The Oxford Tolkien Conference 2006 at Exeter College

hope · Post by **hope** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 7:17 pm

May I took add my thanks, It is truly wonderful to read reports from you all. Not having the chance to attend such a conference it gives great pleasure and added insight into Tokien's world and mind.

Thank you so much

Iolanthe · Post by **Iolanthe** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 10:23 am

I'm glad you're enjoying it, Hope! I've been typing up my notes of Patrick Curry's talk, which I really enjoyed at the time but now I can't make any sense of it

. I shall go through them again and if I still can't get it together I shall post the notes anyway and hope Merry can make more sense of it than me

. At least it will be an excuse for some more photos. Watch this space....

Iolanthe · Post by **Iolanthe** » Sun Oct 08, 2006 4:37 pm

Patrick Curry
Tolkien and Enchantment

My notes for this talk are very poor, I'm afraid! I'm hoping Merry or bat'leth can add enough to make sense of it. The theme of Patrick Curry’s talk was Tolkien’s understanding of enchantment. He posed the question ‘What is enchantment?’ then went on to argue that Tolkien’s idea of it was quite unusual. What I haven't quite grasped in my notes is why it is unusual

. I enjoyed this talk a lot at the time but from my notes it comes accross as very disjointed and apparently with little specific Tolkien substance. Blame me not Curry!

21 Merton Street, Tolkien's College lodgings after Edith's death

Here goes:

Enchantment in Tolkien is a secondary world “artistic in desire and purpose” and enchantment is the primal desire in the land of Faerie, the conceiving of imagined wonder. Curry defined enchantment as being so ‘in the moment’ that you are under a spell, focussed to the exclusion of all else. Enchantment can be found in nature, love, ritual, art, sport, even in food. He cited two examples of Tolkien’s experience of enchantment. The first was reading Cynewulf’s Crist when he came across the words Eala Earendil engla beorhtast! (Hail Earendel brightest of angels). This was a seminal moment for Tolkien. He was stirred by something he couldn’t grasp and his fascination with the line was the start of his whole mythology. The second moment was the sight of Edith singing and dancing in the wood which later found its way into the tale of Beren and Luthien.

In The Lord of the Rings wonder and enchantment is most fully realised when Frodo and Sam first see Lorien. Sam feels that he is ‘inside a song’. Curry made the point that Lorien is a perilous land, but the danger lies in our reaction to it, not in Lorien itself.

Leaving enchantment for the grey real world is painful. Enchantment slips away from us, rather than us leaving it. We are attached to it, dependent on it, unwilling to let it go. But humans cannot live in a state of permanent enchantment. There is ultimate beauty but the test is – can we let it go? It is the love of ‘other’, something perfect that is not ours to keep. When the One Ring is destroyed the other three Elven rings which Sauron never touched also wane [there is a connecting point here but I seem to have missed it....].

Enchantment is both concrete and magic. It is grounded in the real, but is perfect and transforming. We can’t live without enchantment, the desire for perfection and wonder attempts to fill a gap in our lives but it can never be totally filled. If we attempt to live in Lorien it becomes escapism. We cannot live totally in our fundamental desire, we have to accept the absence of it. Poignancy for what is beyond us is part of the human condition.

Outside the Eagle and Child

Comments from the floor:

Curry sees enchantment and faerie as the same: enchantment/disenchantment = Faerie/mortal.

Domestic life is the way we cope with the absence of enchantment. We live in the domestic but yearn for the lyric. The hobbits are a good example of domestic life in LOTR.

Someone from the floor mentioned that Tom Bombadil combines the lyric and domestic. Enchantment is the love of the other as the other, not as something we can master. Although Tom Bombadil is described as Master, it is only of his own world. Goldberry is very clear on what he is master of.

We glimpse visions of the whole but these are fragments. If we try to possess the whole we become like Gollum, trying to possess the other, addicted to it and the feeling it gives us.

Father Guiglielmo, interestingly for a deeply spiritual man, made the point that Pippin is the best philosopher (?) in LOTR because of his materialistic grounding, his connection with the material world: the love of it and the living of it.

Banquet in Exeter College Dining Hall

Merry · Post by **Merry** » Mon Oct 09, 2006 3:52 am

Speaking of enchantment, the banquet the final night was truly enchanting! Nice to see pictures of our old friends.

I don't have time tonight to look over my notes, but one thing I remember is that 'enchantment' literally means 'inside a song'. (Lindariel, you ought to enjoy that idea!) So when Sam says that line in Lothlorien, this has to be Tolkien playing his word games.

More later. Thanks again, Iolanthe!

marbretherese · Post by **marbretherese** » Mon Oct 09, 2006 12:59 pm

Merry wrote: one thing I remember is that 'enchantment' literally means 'inside a song'.

That's fascinating, Merry, and when I looked properly at the word I couldn't believe I'd never spotted it before!

Iolanthe · Post by **Iolanthe** » Mon Oct 09, 2006 1:58 pm

I suppose that's the connection to 'chant' and 'chanting'

.

marbretherese · Post by **marbretherese** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 12:46 pm

Strange, isn't it - Merry's post didn't make me think of 'chant' or 'chanting', I thought of the French: 'chanter' or 'chanson'. Which have presumably the same root!

Lindariel · Post by **Lindariel** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:56 pm

I thought the same thing Marbretherese, especially since my screen name at Writers of Rohan is Chantal!

Merry, you're absolutely right. Lindariel (screen name AND GS character) finds that definition particularly apt! And I always found Sam's descriptions of people, places, and things to be especially on point. Saying that being in Lothlorien is like being "inside a song" is one beautiful example. The other is the evocative description of Galadriel that Sam shares with Faramir, just before he slips and mentions the Ring:

'The Lady of Lorien! Galadriel!' cried Sam. 'You should see her, indeed you should, sir. I am only a hobbit, and gardening's my job at home, sir, if you understand me, and I'm not much good at poetry . . . . But I wish I could make a song about her. Beautiful she is, sir! Lovely! Sometimes like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like. Hard as di'monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in springtime. But that's a lot o' nonsense, and all wide of my mark.'

I'd say he hit the mark right in the bull's-eye!

bruce rerek · Post by **bruce rerek** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 3:02 pm

And how wonder struck, in a state of almost childlike (not childish) wonder. I think Picasso stated that an artist must reclaim that state in order to create art.

marbretherese · Post by **marbretherese** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 9:44 pm

bruce rerek wrote: I think Picasso stated that an artist must reclaim that state in order to create art.

Another fascinating insight - thanks Bruce! food for thought, indeed

Merry · Post by **Merry** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 10:25 pm

Aristotle wrote that philosophy begins in wonder.

Iolanthe · Post by **Iolanthe** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:53 pm

Interestingly this has brought us back to Patrick Curry's talk because I think this was one of the many points he was trying to make, and certainly the two examples of 'wonder' he gave in Tolkien's life (reading Cynewulf’s Crist and coming across 'Eala Earendil engla beorhtast!', and the sight of Edith singing and dancing in the wood) did generate Tolkien's own special creativity. His work is both born of wonder and generates wonder in the reader.

Iolanthe · Post by **Iolanthe** » Sat Oct 21, 2006 7:45 pm

Father Guglielmo Spirito
The Influence of Holiness: The Healing Power of Tolkien’s Narrative

Father Guglielmo talking to Alison Milbank

This is another talk where my notes are very scant, maybe because Father Guglielmo was completely mesmerising.

Father Guglielmo is a Franciscan friar, Vice-Dean of the Theological Institute of Assisi and Professor of Spirituality and Christian and non-Christian Mystics. He is also a huge Tolkien fan and is the author of a book and many articles about him. Merry and I became Father Guglielmo fans from the minute he opened his mouth. He radiates spirituality and presence and has a wicked sense of humour. He told me that his grey robes were his ‘Gandalf costume’ and, indeed, they are very like (see above

)!

The substance of his talk – and I think I felt the ‘Enchantment’ that Patrick Curry was talking about while listening to it – was that Tolkien presented a window to the true radiance that filled the world, our world as much as Middle-earth. That The Lord of the Rings was not an escape from the world, as many fantasy critics label it, but a renewal of the world, a seeing it anew with the light of awe. Because of this I’m presenting the essence of his talk after Patrick Curry’s (the reverse of the way they were given in the Conference) because Curry’s talk was an attempt to define Tolkien’s view of awe and enchantment, and how it interacts with our mundane lives, and Father Guglielmo’s to show us where it truly comes from, why we recognise it, and how it lights up the whole of The Lord of The Rings.

He cited the Window on the West with the setting sun shining through it as a metaphor for this radiance. Something wondrous and beautiful that we know to be a truth, that we sense throughout the book, even if we do not recognise its source. Father Guglielmo saw Tolkien using light as a symbol of the eucatastrophy – an unexpected light in the darkness, like Sam’s star and Gandalf, talking about Frodo, sensing that ‘he may become a transparent light… that some may see’ [a rough quote – I haven’t found it in the book yet!]. He also linked Gandalf’s return to the Transfiguration – not saying that it was an allegory of the Transfiguration, but that it was a sudden revealing of Gandalf as he truly was ‘Gandalf the White’ to which the only response was awe.

Father Guglielmo coined a wonderful phrase for us: ‘Tolkien is a misunderstood man because he is a myth-understood man. I think, if my memory serves as my notes are poor here, that he was saying that many critics miss the whole point of Tolkien’s myth. That Tolkien was bringing us back to the enjoyment of reality, the real light that illuminates all things, even the prosaic, not leading us away from it to fantasy. That this ‘light’, the true light of ultimate Reality - God - is present as much in the Hobbits enjoying their pipeweed and songs in the Shire as it is in Valinor, it’s in the simple things and high things, it shines through LOTR in abundance (although absent in any direct reference), and is equally in our ordinary daily lives and our enjoyment of them whether we know where it comes from or not. Tolkien pulls the shades back a little for us in The Lord of the Rings and our recognition of a ‘reality beyond reality’, as Father Guglielmo coined it, is why The Lord of the Rings speaks so deeply to the hearts of so many readers around the world and in every walk of life.

That was the essence of the talk although I’ve lost a lot of the detail and argument! I hope I've done his thoughts some justice. I’ll just add that it was Father Guglielmo who brought a prayer book with him and led us in prayers at Tolkien’s grave in Wolvercote Cemetery, asking us if he could say them for ‘Beren’ and ‘Luthien’ and turning the visit into something very moving and special. On the last day he told me how wonderful the week in Oxford had been for him, sharing conversation and thoughts with other Tolkien lovers – evidently not something he got a lot of in Assisi where his Tolkien obsession was something of a mystery to his other Brothers…

I’m sure Merry (the other founder member of the Father Guglielmo Spirito fan-club) can add anything I’ve missed!

Chrissiejane · Post by **Chrissiejane** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 2:08 pm

Iolanthe, thanks for sharing this, it must have been a very special occasion. What great insights he has, he has articulated for me many of the reasons that Tolkien's work is so compelling.

Merry · Post by **Merry** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 8:46 pm

Wonderful report, Iolanthe! You're right: Father Guglielmo was wonderful! As we were leaving the Eagle and the Child on the last Friday night, he leaned over and actually kissed the building! I think there is no division between the sacred and the profane for him.

Here are a few other scattered ideas from my notes:

Someone wrote a letter to JRRT saying that there was a "sanity and sanctity" in LOTR, like "a light from an invisible lamp". I think this was the metaphor that Guglielmo used throughout the talk. He said that being human is like being in a dark room--we find this in LOTR whenever anyone is uncertain about how to proceed, not knowing what others are doing. But "all reality has a radiance", and we can always be aware of transcendence. If we do not seek it, it is tragedy. (Denethor?)

He also connected these ideas up with the enigmatic words of Gandalf at Rivendell, that at the end, Frodo may become like a light.

At the end of his talk, Guglielmo told the story of a Franciscan friar who had decided to leave the order, but read LOTR and Galadriel's words to Sam convinced him to stay. (This is what was in my notes, but now I can't think of what those words might be--any guesses?)