“I think that it will be read 500 years from now in the way that we read Dante. “I think our equivalent of those great stories of the past is really ‘The Lord of the Rings,’” Birzer says. “We think about Homer and ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey.’ We think about Virgil and ‘The Aeneid,’ but also ‘The Georgics’ and ‘The Eclogues.’ We think about Dante and ‘The Divine Comedy.’ We think about Milton and ‘Paradise Lost.’” “I think that when we study Western civilization, we often do it in terms of the great stories,” the professor adds. He didn’t have all these other things that we can dismiss Thomas Jefferson for.”īirzer addresses the “literary archaeology” of Tolkien and explains why he thinks “ The Lord of the Rings” is “our great story of the modern world.” There aren’t real serious personal failings. “I think one of the great things about Tolkien is, when we praise him, we can praise him as a person. “I think he calls us to sacrifice for one another, and that was as true in Tolkien’s life as it was in his writing,” the Hillsdale professor says. I think he calls upon our uniqueness, each of us made individually in the image of God, and I think he calls us to be heroic.” “I think Tolkien teaches us to be ourselves in the best way, to be our authentic selves, to be made in the image of God, to do what we’re meant to do. “I don’t think society is healthy right now, but I think that’s one of the healthier signs of society,” he explains. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth,” calls Tolkien’s enduring popularity “a healthy sign in society.” “I’m very glad when I look at the numbers of how many books of Tolkien’s still sell and that almost anything that is publishable has been published by Tolkien,” Bradley Birzer, a history professor and the Russell Amos Kirk chair in American studies at Hillsdale College, tells The Daily Signal.īirzer, who recently published a second edition of his book “ J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “ The Lord of the Rings,” calls us to be heroic and to sacrifice for one another, according to the author of a new book on Tolkien’s “Sanctifying Myth.”
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