November 29, 2025 • 16 mins
Welcome to a special Holiday Interlude of the Seers See Podcast: Seers See the Lord of the Rings.
In this mini-season, Doug explores how J.R.R. Tolkien’s world can retrain us to think supernaturally—helping modern readers recover the enchanted, pre-materialistic imagination that both Tolkien and Scripture assume.
Episode 1 lays out the purpose of the series:
- Why Tolkien helps us reawaken a supernatural worldview
- How The Lord of the Rings subtly reveals unseen spiritual forces
- Why Dr. Cory Olsen (The Tolkien Professor) inspired this approach
- How this mini-season bridges into Season 2: Seers of the Bible with Emily in 2026
If you’ve ever wanted to see the spiritual dimension within Tolkien’s world—and recognize similar patterns in our own—this episode is your invitation to step through the door and into the unseen realm of Middle-earth.
In this opening episode of our Holiday Interlude, Doug explains why Tolkien is the perfect guide for anyone seeking to understand the supernatural world. Tolkien writes with a medieval imagination—a worldview where spiritual beings, providence, enchantment, corruption, and hidden powers operate behind the visible world.
Drawing on insights from Dr. Cory Olsen, “The Tolkien Professor,” Doug shows how The Lord of the Rings trains modern readers to notice the spiritual activity Tolkien shows but never over-explains.
This approach mirrors how Scripture invites us to recognize unseen forces shaping events, identity, and calling.
This episode sets the stage for the mini-season, which will explore:
- The Ring Poem (Episode 2)
- The Prologue as ancient historiography (Episode 3)
- Gandalf’s spiritual authority, providence, and the Nazgûl (Episode 4)
- Tom Bombadil, nature spirits, singing as spiritual warfare, Caradhras, and more
Join us as we rediscover the supernatural imagination Tolkien intended—and learn to see the world around us with new eyes.
In this mini-season, Doug explores how J.R.R. Tolkien’s world can retrain us to think supernaturally—helping modern readers recover the enchanted, pre-materialistic imagination that both Tolkien and Scripture assume.
Episode 1 lays out the purpose of the series:
- Why Tolkien helps us reawaken a supernatural worldview
- How The Lord of the Rings subtly reveals unseen spiritual forces
- Why Dr. Cory Olsen (The Tolkien Professor) inspired this approach
- How this mini-season bridges into Season 2: Seers of the Bible with Emily in 2026
If you’ve ever wanted to see the spiritual dimension within Tolkien’s world—and recognize similar patterns in our own—this episode is your invitation to step through the door and into the unseen realm of Middle-earth.
In this opening episode of our Holiday Interlude, Doug explains why Tolkien is the perfect guide for anyone seeking to understand the supernatural world. Tolkien writes with a medieval imagination—a worldview where spiritual beings, providence, enchantment, corruption, and hidden powers operate behind the visible world.
Drawing on insights from Dr. Cory Olsen, “The Tolkien Professor,” Doug shows how The Lord of the Rings trains modern readers to notice the spiritual activity Tolkien shows but never over-explains.
This approach mirrors how Scripture invites us to recognize unseen forces shaping events, identity, and calling.
This episode sets the stage for the mini-season, which will explore:
- The Ring Poem (Episode 2)
- The Prologue as ancient historiography (Episode 3)
- Gandalf’s spiritual authority, providence, and the Nazgûl (Episode 4)
- Tom Bombadil, nature spirits, singing as spiritual warfare, Caradhras, and more
Join us as we rediscover the supernatural imagination Tolkien intended—and learn to see the world around us with new eyes.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, everybody, it's me Cinderella Acts. You are listening to
the Fringe Radio Network. I know I was gonna tell them, Hey,
do you have the app? It's the best way to
listen to the Fringe Radio Network. It's safe and you
don't have to log in to use it, and it
doesn't track you or trace you, and it sounds beautiful.
(00:27):
I know I was gonna tell him. How do you
get the app? Just go to Fringe radionetwork dot com
right at the top of the page. I know, slippers,
we gotta keep cleaning these chimneys. This is the Seer
(00:53):
Seed Podcast, so we explore the Seer Gift within the
Kingdom of God mindset.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Welcome to the Holiday interlude of the Searc podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Searc The Lord of the Rings. All right.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
In this mini series, we're going to use Tolkien's story
mainly mainly The Lord of the Rings, but some of
the Hobbit to help us recover a supernatural imagination. Tolkien
shows us a world where the supernatural, the spiritual, and
the physical interlap, and where unseen powers move a story forward,
(01:30):
and where ordinary people step into an extraordinary purpose, just
like the world we live in today. This is the
SEARC Podcast, and we teach seers how to think supernaturally,
how to accept their gift, how to interpret what it
is they see. We teach pastors and parents and those
(01:52):
of us who don't see, how to understand what it is,
and how to think supernaturally through a biblical mindset about
how the spiritual and the physical interact. So today we're
going to walk in this little mini series. We're going
to walk through some of the Hobbit, but mostly the
(02:12):
Lord of the Rings, and it's my hope is that
you'll learn to see the spiritual dimension of the Middle
Earth and then begin to recognize as spiritual patterns at
work in our own world as well. Okay, today we're
starting this short series. This is going to sit between
season one of the CRC podcast is season two. We're
(02:35):
stepping into Middle Earth, not as fans, but as students
of the supernatural worldview that Tolkien assumed his readers had,
although most of us didn't. We're going to follow the
approach of doctor Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor, and we're
using Tolkien's text to retrain our imagination. Tolkien assumed that
(02:58):
people had did not think spiritually about the world that
modern people had unlearned, had unlearned how we were meant
to live and interact with nature, with the supernatural and
the physical. He wants us to unlearn our default materialism
and invites us to think the ancient way, at least
(03:20):
the way that medieval people thought, the same kind of
world the scriptures describe. So our goal is simple, learned
to see the spiritual forces Tolkien shows at work and
his work, and that helps us to see the unseen
world at work in hours. Okay, so why am I
doing this? Why am I doing this? Well, we just
(03:44):
finished season one of The Serious Podcast where Emily Dixon
and I we discussed a serious e book. It's a
seriously instruction on seeing into the spiritual realm there at
least in about a year ago, and we discuss each
chapter at length. Some chapters took months to get through,
and we also discuss some additional material that we'll go
(04:04):
into the next editions of appendices. And now we're taking
a bit of a break. And then in season two,
which I think we'll start in January, and I've been
teasing that we're going to do this live, we'll see
it's harder to do this and you know, when you
have jobs and family, you know, harder to do this live,
(04:24):
but I'll try to anyway. We'll start this, I think
in January, and we're going to do sears of the Bible,
seers of the Bible. This will be very biblical and scholarly.
It's going to be very interesting, but we need to
take a few weeks to develop that. And also, this
is the holiday season, so here in the US, this
is Thanksgiving week, and this gives us, you know, several
(04:45):
weeks of the holidays, gives us a chance just to
take a break from sort of the deep scholarly stuff.
And I wanted to take this little opportunity to talk
about something that I love.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
I love Tolkien the level of the rings, and this
is just another.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Angle to recover the supernatural world view. Tolkien helped me
regain that way of seeing the supernatural world. He writes
from a medieval imagination. He assumes the world is full
of unseen powers, and he shows that spiritual forces are
at work through narrative, not lecture, meaning he shows, he
(05:24):
doesn't tell.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
And that's how the world is today.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
We see things, we see effects of things, and we wonder,
is that a spiritual thing.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Is it just a physical thing? Or is it a little
bit of both?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
So why Tolkien helps us to think supernaturally? So The
Lord of the Rings is the probably the most influential
piece of literature of the twentieth century. Tolkien is probably
the most influential writer of the twentieth century, at least
in the English world, although his work's been translated into
(06:00):
dozens of other languages. And I'm not exaggerating, literally the
most influential author more than hemingway, more than Stephen King More.
I mean the most influential because he influenced so much.
He invented a genre. He influenced people like C. S. Lewis,
who's also super influential, right, He reshaped a whole genre,
(06:24):
and he wrote he created Middle Earth, which is the
world of the Lord of the.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Rings as a sub.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Creation, a sub world infused with spiritual power. He believed
that we modern people, at least of the modern world,
had lost the ability to think spiritually and rationally. For
that matter, he lived through World War One, the most
irrational war all among you know, the irrationality of all
wars if you think about it. But his stories train reader,
(06:50):
if you have the isis scene. You set your sort
of modern mindset apart. You can see providence at work.
You can see spiritual corruption, you can see enchantment authority.
There's nature spirits, very hard concept for a lot of
us to consider, but they're in the book. And I
got to tell you the first probably thirty years where
I engage the Lord of the Rings, I did not
(07:11):
understand nature spirits, save the concept.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Didn't see it.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I just thought it's a snowstorm, you know. I just
saw it's a branch in a forest that fell and
almost killed them. You know, like I didn't understand, and
I found those parts of the book rather boring. But
whenever you have this understanding of sort of the supernatural lens,
those passages are fraught with terror and like excitement and drama.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
He also engages ancient hierarchies. He engages thin places between
the spirit realm and the physical, and.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
He never explains it. He shows it.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
So you know a couple of examples, I mean, there's
so many examples. Gandolf never describes his power, but think
of his power as magic.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
We just see its effects.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
We just see it's his spiritual will, spiritual gifts, spiritual
abilities at work. But if you don't have a supernatural mindset,
you might say, what's magic and weird? The Nascal the
Ring Wraiths, they never give his speech about what it
means being a wraith a ghost, but the characters in
the story feel their presence, right. So I'm going to
(08:27):
give some credit to a Tolkien scholar, the Tolkien professor,
doctor Corey Olsen. He has taught us. There's a lot
of Tolkien scholars. Again, he's super influential, but he really
engaged the public in the same way that doctor Heiser
engaged people in biblical worldview and biblical teaching, and then they could.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Buy a podcast and some of that.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Doctor Corey Olson engaged the Tolkien scholarship with the public
through podcasts. And initially he just he just recorded some
of his lectures at his university. Over time he developed
an audience and now he has he has Signum University,
an online university where you can study medieval literature, you
can study fantasy literature, get.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
A master's degree.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
And he has the myth Guard Institute where they produce
all sorts of things, they host, the host sort of
conferences around the world. Pretty spectacular. What he's created there,
but he used to introduce Tolkien in his medieval classes
to teach his students how to recover the medieval mind,
because he needed the medieval mind to read medieval literature.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And to get the most out of it to understand it.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
I mean, he literally assigned Lord of the Rings in
his medieval classes so they could think supernaturally from medieval mindset.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
And that clicked with me.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
I was reading I was studying Actor Olsen stuff about
the same time I was studying doctor Heiser stuff from
the very beginning, and all this was happening coinciding whenever
I was trying to understand what it is c or
see okay, and this just really helped. It's really clicked
with me, right, So that's what we're going to do
in this little minut series. So here's my plan. It's
going to be just a few episodes. I'm just going
(10:05):
to I'm releasing some over this holiday week here in
the US, it's Thanksgiving week, a lot people are traveling.
Hopefully you'll have some opportunity while you're traveling and maybe
cleaning up from Turkey dinner and not watching football, you know,
or shopping or whatever. Here in the US and maybe
you can enjoy some of these, some of.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
The podcasts I'm going to release.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Hopefully I release two or three this week, and then
after that it'll be again on a regular basis. I
haven't decided if I'm going to bring a guest on
to talk with this or just sort of talk to you.
I don't want to lecture, you, know, so like just
talk to you, and maybe I can do some of
these live again. I'm still working through how to do that,
but it could be fun. I encourage you to write
(10:49):
in and message me on Facebook or I Doug at
CRC dot com. Just email and let me know what
you want to talk about, let me know how this
is impacting you. I'll post this in the CIARC Facebook
group also, and I'd love to hear.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Some of your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
But next the next time, we're going to talk about
the Ring poem, you know, the one Ring to rule
them all? That that poem because it describes again, Oh,
we're just engaging the Lord of the Rings and some
of the hobbit. I'm not engaging the movies. I'm talking
about the book. The movies tell a somewhat different story.
(11:26):
I'm less interested in I mean, I may talk about
the movies in the and how they contrast, okay with
with the with the books, the movies tell somewhat different story.
I love the Lord of the Rings movies, particularly the
extended version. Actually both of them, the regular theatrical and
extended versions are brilliant.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
But they but you know, if you.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Haven't seen the movies, I encourage you to read the
book without seeing the movies. Try not to engage the
artwork from the movies. Let your own mind create create
the imagery. You know, the film has sort of hardened
and shaped how people think of these characters. But these
characters are not the characters that Tolkien wrote. They're the
characters that Peter Jackson, the director Lord of the Rings films,
(12:06):
interpreted them.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
You know.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
For instance, Frodo in the Lord of the Rings films
is about in his twenties, maybe thirties and twenties, but
in the book on his journey, he's in his fifties.
It's quite a different take, right, he's so young the
in the film.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
And that's fine.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
That's the interpretive, assessed interpretation that Peter Jackson wanted. That's
the story he wanted to tell. And it's fine, but
I'm engaging the book. I'm not engaging the material that
came after the book. I'm not engaging the Selmrillion. I'm
engaging the Tolkien's letters. You know, well, in Tolkien Letter
thirty four he explains this. No, we're engaging just the text.
And I'll explain why as we go in our episodes.
Why we're engaging just a text. I'm not going to say, well,
(12:45):
you know orcs. You know, according to Tolkien letter and
according to Lord of the Rings film, they're you know,
they're like corrupted elves. No, I'm not engaging that because
that's not in the Lord of the Rings book or
the Hobbit. It wasn't even Tolkien's mind until much much later,
when he was trying to ration out some of the
challenges his own book posed. Okay, but anyway, so the
(13:06):
next time, we're going to look at the Ring poem,
because the Ring poem describes a lot about what the
rings do, the rings of power, what the Ring does,
what the Lord of the Rings wanted to do, tells
you about elves, dwarves, and men, and it tells you
what the rings did to them. So we're gonna look
at the ring poem, and that tells you right away
(13:26):
about spiritual hierarchies.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
It's going to be great. And then after that we'll.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Look at the prologue. Now, the prologue for a lot
of people's super boring. For me, it can be super boring, right,
But the prologue it gives us. It's sort of the
historiography of the book The Lord Lord of the Rings.
It sets the frame, it does world building.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I've to be honest, the first time a lot of
times when I.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Read the book, I skipped the prologue when I was
a freshman in high school.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
The first time I tried reading The Lord of the Rings.
I think I tried reading it in junior high.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
But when I was a freshman is when I actually
was able to read it.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And I was like, what is one am I reading?
Speaker 2 (14:00):
I read the Hobbit and now I'm reading the prologue.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
This is terrible.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
You know, we're gonna look at the prologue because it
frames the rest of the book, and then we're gonna
look at early chapters. We're gonn look at Gandalf or
that providence, the Ring race, spiritual attacks, spiritual the effect
of the unseen realm on the characters in what is
going on in the narrative. We're gonna spend a whole chapter,
(14:25):
a whole episode looking at Tom Bombadill talk about nature, spirits,
nature deities. I can't wait. It's gonna be so interesting.
And the text will speak for itself, all right, the
text will speak for itself. We're gonna look at weather Top,
the spiritual battle on Weathertop, and there's a song that
is pivotal to the spiritual warfare that will not happen
that Weathertop when the Ring Race attack Photo and the Fellowship.
(14:48):
We're gonna look at the Karadras, the mountains when they
try to cross the mountains. We're gonna look at the
Moria Gate. Is that a sentient gate? Is there a
spirit there in the gate?
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Well, what the.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Texts say, we'll look at it that the creature that
attack them. Don't think of the creature like in the movie.
Think of the creatures as the text. As the text conveys,
there's a lot of spiritual stuff going on with that
creature attacks them at the Moria Gate. So anyway, as
as you see spiritual forces in Tolkien's work in The
(15:20):
Little of the Rings, we will be trained to see
spiritual forces in our own work and in scripture. I
have to say, studying with doctor Olson and how Tolkien
put together the Lord of the Rings and the frame
of the story help me read the Bible better, Okay,
(15:42):
And I'll explain that more as we go on, But
it did. It helped me become a better reader of
scripture pretty neat all right. So, this little mini season,
this holiday interlude, if you will, is an imitation. Like
Gandalf knocking on Bilbo's door, you step into a larger,
more enchanted reality. Next time we'll come back and we'll
(16:04):
look at the ring poem. So hope you engage this
and let me know what you think about it. If
you think it's completely stupid and irrelevant to the sier thing.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
That's fine.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
You can skip it, But I hope you don't skip it.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
It'd be fun, right, it'd be fun.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
All Right.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
We'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Thank you for listening to the seer Se podcast. Opening
and closing music is Sun by Jason Callahan. Hopri music
includes Just Around the World and Alta Hearing by Keela Camps.
Music and serierc podcasts are distributed in our Creative Commons
attribution non commercial note of it is four point zero
Hi, everybody, it's me Cinderella Acts. You are listening to
the Fringe Radio Network. I know I was gonna tell them, Hey,
do you have the app? It's the best way to
listen to the Fringe Radio Network. It's safe and you
don't have to log in to use it, and it
doesn't track you or trace you, and it sounds beautiful.
(00:27):
I know I was gonna tell him. How do you
get the app? Just go to Fringe radionetwork dot com
right at the top of the page. I know, slippers,
we gotta keep cleaning these chimneys. This is the Seer
(00:53):
Seed Podcast, so we explore the Seer Gift within the
Kingdom of God mindset.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Welcome to the Holiday interlude of the Searc podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Searc The Lord of the Rings. All right.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
In this mini series, we're going to use Tolkien's story
mainly mainly The Lord of the Rings, but some of
the Hobbit to help us recover a supernatural imagination. Tolkien
shows us a world where the supernatural, the spiritual, and
the physical interlap, and where unseen powers move a story forward,
(01:30):
and where ordinary people step into an extraordinary purpose, just
like the world we live in today. This is the
SEARC Podcast, and we teach seers how to think supernaturally,
how to accept their gift, how to interpret what it
is they see. We teach pastors and parents and those
(01:52):
of us who don't see, how to understand what it is,
and how to think supernaturally through a biblical mindset about
how the spiritual and the physical interact. So today we're
going to walk in this little mini series. We're going
to walk through some of the Hobbit, but mostly the
(02:12):
Lord of the Rings, and it's my hope is that
you'll learn to see the spiritual dimension of the Middle
Earth and then begin to recognize as spiritual patterns at
work in our own world as well. Okay, today we're
starting this short series. This is going to sit between
season one of the CRC podcast is season two. We're
(02:35):
stepping into Middle Earth, not as fans, but as students
of the supernatural worldview that Tolkien assumed his readers had,
although most of us didn't. We're going to follow the
approach of doctor Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor, and we're
using Tolkien's text to retrain our imagination. Tolkien assumed that
(02:58):
people had did not think spiritually about the world that
modern people had unlearned, had unlearned how we were meant
to live and interact with nature, with the supernatural and
the physical. He wants us to unlearn our default materialism
and invites us to think the ancient way, at least
(03:20):
the way that medieval people thought, the same kind of
world the scriptures describe. So our goal is simple, learned
to see the spiritual forces Tolkien shows at work and
his work, and that helps us to see the unseen
world at work in hours. Okay, so why am I
doing this? Why am I doing this? Well, we just
(03:44):
finished season one of The Serious Podcast where Emily Dixon
and I we discussed a serious e book. It's a
seriously instruction on seeing into the spiritual realm there at
least in about a year ago, and we discuss each
chapter at length. Some chapters took months to get through,
and we also discuss some additional material that we'll go
(04:04):
into the next editions of appendices. And now we're taking
a bit of a break. And then in season two,
which I think we'll start in January, and I've been
teasing that we're going to do this live, we'll see
it's harder to do this and you know, when you
have jobs and family, you know, harder to do this live,
(04:24):
but I'll try to anyway. We'll start this, I think
in January, and we're going to do sears of the Bible,
seers of the Bible. This will be very biblical and scholarly.
It's going to be very interesting, but we need to
take a few weeks to develop that. And also, this
is the holiday season, so here in the US, this
is Thanksgiving week, and this gives us, you know, several
(04:45):
weeks of the holidays, gives us a chance just to
take a break from sort of the deep scholarly stuff.
And I wanted to take this little opportunity to talk
about something that I love.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
I love Tolkien the level of the rings, and this
is just another.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Angle to recover the supernatural world view. Tolkien helped me
regain that way of seeing the supernatural world. He writes
from a medieval imagination. He assumes the world is full
of unseen powers, and he shows that spiritual forces are
at work through narrative, not lecture, meaning he shows, he
(05:24):
doesn't tell.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
And that's how the world is today.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
We see things, we see effects of things, and we wonder,
is that a spiritual thing.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Is it just a physical thing? Or is it a little
bit of both?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
So why Tolkien helps us to think supernaturally? So The
Lord of the Rings is the probably the most influential
piece of literature of the twentieth century. Tolkien is probably
the most influential writer of the twentieth century, at least
in the English world, although his work's been translated into
(06:00):
dozens of other languages. And I'm not exaggerating, literally the
most influential author more than hemingway, more than Stephen King More.
I mean the most influential because he influenced so much.
He invented a genre. He influenced people like C. S. Lewis,
who's also super influential, right, He reshaped a whole genre,
(06:24):
and he wrote he created Middle Earth, which is the
world of the Lord of the.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Rings as a sub.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Creation, a sub world infused with spiritual power. He believed
that we modern people, at least of the modern world,
had lost the ability to think spiritually and rationally. For
that matter, he lived through World War One, the most
irrational war all among you know, the irrationality of all
wars if you think about it. But his stories train reader,
(06:50):
if you have the isis scene. You set your sort
of modern mindset apart. You can see providence at work.
You can see spiritual corruption, you can see enchantment authority.
There's nature spirits, very hard concept for a lot of
us to consider, but they're in the book. And I
got to tell you the first probably thirty years where
I engage the Lord of the Rings, I did not
(07:11):
understand nature spirits, save the concept.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Didn't see it.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I just thought it's a snowstorm, you know. I just
saw it's a branch in a forest that fell and
almost killed them. You know, like I didn't understand, and
I found those parts of the book rather boring. But
whenever you have this understanding of sort of the supernatural lens,
those passages are fraught with terror and like excitement and drama.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
He also engages ancient hierarchies. He engages thin places between
the spirit realm and the physical, and.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
He never explains it. He shows it.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
So you know a couple of examples, I mean, there's
so many examples. Gandolf never describes his power, but think
of his power as magic.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
We just see its effects.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
We just see it's his spiritual will, spiritual gifts, spiritual
abilities at work. But if you don't have a supernatural mindset,
you might say, what's magic and weird? The Nascal the
Ring Wraiths, they never give his speech about what it
means being a wraith a ghost, but the characters in
the story feel their presence, right. So I'm going to
(08:27):
give some credit to a Tolkien scholar, the Tolkien professor,
doctor Corey Olsen. He has taught us. There's a lot
of Tolkien scholars. Again, he's super influential, but he really
engaged the public in the same way that doctor Heiser
engaged people in biblical worldview and biblical teaching, and then they could.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Buy a podcast and some of that.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Doctor Corey Olson engaged the Tolkien scholarship with the public
through podcasts. And initially he just he just recorded some
of his lectures at his university. Over time he developed
an audience and now he has he has Signum University,
an online university where you can study medieval literature, you
can study fantasy literature, get.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
A master's degree.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
And he has the myth Guard Institute where they produce
all sorts of things, they host, the host sort of
conferences around the world. Pretty spectacular. What he's created there,
but he used to introduce Tolkien in his medieval classes
to teach his students how to recover the medieval mind,
because he needed the medieval mind to read medieval literature.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And to get the most out of it to understand it.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
I mean, he literally assigned Lord of the Rings in
his medieval classes so they could think supernaturally from medieval mindset.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
And that clicked with me.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
I was reading I was studying Actor Olsen stuff about
the same time I was studying doctor Heiser stuff from
the very beginning, and all this was happening coinciding whenever
I was trying to understand what it is c or
see okay, and this just really helped. It's really clicked
with me, right, So that's what we're going to do
in this little minut series. So here's my plan. It's
going to be just a few episodes. I'm just going
(10:05):
to I'm releasing some over this holiday week here in
the US, it's Thanksgiving week, a lot people are traveling.
Hopefully you'll have some opportunity while you're traveling and maybe
cleaning up from Turkey dinner and not watching football, you know,
or shopping or whatever. Here in the US and maybe
you can enjoy some of these, some of.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
The podcasts I'm going to release.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Hopefully I release two or three this week, and then
after that it'll be again on a regular basis. I
haven't decided if I'm going to bring a guest on
to talk with this or just sort of talk to you.
I don't want to lecture, you, know, so like just
talk to you, and maybe I can do some of
these live again. I'm still working through how to do that,
but it could be fun. I encourage you to write
(10:49):
in and message me on Facebook or I Doug at
CRC dot com. Just email and let me know what
you want to talk about, let me know how this
is impacting you. I'll post this in the CIARC Facebook
group also, and I'd love to hear.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Some of your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
But next the next time, we're going to talk about
the Ring poem, you know, the one Ring to rule
them all? That that poem because it describes again, Oh,
we're just engaging the Lord of the Rings and some
of the hobbit. I'm not engaging the movies. I'm talking
about the book. The movies tell a somewhat different story.
(11:26):
I'm less interested in I mean, I may talk about
the movies in the and how they contrast, okay with
with the with the books, the movies tell somewhat different story.
I love the Lord of the Rings movies, particularly the
extended version. Actually both of them, the regular theatrical and
extended versions are brilliant.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
But they but you know, if you.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Haven't seen the movies, I encourage you to read the
book without seeing the movies. Try not to engage the
artwork from the movies. Let your own mind create create
the imagery. You know, the film has sort of hardened
and shaped how people think of these characters. But these
characters are not the characters that Tolkien wrote. They're the
characters that Peter Jackson, the director Lord of the Rings films,
(12:06):
interpreted them.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
You know.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
For instance, Frodo in the Lord of the Rings films
is about in his twenties, maybe thirties and twenties, but
in the book on his journey, he's in his fifties.
It's quite a different take, right, he's so young the
in the film.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
And that's fine.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
That's the interpretive, assessed interpretation that Peter Jackson wanted. That's
the story he wanted to tell. And it's fine, but
I'm engaging the book. I'm not engaging the material that
came after the book. I'm not engaging the Selmrillion. I'm
engaging the Tolkien's letters. You know, well, in Tolkien Letter
thirty four he explains this. No, we're engaging just the text.
And I'll explain why as we go in our episodes.
Why we're engaging just a text. I'm not going to say, well,
(12:45):
you know orcs. You know, according to Tolkien letter and
according to Lord of the Rings film, they're you know,
they're like corrupted elves. No, I'm not engaging that because
that's not in the Lord of the Rings book or
the Hobbit. It wasn't even Tolkien's mind until much much later,
when he was trying to ration out some of the
challenges his own book posed. Okay, but anyway, so the
(13:06):
next time, we're going to look at the Ring poem,
because the Ring poem describes a lot about what the
rings do, the rings of power, what the Ring does,
what the Lord of the Rings wanted to do, tells
you about elves, dwarves, and men, and it tells you
what the rings did to them. So we're gonna look
at the ring poem, and that tells you right away
(13:26):
about spiritual hierarchies.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
It's going to be great. And then after that we'll.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Look at the prologue. Now, the prologue for a lot
of people's super boring. For me, it can be super boring, right,
But the prologue it gives us. It's sort of the
historiography of the book The Lord Lord of the Rings.
It sets the frame, it does world building.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I've to be honest, the first time a lot of
times when I.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Read the book, I skipped the prologue when I was
a freshman in high school.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
The first time I tried reading The Lord of the Rings.
I think I tried reading it in junior high.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
But when I was a freshman is when I actually
was able to read it.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And I was like, what is one am I reading?
Speaker 2 (14:00):
I read the Hobbit and now I'm reading the prologue.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
This is terrible.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
You know, we're gonna look at the prologue because it
frames the rest of the book, and then we're gonna
look at early chapters. We're gonn look at Gandalf or
that providence, the Ring race, spiritual attacks, spiritual the effect
of the unseen realm on the characters in what is
going on in the narrative. We're gonna spend a whole chapter,
(14:25):
a whole episode looking at Tom Bombadill talk about nature, spirits,
nature deities. I can't wait. It's gonna be so interesting.
And the text will speak for itself, all right, the
text will speak for itself. We're gonna look at weather Top,
the spiritual battle on Weathertop, and there's a song that
is pivotal to the spiritual warfare that will not happen
that Weathertop when the Ring Race attack Photo and the Fellowship.
(14:48):
We're gonna look at the Karadras, the mountains when they
try to cross the mountains. We're gonna look at the
Moria Gate. Is that a sentient gate? Is there a
spirit there in the gate?
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Well, what the.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Texts say, we'll look at it that the creature that
attack them. Don't think of the creature like in the movie.
Think of the creatures as the text. As the text conveys,
there's a lot of spiritual stuff going on with that
creature attacks them at the Moria Gate. So anyway, as
as you see spiritual forces in Tolkien's work in The
(15:20):
Little of the Rings, we will be trained to see
spiritual forces in our own work and in scripture. I
have to say, studying with doctor Olson and how Tolkien
put together the Lord of the Rings and the frame
of the story help me read the Bible better, Okay,
(15:42):
And I'll explain that more as we go on, But
it did. It helped me become a better reader of
scripture pretty neat all right. So, this little mini season,
this holiday interlude, if you will, is an imitation. Like
Gandalf knocking on Bilbo's door, you step into a larger,
more enchanted reality. Next time we'll come back and we'll
(16:04):
look at the ring poem. So hope you engage this
and let me know what you think about it. If
you think it's completely stupid and irrelevant to the sier thing.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
That's fine.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
You can skip it, But I hope you don't skip it.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
It'd be fun, right, it'd be fun.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
All Right.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
We'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Thank you for listening to the seer Se podcast. Opening
and closing music is Sun by Jason Callahan. Hopri music
includes Just Around the World and Alta Hearing by Keela Camps.
Music and serierc podcasts are distributed in our Creative Commons
attribution non commercial note of it is four point zero
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