The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings

The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings

by Peter Kreeft

While nothing can equal or replace the adventure in reading Tolkien’s masterwork, The Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the Rings, Peter Kreeft says that the journey into its underlying philosophy can be another exhilarating adventure.
Thus, Kreeft takes the reader on a voyage of discovery into the philosophical bones of Middle earth. He organizes the philosophical themes in The Lord of the Rings into 50 categories, accompanied by over 1,000 references to the text of Lord.Since many of the great questions of philosophy are included in the 50-theme outline, this book can also be read as an engaging introduction to philosophy. For each of the philosophical topics in Lord, Kreeft presents tools by which they can be understood. Illustrated.Illustrated.

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Paperback, 237 pages

Published October 30th 2005 by Ignatius Press (first published October 1st 2005)

tags: theology, catholic, spirituality, philosophy, christianity, religion, biography, nonfiction, literature, christian

Book Quotes

“We all, like Frodo, carry a Quest, a Task: our daily duties. They come us, not from us. We are free only to accept or refuse our task- and, implicitly, our Taskmaster. None of us is a free creator or designer of his own life. "None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself" (Rom 14:7). Either God, or fate, or meaningless chance has laid upon each of us a Task, a Quest, which we would not have chosen for ourselves. We are all Hobbits who love our Shire, or security, our creature comforts, whether these are pipeweed, mushrooms, five meals a day, and local gossip, or Starbucks coffees, recreational sex, and politics. But something, some authority not named in (but named in the ), has decreed that a Quest should interrupt this delightful Epicurean garden and send us on an odyssey. We are plucked out of our Hobbit holes and plunked down onto a Road.”

― Peter Kreeft

“It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.”

― Peter Kreeft

topics: Evil, Mercy

“The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist.”

― Peter Kreeft

“Great stories give us the grace of a mystical experience, on the level of the imagination.”

― Peter Kreeft

“Man's soul has three powers, and God left him prophets for all three: Jewish moralists for his will, Greek philosophers for his mind, and pagan mythmakers for his heart and imagination and feelings. Of course, the latter two are not infallible.”

― Peter Kreeft

“Philosophy is not confined to philosophers, thank God. Everyone has a philosophy. As Cicero famously said, you have no choice between having a philosophy and not having one, only between having a good one and having a bad one. And not to admit that you have a philosophy at all is to have a bad one. For it is one that does not know itself. So how could it know anything else, especially us?”

― Peter Kreeft

“Philosophy says truth, literature shows truth.”

― Peter Kreeft

“Philosophy makes literature clear, literature makes philosophy real.”

― Peter Kreeft

“From the premise that Christianity is true it follows that the far-off glimpse of joy produced by fantasy is a glimpse of truth; that a great eucatastrophic tale like is a gift of divine grace, an opening of the curtain that veils Heaven to earthly eyes, a tiny telepathic contact with the Mind of God.”

― Peter Kreeft

“The literary establishment in England was stunned, shocked, and scandalized by an event of millennial significance when a major bookstore chain innocently polled English-speaking readers, asking them to choose the greatest book of the twentieth century. By a wide margin The Lord of the Rings won. Three times the poll was broadened: to a worldwide readership, into cyberspace via Amazon.com, and even to "the greatest book of the millennium". The same champion won each time. The critics retched and kvetched, wailed and flailed, gasped and grasped for explanations. One said that they had failed and wasted their work of "ed-u-ca-tion". "Why bother teaching them to read if they're going to read that?”

― Peter Kreeft

“The deepest healing is the healing of the deepest wound. The deepest wound is the frustration of the deepest need. The deepest need is the need for meaning, purpose, and hope.”

― Peter Kreeft

“A great story must have, first of all, a good plot, a great deed, a good work, something worth doing. You cannot write a great story about saving a button on a sweater and nothing more. You can, however, write a great story about saving the world, which is what Tolkien did.”

― Peter Kreeft

“Every human soul craves "the good, the true, and the beautiful" absolutely and without limit. And it is precisely about these three most fundamental values that the gap is the widest. Ordinary people still believe in a real morality, a real difference between good and evil; and in objective truth and the possibility of knowing it; and in the superiority of beauty over ugliness. But our educators, or "experts" (Fr. Richard John Neuhaus calls them "the chattering classes"), feel toward these three traditional values the way people think medieval inquisitors felt toward witches. Our artists deliberately prefer ugliness to beauty, our moralists fear goodness more than evil, and our philosophers embrace various forms of post-modernism that reduce truth to ideology or power.”

― Peter Kreeft

“Like the Fellowship itself, Tolkien’s philosophy fights. It conquers what George Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies” of political correctness that have twisted and wounded our souls. In other words, it is like the healing herb athelas (see LOTR, p. 193).”

― Peter Kreeft

“Those who love Tolkien are almost always good people, honest people. Some are Hobbit-like and some are Elvish, but none are Orcish. Not all Tolkien haters are Orcs, but all Orcs are Tolkien haters.”

― Peter Kreeft

“Cicero famously said, you have no choice between having a philosophy and not having one, only between having a good one and having a bad one. And not to admit that you have a philosophy at all is to have a bad one. For it is one that does not know itself. So how could it know anything else, especially us?”

― Peter Kreeft

“In art, the world conforms to the creative idea; in science, the idea conforms to the world.”

― Peter Kreeft

“time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature; either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other (Mere Christianity,”

― Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft

Peter John Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King's College, and author of numerous books as well as a popular writer on Christian theology, and specifically Roman Catholic apologetics. He also formulated together with Ronald K. Tacelli, SJ, "Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God".

Kreeft took his A.B. at Calvin College (1959), and an M.A. at Fordham University (1961). In the same university he completed his doctoral studies in 1965. He briefly did post graduate studies at Yale University. He joined the Philosophy faculty of the Department of Philosophy of Boston College in 1965. In 1994 he was a signer of the document Evangelicals and Catholics Together.
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