I seem to recall that the receint fantasy series “Harry Potter” was subject to lots of protests from ultra-religious groups, for making witchcraft and magic look attractive, or for being somehow anti-Christian. Even more so, when the movie came out based on the first book.
Now, I don’t recall any similar protests concerning LoTR, even though this features good wizards and magic, and even a whole non-Judeo-Christian cosmology apparently complete with gods and demons.
Why not? What about Harry Potter makes it protest-worthy, but makes LoTR not worth protesting about?
[It may be pointless to look for consistency on this subject, but I am curious.]
I think all of those mentioned above plus one more. Although many adults love the Harry Potter series - I think they were first marketed as children’s books.
So, you get the whole, “For the Children!!!” rally cry that often causes nothing but nonsense.
And then there was that article in The Onion, which was taken seriously and cited as true by several Christian organisations and publications. Even after it had been tactfully pointed out to them that The Onion is a satirical magazine, and usually not particularly subtle, some of them kept maintaining that “the basic facts were true.”
I thought the LoTR “universe” started out as a purely children’s fantasy - at least, I got that impression when reading The Hobbit. It later morphed into a much more “adult” phase with the LoTR proper.
Anyway, when I went to see it, a lot of young teens were in the theatre - the same sort of crowd I saw when I watched Harry Potter.
True enough. I was in the 8th grade when I read The Hobbit and read LOTR in high school.
But when were the Hobbit and LOTR published? I honestly can’t remember but I want to say back in 50’s maybe? Maybe they just been available for so long that the “threat effect” of them as worn off?
In any event, I remember when the last Harry Potter book came out. The local news had stories showing all the displays, hype, associated merchandise, and hordes of eager kids and parents lined up to buy the books. Scenes of long lines of kids queueing up for something (that in the minds of some Christians) is associated with the occult is going to get some fundies all worked up. The fundies had the enormous hype of the books to get bent out of shape about before the movie even came out.
But a kid buying a copy of Return of the King isn’t going to make news.
Only other thing I can think of - the setting. LOTR is in a fantasy world, the char’s are all adults. However, in Harry the main char is a kid and the setting is present day. So, maybe that also leads to the fears that will lead kids to interest in the occult?
Tolkien was a devout Catholic. And even though members of some Protestant sects do not consider Catholics to be Christian, his work contains enough (genuine or artificially attributed) Christian symbolism that it escapes the “satanic” label applied to most fantasy fiction. Many people think of Gandalf as a Christ figure, but Aragorn is even more so. Descended from the kings of old, he lives a humble life, and goes to the “underworld” to bring salvation to the sinners, thus leading his people to victory. I don’t know if Tolkien meant any of this to be a deliberate parallel, or he might have been simply tapping into the western tradition of the “hero” a la Joseph Campbell. But enough Christian references can be found (if one looks for them) to save LOTR from most fundamentalist book burnings.
C.S. Lewis was Anglican (I believe), and wrote numerous books on theological subjects. His Christian parallels in The Chronicles of Narnia were quite deliberate. Largely for this reason, certain fundies have accepted Lewis as a “safe” Christian writer. I saw a representative from some fundie group on TV a couple of years ago, talking about how he was raising money to have a new film version made of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as an “acceptable” alternative to Harry Potter (I don’t remember if Tolkien was mentioned). Since the IMDB has an entry for The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe to be released in 2005, I assume he succeeded.
Rowling, on the other hand, has not (to the best of my knowledge) claimed any specific religious beliefs, and religion is almost entire absent in Harry Potter. That, plus the whole witchcraft angle, is certainly enough to upset the book burning types.
Basically: Tain’t no kids in Lord of the Rings. If there’s no kids onscreen, then the kids won’t relate the the film, and they won’t want to study magic and become evil Satan-worshipping sorcerers because of it.
Well, those are some reasonably good reasons - I guess, reading them over, that the most convincing is the hype surrounding the release of the Harry Potter books called for some counter-hype from the book banners, as mentioned by Adjustable_Beavis.
I am not sure that Tolkien’s own Christianity, or the possibility of reading Christian symbolism into LoTR as mentioned by Kizarvexius and others is very convincing, as it implies a level of familiarity with the author and text that I, rightly or wrongly, don’t associate with such people.
In all seriousness I read a letter to the editor in Reader’s Digest that, through a righteous fundamentalist froth, quoted bits and pieces of the Harry Potter-Satanism Onion article, and demanded to know when that brazen woman would be brought to her knees for admitting she ensorcels children with her Black Cult of wizards and—what? It’s… it’s a, um, a joke? Oh.
Yes, friends, the editors at Reader’s Digest had to politely tell their letter-writer that no, no, the article in the Onion was just a joke, here’s their website, check them out, it wasn’t real, stop writing us about Harry Potter and Satan.
Very funny. Wish I knew now what month that came out, I’d find a copy of RD and frame it.
Fish: I have that issue somewhere in one of my boxes. You can almost hear the snickering that the editors were making, while KNOWING they couldn’t do any of it in the magazine…
Disclaimer: I’ve never read Harry Potter. :eek: Unthinkable, I know.
Witches are often depicted in literature as working magic with the aid of the devil for evil ends (Faust, MacBeth), so it is not surprising that Christian parents would prefer their children not read about them, if indeed the witches in HP are “real” witches and not just fantasy characters. Atheists would probably object to their children reading the Narnia Chronicles. Objectivist parents would want their kids to steer clear of Christian and pagan books…
Atheist parent raising two little atheist kids checking in – nope, I’d have no problem with them reading Narnia. We’ve been trying to teach our children about a wide variety of different supernatural traditions – Greek myths, Judaism, Christianity, magic, monsters. We explain that none of these things are literally true, but something doesn’t have to be literally true for it to be a good story.
The Narnia stories are fun little adventures, although as an adult I find the heavy-handed allegory a little cloying.
Yeah, since most minimally educated evangelicals know that Tolkien, like Lewis, was a deeply Christian man whose literature reflects his faith, they wouldn’t protest it. And those who would would be corrected by their ministers or peers- it’d be pretty hard to get any sizeable protest going. As a little fundie, the books my mother read to me at bedtime included ‘The Hobbit,’ The Chronicles of Narnia, and G.K. Chesterton’s ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ and ‘The Princess and Curdie,’ which really deserve to be as widely read and well known as the Lewis and Tolkien books.
Like Pochacco, I’d have no problem with my (future) kids reading The Chronicles of Narnia. I’d enourage them to read the books, just like I’d encourage them to read Little Women, The Water-Babies, and other kids’ classics. I loved the Narnia books as a young’un, though I’ll admit that the allegory went right over my little head.
Well, it would seem that, if one felt that Harry Potter were Satanic and a threat to children, it would be logical and consistent to feel that Lord of the Rings is also Satanic and a threat to children. However, the sort of people who think Harry Potter is Satanic and a threat to children are generally short on both logic and consistency.
