For the fortieth anniversary of the death of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Telegraph website presents a picture postcard pilgrimage in the great writer’s honour. It’s a photo feature, highlighting many of the key locations that influenced Tolkien’s life and work:
On the Tolkien Trail
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
About the Author: Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is a Catholic author and biographer who has written about subjects as various as GK Chesterton, economics, and Shakespeare.
I just read a short extract from your book ‘race with the devil’.
I know Haverhill well, also those ‘blue remembered hill moments that C S Lewis understood so intensely. Sun, fields, woods, blue sky [ the kind of blue you never see now!] innocence seems to readily absorb these spiritual currents, for a future purpose maybe?
I was a skinhead, Hitler idolator, alcoholic, drug taker lost in impurity addicted to a host of defiling actions and thoughts.
Then stiubble burning time came.
One night hell broke loose inside me.
Like yourself I can now see in the works of John of the cross what was happening to me. I thought I was going completely insane and turning forever into that evil creature I had practised being for so long. A bit like being hurled into mount doom.
It was then that the holy spirit released the memorial of those halcyon days of my childhood. Them, and the sheer joy I had of reading the Hobbit, LOTR and Narnia came to my aid. God represented them, or rather the childish experience of them directly into my soul.[.sahnsucht is a term that Lewis used to capture this mystery] This showed me that I was not always the creature that I had turned into. There was a time when I had been somebody else , light was breaking in and that, not the darkness I had been living in for twenty years was causing the agony.
I bless the most painful day of my life.
I just wanted to say that I acknowledge that the writings of J RR Tolkien and C S Lewis are precious to me……they had a part in saving me.
I am an artist now living in Ireland, homeschooling my five daughters and working on our home business…’The Middle-earth Collection.’
God Bless you
Colin Patten
http://www.historymaker.ie