The Hall of Fire

Voronwë - that was a rather intemperate remark, I feel.

The whole point of the contextual infromation is to make clear that the TE is precisely not the moral equivalent of the Nazi holocaust, and it does nobody credit to make-out that they were morally equivalent.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that.

Thanks Voronwë - I fixed the link.

I do have a care! this is my professional subject. Which doesn't mean I am necessarily correct, but that I have gone into the background in some detail.

all would agree that the Tuskeegee Experiment was immoral, although it did nothing "active' at all Well I wouldn't necessarily agree ':scratch:' ! in the sense that I believe that the reality of this study has probably been presented in a rather selective, distorted and anachronistic fashion f...

While it is clear that Tolkien identified some characteristics of himself with several members of the Notion Club, Dolbear is mostly drawn from Havard while Lowdham has the personality of Dyson. Interestingly, I cannot get the feel of Lewis from any of the characters, nor that of Williams. (I have r...

Voronwë - T-P, as for Ramer being representative of Tolkien himself, that is also only loosely true. As Flieger points out, Tolkien actually puts aspects of himself in several of the members of the Notion Club (and the correspondence between various Notion Club members and various Inklings varied at...

In the Notion Club Papers Ramer (? Tolkien's mouthpiece) states that dream experiences have informed him that there is purposive evil in the universe, with a specific purpose of harming humans (among other things, presumably), and that this evil may have widespread influence on humanity via dream ex...

Very interesting discussions! I agree that many bad things that people do can be explained without an evil agent, but the fact seems to be that in previous generations they felt that there were also evil beings or purposes. I think of how Tolkien (in HoME) was musing on how Morgoth had tainted the w...

It seems certain to me that Tolkien believed in the reality of purposive evil - not just in his Legendarium but in reality. By purposive evil I mean a person-like entity (such as Sauron, Morgoth or the Christian Devil) which deliberately pursues evil. In the Notion Club Papers Tolkien (via Ramer, wh...

OK - but before I do, I will wait and see if anything happenes here first...

Note: I'm going to combine this thread with the other NCP thread. We don't really need two separate active threads on the work. I wonder if it might be better instead to abandon the NCP thread, as it seems few have read it? I am worried that people might be put off by discussing Tolkien's theology ...

Tplkien's theology is a huge topic - but some people might not be aware of the aspects which emerge in the Notion Club Papers: From http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2009/11/notion-club-theology.html From about page 193 of Tolkien's Notion Club Papers, the conversation takes on an implicitly theo...

That's a wonderful quote, which I had not registered before - thanks!

I can't really accept that. As I said before, all things have their uttermost source in the will of Eru. Even sub-creation is a part of creation, and the Dwarves must have a role to play in the fate of Arda. Fair enough. What do you think was the most important thing/s that dwarves ever did in the ...

I am not an expert on Tolkien fanfiction, but I must mention The Question of Pengolod, by Tyellas. http://www.ansereg.com/mpqp_series.htm I have read this novel - set in Númenor - three times; slowly, and with enormous pleasure. I believe it is _really_ good - both in its own right, and as an erudit...

Thanks for these responses. One idea I had is that Dwarves are not really necessary to the fate of Arda (similar to the point made by BISAY), and that at the end dwarves will go back to stone, or back to sleep, and things will be as if dwarves never had been. My hunch is that dwarves found out that ...

This is a very useful and enlightening thread. To put Tolkien into his Inklings context, there are the two classics of The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter, and They company they keep by Diana Pavlac Glyer. Both extremely enjoyable, and the second corrects the main error of the first (i.e. the error t...

Well, yes indeed - in the movie! And in the early part of the Hobbit too. But in LotR/ Legendarium they seem like the opposite - at best the 'straight men' in any comedy, and perhaps more often like a bunch of chronic depressive/ obsessives...

I mean their ultimate purpose in the history of Arda. Much was written by Tolkien abut the role that elves and men had to play - but not so much about dwarves. Why? Is it because they don't have a purpose? If so, what would that lack of purpose mean for a thoughtful dwarf? I have a few half-baked id...

PB: The different gods are views of the same God. Believers disagree about who sees most clearly, and whether other believers see at all; but that's my take. Indeed. And of course the selective view of each religion (each person too) is somewhat different, with greater or lesser degrees of overlap. ...

Celendril Gildinaur said: "The problem with condemning the moral code of any faith (or any moral code with or without a faith involved) is that it cannot be done inside the moral code being considered. By every moral code, itself is the correct code to follow. " That view assumes that reli...