By Samantha Adams
Staff Writer
Weeks before the much-anticipated Dec. 14 premier of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and nearly 40 years after author J.R.R. Tolkien’s death in 1963, Dr. Hal Poe put his collection of Tolkien’s works and related memorabilia on display at Union.
Poe is Union’s Charles Colson professor of faith and culture.
American and British first-edition copies of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “The Silmarillion,” along with an ashtray from the Mitre Hotel in Oxford, England, are among items displayed in the lobby outside the G. M. Savage Memorial Chapel in the Penick Academic Complex.
Tolkien and his friends often met at the Mitre, Poe said.
“They smoked like locomotives,” he said. “They thought it was good for you.”
Poe said he hopes the exhibit will be enjoyable for those who have read Tolkien’s works and pique the curiosity of people who have not read the books or thought about the themes.
“I would like (the exhibit) to be a catalyst for people to think about faith issues,” Poe said.
Tolkien’s works have maintained popularity since first being published in the 1950s because they are a “word-of-mouth phenomenon,” he said.
Readers often cannot quite explain them, but they keep telling their friends they should read them, he said.
In 2003, a “Big Read” survey conducted by the BCC found “The Lord of the Rings” to be “The Nation’s Best-Loved Book.”
He adds that Tolkien is largely responsible for making the fantasy genre popular.
“It has been embraced by our culture, I think, because it’s a way for people to deal with the complexity of the society in which we live,” Poe said. “(Tolkien’s literature) is often derided by a certain class of scholar as ‘escapist’ literature. It really isn’t escape at all; it’s actually confrontation, because all of the crises are laid bare, stripped of their modern contemporary context which, in many ways, allows you to see the dynamics more clearly in the fantasy story than you can see it in a realistic story.”
A few of the items in the collection relate to Tolkien’s time as a student and professor at the University of Oxford.
Tolkien and Clive Staples Lewis founded a literary society called “the Inklings” while fellows at Oxford. The group met about once a week to talk about what they were writing “and everything under the sun,” Poe said.
Poe teaches a class about Lewis every few years at Union. He also co-wrote “The Inklings of Oxford: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Their Friends” with photographer Jim Veneman, assistant professor of communication arts.
Poe even founded the Inklings Fellowship, a group of people interested in Lewis and other members of the Inklings. Poe said Union students are invited to attend the Inklings Fellowship’s trip to Oxford in July 2013.
The entire Tolkien exhibit focuses on a postcard-sized photograph of Addison’s Walk, a path on the grounds at Magdalen College, Oxford, Poe said. The photo shows a walkway well shaded by a thick row of trees lining each side.
Late one night while a fellow at Oxford, Tolkien took a stroll on Addison’s Walk with his academic friends Lewis and Hugo Dyson, Poe said. Dyson taught at Oxford and was a member of the Inklings. He and Tolkien played key roles in leading Lewis to accept the Christian faith.
The photo represents the time in which Lewis, who was not yet Christian, protested to Tolkien that Christianity was just another version of the dying-and-rising-god myth found in every culture.
Tolkien immediately replied that Lewis was absolutely right, it is the same myth. The only difference, he told Lewis, is this one really happened.
“It was the catalytic moment in Lewis’s conversion,” Poe said, “because whereas all the other myths happened once upon a time, Jesus was born when Augustus Caesar was emperor, and Quirinius was governor of Syria… He was not in some misty, unknown realm; he was in Galilee and Nazareth and Jerusalem.”
Lewis, who wrote of his journey to accepting Christianity in his autobiography “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life,” became one of Christianity’s most celebrated apologists and novelists.
He retold the idea of a myth that reflected the true universal story in “The Chronicles of Narnia” series.
