books and reading

I wish I could like this book. The topic (the culture of Britain before the Norman conquest) is one in which I have recently become very interested, and Bates seems to know his stuff. However, the feast is spoiled by an ugly flavor of anti-Christian polemic that's sure to alienate anyone who's open to both streams of wisdom. In fact, he come across as the shadow-side of a Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, setting up a radical either/or between the traditions of Christianity and the pre-Christian Celts and Anglo-Saxons, rather than a much more fruitful attitude of both/and.

If you're interested in the ways Bates' "real Middle Earth" and the Christian tradition can enrich, rather than contradict, each other I'd recommend writers like Esther de Waal, John Matthews, Ray Simpson or even Tolkien himself.

First of all this book talks relativly little about Tolkien or any of his books. What it does is try to capture the "magic" of the places and time periods that Tolkien drew inspiration from for his work, namely post Roman to pre Norman Great Britain, and to a slightly lesser extent Scandinavian and Icelandic society and culture from the same time periods using historical sources, so called "myth", namely the pagan beliefs of the Celts, Norse and Anglo-Saxons and other assorted folk beliefs and tales.

From what I can gather from reading this book the author seems like he has a similar belief that I have always had that Tolkien on one level was conciously trying to help to write a missing part of our (assuming you are of anglo-celtic-norse ancestry) heritage due to our own ancestors poor job of writng down and recording their own history, and in part to the fact that much of what is known of our pre christian history was written by outsiders to the culture, or people with a biased political agenda, and above all Christian church hierarchy who were more or less under orders to discredit our whole culture as of being of the Jewish satan and to force this alien Jew Yahweh/Jesus god upon our people. Even though Tolkien himself was a devout Catholic, I believe he was conciously trying to "fill in the blanks" in a sense, even though the inspiration and the imagination of the Hobbit/LOTR came from his subconcious ancestral memory as well as the written sources of the time that we have.

So enough of my pschoanalyzing, on to the book itself. Bates goes into most everything that was "magic" about those times and is very entertaining in doing so talking about the warrior culture, the concept of wyrd and destiny, shapeshifting, the pre christian gods and how the people related to them, how people related to nature, animals, the forest, the land, the use of spells and magic, dwarves and elves, whether you take these things as real or imaginary superstitions they were 100% real to the people of those times.

This is a great book for anybody who wants to look into the "magic" of those times or for anybody who wants to get a better understanding of where Tolkien got his ideas, both on the concious and subconcious levels.

I've read quite a few books on Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, but this one is by far one of the two worst (with the other being Finding God in LotR). I didn't even get through half of it before I had to put it down. There are quite a few facts in the book that could be very interesting, but the writing style set me on edge. What I think I found most annoying was the fact that Bates continually used the term "the Real ME," instead of just saying Norway, or England, or Scotland, or wherever else he was talking about. ME is not real. It is imaginary. It has its roots in real places (and the different groups of ppl are based on real groups of ppl), but that is as far as it goes. If you are talking about a specific place that really does exist (other than someplace in our hearts, as Sir Ian McKellen said), then use that place's real name, and not "the Real ME" over and over. I would actually recommend getting something like Myth & ME. While it deals more with myth, and not so much the history, you can learn a lot about a ppl by their myths.