N
niceatheist
Guest
The difficulty always is with the more academic types that their brilliance isn’t a showy kind of genius. Yes, there were flamboyant geniuses; Newton was one of those (and also a pretty awful person), but Tolkien was a pretty normal, almost unbelievably normal academic. His faith was important to him, but he wasn’t a proselytizer (although he was disappointed Lewis rejoined the CofE, and didn’t convert to Catholicism). He was a family man, and about the most you can say about his marriage is that Edith at times felt a little lonely because Tolkien, in classic English tradition, loved to have a pint with his mates. He was a thorough first-half-of-the-20th century Englishman.
The brilliance came out in his writing and lectures, and that was who he was, a man who didn’t like to travel, who had felt at home in the halls of Oxford since his youth, raised a decent-sized family, and in the middle of it, wrote a couple of extraordinary books (and spent most of his life trying to finish the backstory) that give us a glimpse of the great mind, but he had no need or desire to flaunt it, and indeed found the fame a little befuddling (until his publisher finally hired him a secretary).
The brilliance came out in his writing and lectures, and that was who he was, a man who didn’t like to travel, who had felt at home in the halls of Oxford since his youth, raised a decent-sized family, and in the middle of it, wrote a couple of extraordinary books (and spent most of his life trying to finish the backstory) that give us a glimpse of the great mind, but he had no need or desire to flaunt it, and indeed found the fame a little befuddling (until his publisher finally hired him a secretary).
