#tolkienposting

“And there amid the old bracken and the swift fronds of spring she lay and slept, needless of all

In the morning she woke, and rejoiced in the light as one first called to life”

from The Children of Húrin

I actually kind of hate how the proportions in this Nienor drawing turned out, but I spent so long on it that it feels wasteful to not share it.

Details under cut:

This is one of the dumbest written works on Tolkien I've ever read. His argument seems to be that Tolkien and his work is not Christian because

a) Tolkien did not go to church regularly in his twenties and had doubts (of course, it is well known that anyone who ever has any doubts, or varies in their faith and levels of practice throughout their life) is not a Christian) - please ignore the fact that he attended mass daily most of his adult life, was raised by the Catholic Church in Birmingham, and was personally deeply involved in sever of his friends (re-) discovery if the Gospels - indeed that his closest friend after the War, C S Lewis, re-converted to Anglicanism rather then to Roman Catholicism he took as a personal hurt. Ignore that one of his sons credits his father's strong faith almost entirely with bringing him to the Catholic priesthood, and on and on and on (On that note, the author gives himself away when they claim that the respectably middle-class C of E family of Tolkiens mother were Baptists. He has not even read a single biography of Tolkien, it seems.).

B) that the work isn't Christian because there is no Jesus-figure or clear parallell for the Christian faith in the book - of course there isn't, since it takes place in the deep history of our own world and Christ hasn't incarnated yet. Any other Messiah would by necessity be a false one, and any faith the characters might have would of necessity not be Christian, and therefore they have none. Nonetheless Illúvatar is clearly and obviously the God of Abraham, and that he clearly acts through grace in the world over and again throughout the book, and many if their practices clearly reflects Christianity - the elven hymns to Elbereth Gilthoniel is evidentially modelled after Marian hymns, and Mary is connected deeply to the stars within Roman Catholicism (one of her bynames is Star of the Sea, for example) and the special evening meal that the Rangers in Ithillien partakes in bears a striking resemblance to holy communion, among other examples.

C) that Tolkien wasn't even really a Catholic except out of a sense of love and loyalty to his mother (it can if course not be both, because Christian aren't complex people with difficult interiorities like you and me, Fellow Liberal Secularist. If your faith is deeply entangled with a love for your mother who died, in your own words, a Martyr's death when you were a child, then it apparently isn't genuine Christian faith, according to this prick, and maybe the Westboro Baptist Church).

D) it's not Christian because it doesn't contain an explicit Christian theocracy, homophobia or misogyny, which we all know is what it means to really be Christian and if you are neither a theocrat nor really care that much about condemning homosexuality or have a relatively complicated misogynyz like Tolkien did, you can't really be a Christian.

I love love LOVE this design for him so much, so I just had to make my own take on it.