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Julie Beck writes in The Atlantic that though science and fantasy seem to be polar opposites, a Venn diagram of “scientists” and “Lord of the Rings fans” have a large overlap which could (lovingly!) be labeled “nerds.” Several animal species have been named after characters from the books including wasps, crocodiles, and even a dinosaur named after Sauron, “Given Tolkien’s passion for nomenclature, his coinage, over decades, of enormous numbers of euphonious names—not to mention scientists’ fondness for Tolkien—it is perhaps inevitable that Tolkien has been accorded formal taxonomic commemoration like no other author,” writes Henry Gee. Other disciplines aren’t left out of the fun—there’s a geologically interesting region in Australia called the “Mordor Alkaline Igneous Complex,” a pair of asteroids named “Tolkien” and “Bilbo,” and a crater on Mercury also named “Tolkien.”
“It has been documented that Middle-Earth caught the attention of students and practitioners of science from the early days of Tolkien fandom. For example, in the 1960s, the Tolkien Society members were said to mainly consist of ‘students, teachers, scientists, or psychologists,’” writes Kristine Larsen, an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University, in her paper “SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths: The Influence of Tolkien on Modern Science.” “When you have scientists who are fans of pop culture, they’re going to see the science in it,” says Larson. “It’s just such an intricate universe. It’s so geeky. You can delve into it. There’s the languages of it, the geography of it, and the lineages. It’s very detail oriented, and scientists in general like things that have depth and detail.” Larson has also written papers on using Tolkien as a teaching tool, and discusses with her astronomy students, for example, the likelihood that the heavenly body Borgil, which appears in the first book of the trilogy, can be identified as the star Aldebaran. “I use this as a hook to get students interested in science,” says Larson. “I’m also interested in recovering all the science that Tolkien quietly wove into Middle Earth because there’s science in there that the casual reader has not recognized."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gman003 on Monday May 04 2015, @11:54PM
The difference I see between Tolkien and Lewis is that the former built a world that reflected his religion, and the latter built a world that existed only to advance the cause of his religion.
If you had no idea what catholicism or christianity were, you'd learn nothing about it by reading Tolkien. Even if you were told "by the way these books reflect the religion", by the end of it all, you'd still not be completely sure if catholicism was monotheistic or not. And if you skipped the Silmarillion, you wouldn't even be sure if there were gods in Middle-Earth. Once you know what to look for, you can see the signs, but you can't really use it to learn more about Tolkien's religion.
In contrast, Lewis wrote religious propaganda with varying degrees of subtlety. Sit someone down with no knowledge of christianity, and hand them the collected Narnia books, and they'll have a pretty decent grasp of it by the end. They'll even have an idea of how Lewis saw muslims. They wouldn't quite end up being able to distinguish anglicanism from catholicism from eastern orthodoxy, but they'll have figured out the main gist of the religion, and probably have been a bit annoyed by it in the later books, if my personal experience was anything to judge by.
And to be fair, such things aren't restricted to the religious. Many atheist authors get annoyingly preachy - Philip Pullman intended his Dark Materials series to be an atheist parallel to Narnia, and he nailed it right down to throwing out subtlety and just shoving sermons in your face in the last book. Speaking as a catholic-turned-atheist who re-read them both after converting, it's incredibly annoying regardless of whether you agree with the point or not. Tolkien obviously agreed - he ranted sometimes about how people ruined Germanic/Norse mythology by inserting christian parable into them. I doubt he would intentionally put his own religion into Middle-Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @03:00AM
I'm not religious, my parents never took me to a regular church service (have been to funerals and other special events in churches). I did grow up in an area that was primarily Christian/Catholic, with a few Jews in my schools too, but never paid a lot of attention to what my playmates did when they went to services.
I read the Narnia series as an adult one time when the set fell into my hands. I knew in advance that it was supposed to be very "Christian". Didn't bother me at all, I enjoyed the story and didn't come out converted or anything...