Jarret, Views from the Occident and the MEI Editor's Blog have all noticed that The Lord of the Rings movies have once again inspired cyber jihadis. As I noted in this December 2006 post, JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is, according to the author, "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work..."
As a matter of fact it is such a deeply Catholic work that most movie watchers have no idea what they're experiencing. And so it is that the cyber jihadis get drawn into the pseudo-medieval world of Tolkien's Catholic imagination again and again, never knowing that the characters and symbols are Christendom through and through.
And this isn't the generic modern-day, ecumenical post-Vatican II Cat Stevens-songbook Catholicism either. Tolkien's is the unapologetically medieval Catholicism of pre-Reformation Christendom. It is the foundation of Western thought and, more important for the book, Western storytelling. This is the medieval civilization that produced the Icelandic Sagas, the Middle High German poets and the Pearl Manuscript, oh, and the Crusaders, too.From a 13th century Crusader knights' dinner table straight into a Pakistani cyber jihadi's adoring ears.
God has a sublime sense of humor.
