Posts Tagged ‘xkcd’
How to sum up the Lord of the Rings in a line diagram
This is for all you Lord of the Rings fanatics out there, some brilliant work from xkcd:
The diagram’s scarily accurate (also includes other stories like Star Wars and Jurrasic Park) and must have taken a lot of work to draw!
Incidentally J.R.R. Tolkien was good friends with C.S. Lewis, and was an influence in his conversion to Christianity. Also, the Lord of the Rings is steeped with mythology and allegory: one could compare the struggles of the Christian life to Frodo’s journey as a ringbearer, or draw parallels to Aragorn and Jesus as returning Kings. Obviously the Christian themes and messages are much more overt in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (here’s a satire that points this out).
From an interview with Colin Duriez, author of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship:
What Tolkien did was help Lewis see how the two sides, reason and imagination, could be integrated. During the two men’s night conversation on the Addison Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College, Tolkien showed Lewis how the two sides could be reconciled in the Gospel narratives. The Gospels had all the qualities of great human storytelling. But they portrayed a true event—God the storyteller entered his own story, in the flesh, and brought a joyous conclusion from a tragic situation. Suddenly Lewis could see that the nourishment he had always received from great myths and fantasy stories was a taste of that greatest, truest story—of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
So Tolkien brought the imagination right into the center of Lewis’s life. And then, through a gradual process, with the example of Tolkien’s Silmarillion tales and Lord of the Rings before him, Lewis learned how to communicate Christian faith in imaginative writing.
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