. So pulling a heavily from biblical tradition, pulling heavily from the Deuterocanon, pulling heavily from Christian history and civilization, for example, Byzantium, as you guys may know, it's pretty well known and undisputed that Constantinople is really kind of the symbol or the basis for Minas Tirith. And Gondor is Byzantium. In fact, the beacon lighting system that they had in Gondor is essentially the beacon system of Byzantium to warn against invaders. And just as Byzantium was kind of a bulwark against the hordes of the east, in the same way Minas Tirith and Osgiliath are essentially the bulwarks against the hordes of the east of Mordor, in fact, we're even told that Sauron recruits evil men of the east to become part of his vast horde of the armies of Mordor. So Tolkien, I think, is going beyond just some sort of mere World War II analysis and tapping into just more of an eschatological story of the end of the age at the end of the time of the Great War for the Ring, as it's called, the beginning of Lord of the Rings. In the same way there's a mini apocalypse or a mini end times, so to speak, in the Hobbit, which as we said, in many, many ways mirrors the longer Lord of the Rings. Hobbit is a mini Lord of the Rings in terms of its structure and journey. So all of that in mind, then we can come to some of the areas that I think no one else has really plumbed the depths of with regard to what's going on in the Hobbit, particularly with the Jews and the relationship of the Jews to Gentiles and the Gentile Church.
