Just received my author’s copies of the first book in which I am
published (not counting being quoted by another writer).
I have
contributed a chapter to Het betoverde land achter het filmdoek: Een christelijke blik op film en fantasy. As you can see, it’s in Dutch, which some of you may know is the language of my forebears (well, some of them).
My
chapter is called “Harry Potter versus Gandalf: het gebruik van magie
in fantasyfilms” (vertaling Bert Cusveller, the book’s redactie). As, again, some of you may recognize, it’s an abridgement of my essay “Harry Potter vs. Gandalf,” subtitled “An in-depth analysis of the literary use of magic in the works of J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis.”
If you read Dutch, you can order the book here. Otherwise, well, you’re as out of luck as I am. Despite my Dutch ancestry, I don’t speak or read a word of the language (well, maybe a cognate here and there). (I have occasionally been contacted by Greydanuses in the Netherlands. Our family tree is very well documented back to the first Greydanus in the 1600s, so it’s never hard to figure out how we’re related.)
I have been published in other languages before, but only online. As I mentioned in a recent combox, I have a fan in Slovakia who has translated a number of my reviews into Slovak. (According to Alexa.com, Slovakia is the #5 country of origin for Decent Films readers.)
I’m also a contributor to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, but my article, “Film, The Church and,” hasn’t yet appeared in print (it might be available online; I’m not sure).
Well, that’s all I have to say about that.
Congratulations, SDG.
But what’s the title of that article of yours you mentioned, “Film, The Church and,”. Didn’t you forget to put a word or two on it?
Matheus: No, that appears to be a special case of encyclopedia syntax. In normal syntax the article title is “The Church and Film,” but there are too many NCE articles called “The Church and X” to put it all under “C” — or “T” for “The,” for that matter — so they structure it as “Film, The Church and.”
I would have thought you could just use the syntax “X and the Church,” but I guess they want the Church to be the nominal “first” word in the title, even though it leads to a confusing, Yoda-like rearrangement of words. (“Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.”)
Yes, of course; thanks. But I hope you don’t change your nickname here to G, SD. 🙂
Kudos, SDG!
You should order a big box of the books, run out to meet the delivery truck when they arrive, and jump around and holler like Steve Martin did in The Jerk when the new phone books came out.
Really, I’m glad to see your work being recognized as it should be. That is a fine essay, and sums up pretty well my thoughts (actually helped form my thoughts) about the use of magic in fantasy literature, and the ways it is differently understood and used in the fantasy of Tolkien, Lewis and J.K. Rowling.
Again, kudos.
O frabjous day!
Congratulations, G, SD!
Any thoughts of using this translation to learn a little Dutch?
Or perhaps you and Fr. Roderick Vonhögen at SQPN could explore your mutual interest in Mr. Potter?
Something to think about if you ever run short of things to do.
Anyway, I was skimming (because I’m supposed to be doing something else) through the English-version of the essay and came across this:
“We cannot [within the limits of freedom], for example, imagine a world in which love should be evil and hatred good[.]”
My first thought as I read that was ‘orcs’. Admittedly they’re not the entire world, but surely in Tolkien’s depiction of them, that is just the world they seem to want to create. Or perhaps it is the wish of Sauron, or Morgoth Bauglir before him, reflected in them? I suppose you develop that later on in the parts I haven’t time to explore yet. In any event, it seems to be the desire of evil.
Just to clarify, I didn’t say that we can’t possibly can’t imagine a culture in which love is conceived as evil and hatred good. (It’s true that Lewis says something like this in Mere Christianity and elsewhere, and I think something like this is true, but at any rate it’s not my present point.)
My present point is that we cannot lawfully imagine a world in which love is actually evil and hatred actually good. Even if Morgoth and all his minions succeeded in creating a “known world” in which hatred was universally extolled and love universally contemned, in the larger narrative of Tolkien’s universe such a “known world” would be wrong, because love is good and hatred is evil. And, by extension, any orc fiction positing a world in which hatred is actually good and love actually contemptible would be immoral.
Does that help?
There have been some comments made by Tolkien scholars that point out that even orcs recognize some virtues–loyalty to comrades, for example, although they tend not to even live up to those ideals. I think it was in The Road to Middle-Earth by Tom Shippey, although I’d have to check.
Even Tolkien noted that there were philosophical problems with the existence of orcs.
“My present point is that we cannot lawfully imagine a world in which love is actually evil and hatred actually good.”
Yes, I thought that was quite clear from what you’d written in the article. I had meant to take what you had written and take it further. I’m sorry I wasn’t more clear. I was going in the direction that those who choose evil seem eventually to want (or go in the direction of wanting; ‘progress toward’) a world in which love is considered evil and hatred is considered good.
There is a parallel for this sort of ‘progress’ in the Death Eaters in HP, and in non-literary sources I have seen it in the ravings of some of the stranger atheistic websites I’ve stumbled upon.
I’ve read that essay twice myself and shared it with several family members – I can’t praise it enough, especially for its clarity and focus. Ben