IQ 6: Tolkien & Dante, Interdisciplinary Lewis Course, Fellow Spotlights
Inklings Quarterly
February 20, 2025
From a Fellow
Dr. Dominic A. Aquila | AY24-25 Inklings Project Fellow
Professor of History, The University of St. Thomas (Houston, Texas)
Dark Woods and Deep Language: The Forest as Linguistic Threshold in Tolkien and Dante
Tolkien scholars and avid readers alike acknowledge “The Old Forest” chapter in The Fellowship of the Ring as a vital narrative threshold, marking the Hobbits’ first true confrontation with the perilous unknown. More’s the pity that those who know The Lord of the Rings solely from Peter Jackson’s 2001 adaptation of it miss the crucially important transitional function of this chapter. To maintain the film’s momentum, Jackson chose to forgo this eerie and symbolic episode, instead transitioning the Hobbits directly from their departure in the Shire to their tense first meeting with Aragorn in Bree.
Audiences of the film miss the Hobbits' palpable sense of dread not much different than the terror of being hunted by the Dark Riders that they seek to elude by entering the Old Forest. Frodo and company depart from the eastern border of the Shire before dawn, slipping through a secret hedge gate to enter the Old Forest. Fredegar (also known affectionately as Fatty Bolger) anticipates the danger ahead for Frodo and company. He says, “I am more afraid of the Old Forest than of anything I know about: the stories about it are a nightmare.” This ancient woodland, filled with an eerie sentience, resists their passage, leading them deeper into its tangled depths. As they attempt to navigate, they are subtly herded by unseen forces toward the Withywindle valley, the heart of the forest’s strangeness. Exhausted, the hobbits rest by a river, only to fall under the spell of the malevolent Old Man Willow. The ancient tree lulls them into drowsiness, ensnaring Merry and Pippin in its grasp while attempting to drown Frodo. Just as disaster seems imminent, the enigmatic and merry figure of Tom Bombadil appears, singing a song that compels the tree to release them. Bombadil’s presence exudes a mysterious power over the forest, as he effortlessly commands Old Man Willow to let the hobbits go. With a lighthearted demeanor, Tom invites the company to his home, where they will find rest and shelter. The chapter ends with the hobbits following their strange rescuer deeper into the unknown.
The Old Forest is a liminal threshold—an allegorical passage from the rustic serenity of the Shire into a realm of ancient enigma and unseen menace. It is no mere backdrop to the drama of the Hobbits’ flight from the Dark Riders, those relentless spectral hunters of the wraith-world. Rather, the forest itself throbs with a wild, sentient presence, a danger as formidable in its own right as the foes they seek to escape. Tolkien crafted an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere, with the trees embodying primal peril.
Readers of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno will recognize echoes of Dante the wayfarer's terror in the Hobbits’ fearful dread and experience of the Old Forest. Dante the poet writes of his selva oscura in the opening lines of Inferno:
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh—
the very thought of it renews my fear! (Inferno, I. 4-6)
The late Robert Hollander pointed out that “the selva oscura” is one of the governing images of the entire Commedia (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso). Metaphorical interpretations of selva oscura abound, but Hollander reads “selva oscura” historically in a certain sense insofar as it reflects the state of Eden after the Fall. Thus, Dante the pilgrim awakens in the ruins of Eden, an environment intrinsically hostile to him. This “historical” reading of selva oscura resonates in unison with the history underlying the antipathy between the Old Forest and the Hobbits. The Old Forest too is the result of an original disharmony. Sometime in the First or Second Age of Middle Earth, the male and female Ents became estranged; the Entwives crossed Anduin and tended their favorite plants – small trees, grasses, fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables – in what was later called the Brown Lands, while the male Ents tended their larger trees, especially in the great forest that stretched from the Old Forest to Fangorn. The trees of the Old Forest, especially Old Man Willow who swallowed Merry and Pippin, were malevolent and mobile.
But perhaps a more chilling comparison with Tolkien’s Old Forest is the Forest of the Suicides in Canto XIII of Inferno. Dante the wayfarer says:
we [Dante and his guide, Virgil] made our way into a forest
not marked by any path.
No green leaves, but those of dusky hue—
Not a straight branch, but knotted and contorted—
No fruit of any kind, but poisonous thorns. (Inferno, XIII, 2-6)
In this forest those who took their own lives are punished. Unlike other damned souls in Inferno who retain human form, suicides are transformed into gnarled, leafless trees—a reflection of their rejection of their bodies in life. When Dante breaks a branch from one of the trees, the wounded soul, Pier della Vigna, explains their fate: after Judgment Day, their bodies will be returned to them, but they will never be reunited with their souls—instead, their bodies will be hung upon their own trees as a final, eternal sign of their self-destruction.
Would Tolkien have acknowledged these forest comparisons? Tolkien is said to bristle at suggestions that his work was somehow derivative. For example, Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) was often compared to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Both drew heavily on Norse mythology. Tolkien dismissed the comparison. He once said: “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased.” In the case of Dante, Tolkien was ambivalent. He read Dante with C. S. Lewis, was a member of the Dante Society at Oxford, and regarded Dante as “a supreme poet.” Yet, he viewed the Commedia as “full of spite and malice. I don't care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.”
That said, whether knowingly or unknowingly, Tolkien’s and Dante’s forests reflect a deep connection to that which fascinated both of them endlessly: language. For help in understanding the connection between forest and language we turn to Giambattista Vico’s groundbreaking text, The New Science (1725). Vico declared it as axiomatic that “The order of ideas must proceed in accordance with the order of things. The order of human things proceeds so that, first, there are forests; later, lodges; therefore, villages; then cities; and finally, academies.” For Vico, “This axiom is a great principle pertaining to etymology: it is in accordance with this series of human things that the history of words in native languages must be told.”
Vico’s was a fierce opponent of the Enlightenment’s ultra rationalism. His project was to elevate the value of history by focusing on language and myth as privileged sources for the knowledge of history and of our own minds. In this endeavor he was of one mind with Tolkien. Tolkien and Dante were theoreticians of language and creators of language. Tolkien’s created the fictional languages of Quenya (High Elvish) and Sindarin (Grey Elvish) among others. Dante’s unfinished De vulgari eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular) written between 1303 and 1305, is a pioneering work in linguistic thought. It not only championed the literary potential of the Italian vernacular but also offered foundational ideas about how a “common speech” could be elevated into a unifying, prestigious, and artistic medium. These ideas had a profound influence on the evolution of Italian literature, the eventual standardization of the Italian language, and broader discussions on language as a vehicle for cultural identity. Dante set this theoretical work to realize it in the world he created in the Commedia. It is often said that Dante Created the Italian language and was a master of the various Italian dialects.
In both Tolkien’s and Dante’s works, forests are more than mere settings or obstacles; they function as thresholds of myth, language, and transformation. They represent crucial thresholds where language, myth, and meaning converge. While Tolkien may have bristled at direct comparisons to other works, his Old Forest shares in common with Dante's woods a profound connection to their creators' preoccupation with language as a vehicle for mythmaking and cultural memory. Both authors understood forests as primordial realms where the raw materials of language and story take root. Their theoretical works on language – Tolkien's constructed Elvish tongues and Dante's treatise on vernacular eloquence – find creative expression in these sylvan landscapes. The forests become manifestations of their linguistic philosophies: spaces where the ancient and the new, the mythical and the historical, intertwine like branches in a dense canopy. This parallel reveals how both authors, despite their differences, recognized the forest as a vital symbol in the evolution of human consciousness, language, and storytelling – a view that aligns with Vico's understanding of forests as the primordial ground from which human civilization and expression emerge.
From a Fellow
Dr. Josiah Reiswig | AY24-25 Inklings Project Fellow
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Anderson University
“C. S. Lewis is Smarter Than You”: Interdisciplinary Studies Through the Essays of C. S. Lewis
Through my participation in the Inklings Project fellowship, I have developed the interdisciplinary course “C. S. Lewis is Smarter Than You” for the Honors Program at Anderson University (SC), which is being run for the first time in the Spring semester of 2025. Despite its pugnacious title, the course is designed to critically examine C.S. Lewis’s ideas, primarily through his shorter works, with his larger writings serving in a supporting role.
As part of the Honors Program, the class is intentionally small (eight students), student-led, and academically diverse, with students representing six different colleges and schools within the university. Each week, two students pair up to create a reading quiz for the entire class based on the assigned readings and lead that week’s discussion. The quiz creation serves as a summative assessment, while the quizzes themselves act as formative tools, naturally leading into class discussions. Typically, the instructor begins each session with a selection from Surprised by Joy or Lewis’s poetry after which the class completes the reading quiz.
The student-created quizzes provide useful benchmarks for assessing comprehension. One of the earliest assigned essays, “The Parthenon and the Optative” from On Stories, has served as a guiding light for student quiz creation. The quiz questions are directly tied to the content, while more open-ended prompts are reserved for discussion. For example, a quiz designed by Nursing major Isabella and Graphic Design major Owen on “Democratic Education” included the question: “What is Lewis’s objection to the idea of full equality in education?” Meanwhile, Mathematics major Jackson and Biology major Dylan, leading discussion on That Hideous Strength, asked, “Describe a connection between Mark’s involvement in N.I.C.E. and the theme of ‘The Inner Ring.’” Because the students designing the quizzes also lead the discussions, the quizzes help prime the rest of the class for deeper engagement with the material.
Discussion has been lively yet focused. In the first week of class, Accounting major Catie kicked off discussion with, “The essay was a banger! The Abolition of Man, though…” Cybersecurity major Graham completed her thought with a thumbs-down. “If the Tao can be improved, it’s not a foundation for morality. He can’t have it both ways,” Graham objected, before sighing and putting his head in his hands. “It’s just Social Darwinism.”
Based on these responses, I made an impromptu adjustment to the syllabus, replacing an assigned reading with “On Ethics” from Christian Reflections for the next class. When we reconvened, the shift in tone was immediate. “Why did he even write Abolition if “On Ethics” is so much better?” Graham wondered aloud. Catie, in mock resignation, added, “We who hate the Tao will remain silent.”
Not all discussions take such a critical turn. When exploring Lewis’s assertion that “man’s power over nature” ultimately becomes “some men’s power over other men,” Biology major Dylan drew connections to current issues raised in her genetics course. “The next generation doesn’t have a choice in how their genes are manipulated,” she observed. “If we modify genes that may cause cancer, we don’t know what else we’re depriving them of.”
Other students have made similarly insightful cross-text connections. While leading discussion on The Abolition of Man, “On Ethics”, and “Lilies That Fester”, English Education major Austin and Psychology major Easton synthesized their ideas into a compelling diagram—an illustration of the insightful engagement the class has fostered.
While the thematic connections between these three readings are readily apparent, the organizational clarity of their presentation left me thinking, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Rather than dulling Lewis’s ideas, the repetition of themes across his essays has helped sharpen and clarify his arguments for the class. Even when students take issue with his conclusions, they have come to appreciate the precision and depth of his writing. Catie, for instance, suggested that all freshmen in the Honors Program should read “The Inner Ring.” In every essay, students have found at least one quote particularly witty and insightful.
Summative three-to-five-page papers are assigned at the end of each unit, with the course structured around four thematic units: education, politics and economics, the Christian faith in the public sphere, and the Christian faith in one’s private life. Each unit is supplemented by a podcast episode I recorded with an expert on the topic. To my surprise, some students expressed enthusiasm about hearing their other professors discuss Lewis’s work, adding another layer of engagement to the course. The podcast, also titled CS Lewis is Smarter Than You, is available on RSS.com, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
The Inklings Project fellowship has given me the opportunity to teach a course outside my formal discipline but well within my intellectual interests. Lewis’s engaging and accessible writing makes him an ideal subject for a student-led course. I hope to expand the course to a broader student audience at Anderson University and believe this approach would be just as valuable for secondary students as it is for university students. My participation in the fellowship has deepened both my teaching and my appreciation of the Inklings, and I strongly encourage faculty from any discipline to apply.
Fellow Spotlights
Dr. Ben Reinhard | AY24-25 Inklings Project Fellow
Professor of English, Franciscan University of Steubenville
The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination
J. R. R. Tolkien famously described The Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” But while these words have been widely and enthusiastically quoted in Catholic studies of Tolkien’s legendarium, readers have not always paid sufficient attention to what Catholic and religious would have meant to Tolkien himself. To do so is to misunderstand the full import of the phrase.
From his childhood as an altar server and “junior inmate” of the Birmingham Oratory to daily Mass with his children as an adult, Tolkien’s Catholic religion was, at its heart, a liturgical affair. To be religious and Catholic in the Tolkienian sense is to be rooted in the prayer of the Church.
The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination takes this claim seriously: The Lord of the Rings (and Tolkien’s myth as a whole) is the product of an imagination seeped in liturgical prayer. In the course of its argument, Ben Reinhard examines the liturgical pieties that governed Tolkien’s life from childhood to old age, the ways in which the liturgy colored Tolkien’s theory of myth and fantasy, and the alleged absence of religion in Middle-earth. Most importantly, he shows how the plots, themes, and characters of Tolkien’s beloved works can be traced to the patterns of the Church’s liturgical year.
To learn more or to order the book, visit https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-high-hallow-tolkiens-liturgical-imagination/.
Dr. Carolyn Weber | AY24-25 Inklings Project Fellow
Fellow, Trivium and Humanities, New College Franklin
Surprised by Oxford
A conversation with the author & the director.
In a birthday tribute to C. S. Lewis, Angel studios hosted a conversation between Carolyn Weber, author of the memoir Surprised by Oxford, and Ryan Whitaker, director of the movie based on Surprised by Oxford. While discussing the creation of these two beautiful works, Carolyn and Ryan talk about faith and the impact C. S. Lewis has had on their own lives. Click here to watch the recorded livestream from Angel studios.
Dr. Anne-Frédérique Caballero | AY24-25 Inklings Project Fellow
Associate Professor of English, University of Picardie Jules Verne
Surprised by Heaven: Lewis’s Vision of the Afterlife in The Last Battle
At the C. S. Lewis Symposium in Belfast this past fall, Anne-Frédérique Caballero gave a talk on how C. S. Lewis writes The Last Battle in a way that makes the afterlife attractive to both children and adults alike. Click here to watch the recorded lecture on the CSLI Belfast YouTube channel.
Quarterly Highlights
Inspiration: “My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others.” – C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Resource: Lesser-Known Lewis Podcast, hosted by friends Sean and Jordan, explores Lewis’ lesser-known works. Give it a listen to learn about several of Lewis’ erudite essays on topics ranging from meditation to forgiveness to myth.
Event: Registration for the 2025 C. S. Lewis Summer Institute is open! “Returning Home: C. S. Lewis, Roots, & Transformation” will take place in Belfast, Northern Ireland from July 24 - 30, 2025.
Interested in supporting the Inklings Project?
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For past issues of the Inklings Quarterly, visit www.inklingsproject.org/quarterly.
