Easter

Easter:

This is the first Easter that has found me at home in three years.

When I was a boy, Easter was not something about which we made a big deal. My family were Christmas-oriented, and it is easy to see the allure of Christmas over Easter: it is easy to celebrate the birth of a beloved child, which is a natural time for joy unmixed by sorrow. On Easter, we focused on the 'coming of spring' aspects, as I recall: hunting eggs, and white dresses for the girls.

Easter is far more problematic as a holiday. For one thing, it requires a different kind of faith: not faith that a particular child might have been engendered by God for some purpose, but faith that a given man, condemned as a criminal and put to death, rose from the grave as a living God. Yet it is a claim that has quite a history: the number of myths along these lines, with holy weeks about the coming of spring, is formidable. Why this one, among them?

I have nothing to add to the words of better men, who have written on the subject with greater wisdom. The best that I can do is turn your attention to an old book review, by the famous "Spengler," on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin.

Tolkien knew far more about the pagan past than [T. S.] Eliot; as the great philologist of his time, he produced the first readable translation of "Beowulf", as well as seminal editions of the most important Anglo-Saxon classics. He loved the material more than any man living.... Readers who enjoyed The Lord of Rings as a work of fantasy (which it most surely is not) will find the present volume tough going, for it comes out of the world of Anglo-Saxon epic. As the editor reports, Tolkien originally cast it as poem in alliterative verse in the Anglo-Saxon fashion.

What did he want to say in that poem? You'll have to read the rest of the review -- or the book itself, if you prefer.

Or you may listen to the sound of what might almost be angels, or faerie. The greatest truth lies in beauty, I have heard.



Happy Easter, and a joyous spring. May God save this merry company, and all mankind.