Theoden and the riders of Rohan live in the manner of Hrothgar and his people in the opening sequence of Beowulf , and the language they speak is one that Tolkien renders in the trilogy as Anglo Saxon. To read Beowulf in Anglo Saxon was, Tolkien thought, to return to the mythic roots of English language and culture, the lost inheritance of everyone who would learn to think and speak in English in coming centuries. Don't let this assignment dismay you, even if you are not particularly good at learning languages. If you'd like get a head start on learning the section of Beowulf I'll assign, click here on Grendel's page . Literature after the Death of God I will sketch in the background of modern rationalism against which Tolkien and the Oxford Christians developed their theories and wrote their works.
Religions gain their power by being standards of value .
An event appears in a different light when looked at from the point of view of myth. I as the plunge into despair and meaninglessness from which literary Modernism would emerge as the dominant movement in 20th century writing. The central figure in this group is Lewis, who spent most of his earlier years as a religious skeptic, and who, as most people know, was brought to a belief in religious truth through his talks with Tolkien. We will read Lewis's moral comedy The Screwtape Letters and one of his explicitly theological works, The Problem of Pain . A Christian theory of literary imagination would therefore have affinities with the primitive or Homeric theory in which the poet is the mere pensioner of the Muse.