Happenings 01/09/22

I don't know if you are a 'Lord of the Rings' fan? There are a few of them to be found in my house, and because of that, some interest in Amazon Prime's Rings of Power series which is soon to be released (although on yet another streaming platform!!!!). I was reading some musings from a Tolkien fan, Pete Peterson,  on the rightness of wrongness of adapting an existing classic, and he was entirely positive. Here is what he said:

Tolkien championed the idea of humans as sub-creators—images of God who take creation and reshape it into endless lesser creations. In this new Lord of the Rings series, people are doing exactly that. They’re borrowing from the master’s legendarium and fashioning new tales and new characters and new visions of the world they love. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien gives us the “Cauldron of Story”—a great kettle into which all our tales and histories are tossed and boiled. They stew and combine, and in each generation, new flavours are added, and new soups are tasted and served up for the good of those who gather. Sometimes what boils up might only taste like a faint trace of the original bones in the broth. But often, a storyteller pulls out of the mix something that tastes familiar and satisfies. That’s the wonder I wait for. Tolkien suggests that, as images of a God who creates ex nihilo, we rearrange the existing world in the form of songs and poems and paintings and stories. We “sub-create.” And what we make bears an imprint of us and our personal particularity. The same goes for artists down through the ages, who each take up the brush of the master and make something new that reflects what they know of the world. Few writers of the previous century have enriched the cauldron so well as J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s lovely to live in an age when we can see his legendarium taken up into the tradition of story he loved so well. For out of the cauldron it came, and into the cauldron it returns. Now its notes and flavours flow forward into the age to come. Long live the pot. Pass the soup.

Some interesting thoughts on the validity of bringing new interpretations to what has been done before!

In Him
Murray