Tolkien's Perilous Beauty | Prof. David O'Connor
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2019
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This event was hosted at Baylor University, on February 7th, 2019. For more information about upcoming TI events, visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1
About the Speaker:
David K. O’Connor is a faculty member in the departments of Philosophy and of Classics at the University of Notre Dame. His teaching and writing focus on ancient philosophy, aesthetics, ethics and politics, and philosophy of religion. Dr. O’Connor is an acclaimed teacher and lecturer. His online lectures on love and sexuality have reached a wide international audience, and are the basis of his two recent books, Love is Barefoot Philosophy (in Chinese translation, 2014) and Plato’s Bedroom: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love(2015). He has also published extensively on the relation between philosophy, art, and literature, in both the ancient and the modern world.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One of the words that Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings makes into a bell that keeps ringing is the word perilous. |
| 0:13.0 | And he associates peril, a certain dangerousness, especially with human approaches to the elves. |
| 0:25.6 | I think this is one of the deepest underlying themes of Tolkien's book. |
| 0:32.6 | I think it's something that animates all of his imagination. |
| 0:36.6 | I think it has a specifically Catholic |
| 0:40.3 | form in Tolkien, and I'll try to bring some of that out in this talk. In particular, I'm going to show |
| 0:48.4 | slides of some paintings, mostly from the 19th century, that would have been very much alive in the English culture |
| 0:59.6 | of Tolkien's own day, not only in Catholic circles, but with a kind of special reflection |
| 1:05.7 | within Catholic circles. So that'll be the picture here. |
| 1:12.6 | The Lord of the Rings is a fairly long book. |
| 1:17.6 | About a thousand pages. |
| 1:20.6 | I'll only be able to read a few passages to illustrate these ideas. |
| 1:26.6 | If you have other passages you would like to mention in the |
| 1:30.3 | discussion that we are. Let me start with one passage that has become something of a favorite of mine. |
| 1:41.3 | I don't know how many of you are readers of the Lord of the Rings, but one of the guys who's |
| 1:47.0 | a good guy is Ghandle. |
| 1:50.0 | Big Dad, large crozier, and the staff, and you know he's a good guy. |
| 2:02.2 | You're on his side. |
| 2:08.0 | Here's something that happened. |
| 2:11.1 | He and Frodo are sitting in the morning. |
| 2:13.8 | No, it's not at night. |
| 2:15.7 | That's in the movie. |
... |
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