3) How Tolkien Rings the Changes on Shakespeare and Wagner

COURSE: The Crisis of Beauty: Plato, Shakespeare, and Tolkien
Course Description:
Plato uncovered a fundamental duplicity in our experience of beauty. Beauty can draw us most powerfully toward the highest, most transcendent goods, even to the divine; but beauty can also entangle us in merely sensuous enchantments, and distract us from our duties and our transcendent destiny. This doubleness in beauty, both engine of transcendence and temptation from it, creates a crisis that has been a central topic of philosophy and literature since Plato first articulated it. Plato also linked the crisis of beauty to friendship and love, where the promise and temptation of beauty have their greatest potency. To appreciate Plato's philosophical account of the crisis of beauty, we will also consider how this crisis is represented and explored in two literary figures, William Shakespeare and J.R.R. Tolkien. We will focus on two works that think about the crisis of beauty in part by telling stories of the complex human experience of the enchantments of love in the realm of the fairies and the elves: A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Lord of the Rings.
Third class: How Tolkien Rings the Changes on Shakespeare and Wagner.
The Lord of the Rings inherits many treasures and puts them to new and modern uses. Tolkien was of course a great scholar of the myths of Northern Europe, as well as a deeply Catholic thinker; but he was also a distinctively modern writer whose imagination reworked and transfigured a literary inheritance that was neither scholarly nor religious in any narrow way. Tolkien’s active literary inheritance is especially striking when he takes up Shakespeare and Richard Wagner. This lecture emphasizes how Tolkien rewrites Shakespeare’s account of the fairy realm (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), of the power of nature (in Macbeth), and of feminine enchantment (in Antony and Cleopatra); and how he transforms and challenges the classic account of the paradoxes of power and freedom in Richard Wagner’s four-opera masterpiece The Ring of the Nibelung.
David O'Connor is professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame