PWJ: S3E45 – AH – “After Hours” with Tea with Tolkien

Continuing “Tolkien Month”, I sat down with Kaitlyn from the Tea With Tolkien podcast to talk about Hobbit Spirituality…

S3E45: “After Hours” with “Tea With Tolkien” (Download)

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Time Stamps

00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:12 – Welcome
00:32 – Biographical Information
01:09 – Drink-of-the-week
03:00 – Quote-of-the-week
03:53 – More biographical information
05:05 – Tolkien Letter #213
06:07 – First contact with Tolkien
07:55 – Favourite LOTR chapter
10:59 – What is Tea With Tolkien?
13:39 – “Thirty Days In The Shire”
15:06 – What has surprised you?
16:17 – How has it changed your appreciation?
18:36 – Intro to Hobbit Spirituality
21:23 – A Hobbit’s Guide To Lent
22:25 – Lembas & The Eucharist
23:16 – The Hobbit Liturgical Year
24:22 –To Morning Through the Shadows
27:08 – God in Middle Earth
29:21 – Tolkien movies
30:48 – Amazon Prime series
34:01 – Tolkien Quiz
35:42 – “Last Call” Bell
35:52 – Tea With Tolkien website

YouTube Version

After Show Skype Session

No Skype Session today!

Show Notes

• I was joined by Kaitlyn Facista from the Tea With Tolkien podcast:

Kaitlyn is a Catholic convert. She lives with her family in the Midwest. She is a wife to a Alex, and a mother to four babies at home and two in heaven. She is a hobbit at heart. You can usually find her with an iced coffee in her hand and a baby on her hip. Hobbies include thinking about Tolkien (obviously), making friends on twitter, and hanging out with Our Lord in her parish Adoration chapel. …not to mention blogging and podcasting at “Tea With Tolkien”

Biographical details of Kaitlyn Facista

• I was drinking PG Tips out of my “Lattes with Lewis” mug which I bought from the Tea With Tolkien website. Kaitlyn was drinking an iced latte. I told her the story of how I surprised by girlfriend/fiancée with Kaitlyn’s mugs:

• The quote-of-the-week came from a Letter #213:

“I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”

Letter from JRR Tolkien to Deborah Webster (25th Oct 1958)

• I asked Kaitlyn to share a few more details about herself.

• Kaitlyn explained the background to the quote-of-the-week, explaining that Deborah Webster was researching Tolkien and asked him to tell her about himself.

• Kaitlyn first came across Tolkien through the Peter Jackson movies and then jumped into the books.

• Daniel Cox asked for Kaitlyn’s favourite chapter of The Lord of the Rings. She said that it was The Field of Cormallen. We spoke about Tolkien’s understanding of “eucatastrophe”:

“I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary ‘truth’ on the second plane (….) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.“

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #89

• Kaitlyn explained that Tea With Tolkien is really a community which began as a blog, then developed into a reading group and now it is also an occasional podcast.

• I asked Kaitlyn to tell us about her book “30 days in the Shire”? She explained she had also written “To Middle-Earth and Back Again”.

• Another listener, Laura Lee, wanted to know what was the most unexpected thing Kaitlyn encountered in pursuing this project. Kaitlyn said that it was probably the number of friends she would make.

• I asked how Tea with Tolkien has changed her own appreciation of The Professor? She replied that she appreciates nature more and thinks about Tolkien’s works more.

Kaitlyn recommended that I read Tolkien’s Letters. I referenced something which Tolkien wrote to his son about the Eucharist:

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. …. There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

J.R.R. Tolien, Letter #43

• A continued theme in Kaitlyn’s work is “Hobbit spirituality” so I asked her to explain it in more detail. Among other things, Kaitlyn spoke about Frodo’s “fait”, which was an allusion to Mary’s submission to God’s will at the Annunication:

…dixit autem Maria ecce ancilla Domini fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.

Luke 1:38

I referenced several podcast episodes she had recorded, including the following:

Episode 12: A Hobbit’s Guide to Lent
Episode 9: Lembas & The Eucharist
Episode 3: December 25, The Ring Goes South
Episode 16: To Morning Through the Shadows (On Good Friday, Miscarriage, and The Light We Cannot See)

• Listener Michael Havens asked where God and religion are in Middle Earth. She spoke about providence and the book The Messiah Comes To Middle Earth

• I discussed the Middle Earth movies, as well as the upcoming Amazon Prime series.

• As will all of the other guests in “Tolkien Month”, I gave Kaitlyn the “This vs. That” Tolkien Quiz.

• You can find Kaitlyn at TeaWithTolkien.com. She is also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.