As many people know, Tolkien was a fervent Catholic; his wife, not so much.
"The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion.
Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed
Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us.
Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise.
Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more
nourishing than seven times at intervals."
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed
Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us.
Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise.
Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more
nourishing than seven times at intervals."
Here's a couple of more quotes from Tolkien – on war (Tolkien served in the trenches in WW 1 and lost several close friends):
Tolkien criticized Allied use of total war tactics against civilians from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In a 1945 letter to his son Christopher, he wrote:
We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it
might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to
hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd
hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of
the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well,—you and I can do
nothing about it. And that [should] be a measure of the amount of guilt
that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is
not a member of its actual Government. Well the first War of the
Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter—leaving,
alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead,
and only one thing triumphant: the Machines.[109]
He also reacted with anger at the excesses of anti-German propaganda during the war. In 1944, he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher:
… it is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels
in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a
desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly
benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic. … There was a solemn
article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating
of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military
victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.[110]
He was horrified by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referring to the scientists of the Manhattan Project as "these lunatic physicists" and "Babel-builders".[111]
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