A cock crowed...

The drums rolled louder. Fires leaped up. Great engines crawled across the field; and in the midst was a huge ram, great as a forest-tree a hundred feet in length, swinging on mighty chains. Long had it been forging in the dark smithies of Mordor, and its hideous head, founded of black steel, was shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf; on it spells of ruin lay. Grond they named it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old. Great beasts drew it, orcs surrounded it, and behind walked mountain-trolls to wield it.

But about the Gate resistence still was stout, and there the knights of Dol Amroth and the hardiest of the garison stood at bay. Shot and dart fell thick; siege-towers crashed or blazed suddenly like torches. All before the walls on either side of the Gate the ground was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain; yet driven as by a madness more and more came up.

Grond crawled on. Upon its housing no fire would catch; and though now and again some great beast that hauled it would go mad and spread stamping run among the orcs inumerable that guarded it, their bodies were cast aside from the path and others took their place.

Grond crawled on. The drums rolled wildly. Over the hills of slain a hideous shape appeared: a horseman, tall, hooded, cloaked in black. Slowly, trampling the fallen, he rode forth, heeding no longer any dart. He halted and held up a long pale sword. And as he did so a great fear fell on all, defender and foe alike; and the hands of men drooped to their sides, and no bow sang. For a moment all was still.

The drums rolled and rattles. With a vast rush Grond was hurled forward by huge hands. It reached the Gate. It swung. A deep boom rumbled through the City like thunder running in the clouds. But the doors of iron and posts of steel withstood the stroke.

Then the Black Captain rose in his stirrups and cried aloud in a dreadful voice, speaking in some forgotten tongue words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone.

Thrice he cried. Thrice the great ram boomed. And suddenly upon the last stroke the Gate of Gondor broke. As if stricken by some blasting spell it burst asunder: there was a flash of searing lightning, and the doors tumbled in riven fragments to the ground.

In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.

''You cannot enter here,'' said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ''Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!''

The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.

''Old fool!'' he said. ''Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!'' And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.
(J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter IV).

So much repetition here, suspense and symbol. Grond, the weapon in the hands of Morgoth in ancient times, the head of which is shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf, pitted against the cock, a Petrine symbol, a symbol of vigilance and hope in the Resurrection. The Lord of the Nine Riders, who fills the soldiery of the Dark Lord with fear and madness, set against Gandalf, white and without fear, here described as ''steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen,'' which was the ancient ''silent street,'' and buriel place of the Kings of Gondor. This is not the only place where Gandalf is described in this curious way - at the end of Book III it is said that Pippin had a strange feeling, that he and Gandalf were as still as stone, seated upon the statue of a running horse, as the world passed them by. What does this say of Gandalf and Shadowfax? Though not cut in stone, it reminds me of the melancholy expression of Christ on the Rood Loft of Binham Priory, Christ and the Saints who presided over the solemn celebration of Liturgy aforetime, and still, though defaced and long since gone into the grave, at least watch through the rude carvings of verses from an English bible. Gandalf kept vigilance, urged the men of Gondor to put off their fear of the dark, ''wherever he came men's hearts would lift again, and the winged shadows pass from memory,'' it is said of him. It was not to preserve the mere lives of Men that Gandalf went down into Minas Tirith, and stood alone before the face of a terrible captain, but to defend the Tradition and Memory of Númenor, in both the Living and the Dead; the living who were free men and true, inheritors of a regal Tradition, and the men that slept in Rath Dínen, around which the memory of that Tradition was woven, and fundamentally to defend them from enslavement to and worship of the Dark. How would Gandalf fare against the Lord of the Nine Riders who, during the Siege of Minas Tirith, was given by his Master an added demonic force and dominon? Maybe that is the wrong question. What if Gandalf had pursued the Black Captain from the Gate when he turned to meet the new challenge of his foes? What if Pippin had never come? Is it not telling that Gandalf went rather to the aid of Faramir than to the field of Pelennor? Ever the instruments of God are the small and simple in The Lord of the Rings! The cock heralds the coming of the dawn, described by Aragorn as ever the hope of Men; Pippin, as small as a pebble to cause an avalanche in the mountains, saved the line of the Stewards by calling upon Gandalf. It is sad that others died, that the Lady of Rohan was in the path of the Black Captain, but the Battle would have been more evil if Gandalf had pursued him into the field. Maybe the day would have been lost, and the hosts of Mordor victorious.
This is not an attempt to uncover Tolkien's own thoughts here at the time of writing in order to discern some pattern, least of all any obvious parallels with Christianity. This is just how the text speaks to me. I read the passage aloud to myself earlier and quailed at the words: ''all save one.'' My heart is now full of it.

Art: Ted Nasmith.

The Evil Breath...

''Fair as an Elf-child is Lalaith,'' said Húrin to Morwen; ''but briefer, alas! And so fairer, maybe, or dearer.'' And Túrin hearing these words pondered them, but could not understand them. For he had seen no Elf-children. None of the Eldar at that time dwelt in his father's lands, and once only had he seen them, when King Fingon and many of his lords had ridden through Dor-lómin and passed over the bridge of Nen Lalaith, glittering in silver and white.

But before the year was out the truth of his father's words were shewn; for the Evil Breath came to Dor-lómin, and Túrin took sick, and lay long in a fever and dark dream. And when he was healed, for such was his fate and the strength of life that was in him, he asked for Lalaith. But his nurse answered: ''Speak no more of Lalaith, son of Húrin; but of Urwen you must ask tidings of your mother.''

And when Morwen came to him, Túrin said to her: ''I am no longer sick, and I wish to see Urwen; but why must I not say Lalaith any more?''

''Because Urwen is dead, and laughter is stilled in this house,'' she answered. ''But you live, son of Morwen; and so does the Enemy who has done this to us.''

She did not seek to comfort him any more than herself; for she met her grief in silence and coldness of heart. But Húrin mourned openly, and he took up his harp and would make a song of lamentation; but he could not, and he broke his harp, and going out he lifted up his hand towards the North, crying: ''Marrer of Middle-earth, would that I might see you face to face, and mar you as my lord Fingolfin did!''

But Túrin wept bitterly at night alone, though to Morwen he never again spoke the name of his sister.
(J.R.R Tolkien, The Children of Húrin, chapter I).

Art: Ted Nasmith. It depicts Morgoth cursing Húrin and his kindred - as the Diabolos, ''master of the fates of Arda,'' as he described himself, the curse of Morgoth was unlike a ''curse'' in the commonly understood sense. Morgoth, as the origin of evil, is not invoking a higher (or lower, as the case may be) power, but intends to bring about the destruction of Húrin by the force of his own gigantic will, by ''designing'' the future of Húrin, mapping out his life, and making him look upon it, unable to hinder it. Of course, this actually took place after the events described, and Húrin got his wish, and saw the Dark Lord face to face. Maybe it was one of those things where we ought to beware of wishing for our heart's true desire, lest we end by getting it?

Sacrilege...

Imaginary conference with Mr John Hunwicke, a minister of the ''Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham,'' formerly Father John Hunwicke, priest of God in the Church of England. (As of now, in deference to my conviction that Roman orders are absolutely null and utterly void, I shall cease to refer to any Roman cleric by the sacerdotal title ''father'').

Mr Hunwicke, for forty years you believed yourself to be a validly ordained priest, is that correct? My question is, at what point did you cease to believe this, and why? Surely if Grace (which is not a comodity dispensed by clerics, even very important ones) exists outside the confines of the Roman church, which claims to be the True Church of Christ, was there any need of your ''re-ordination?'' Do your newfound Roman Catholic friends think anything at all of your lifelong ministry in the Church of England? And what would you say to them that claim that the quality of your old 'blog waned the closer you came to your conversion to the Roman church?

Answer me all that, and I'll shew you a green dog. Incidentally, a Roman priest admonished me yestereve that we ought all to rejoice in John Hunwicke's ordination to the Roman presbyterate. ''We'' ought? said I. The once great man has been deluded and manipulated by a gigantic fraud, seduced by the scarlet whore, whose mission seems to be to trample Tradition under foot. Wherefore, then, should we all rejoice at what is demonstrably sacrilege of the worst kind? Upon seeing such photos as these I felt just as I felt years ago when I read that Gay Rights activists had thrown used condoms onto the altar of a church in New York - disgusted.

Oh well, at least the Ordinariate has to give all that money back to the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament. As a friend said, ''That should finish the Ordinariate off nicely.'' May it please God!

I saw this photo here.

Churchianity...

Since Sunday I have been making a fuss about appropriate liturgical commemorations and proper Last Gospels. I even began the composition of a post about it, along the lines of: if you were an employee in a business and your line manager back checked your work and found that you hadn't done your job properly, you'd be in serious trouble; but then I thought, who cares? Just like in the manager's meeting I attended on Monday afternoon, which I spent annotating all the points raised with ''D B'' (don't bother) in various scripts, I shall just withdraw my support from churches that can't be bothered with Divine Service completely. What's the point in wasting one's breath upon people who don't want to understand? Maybe it's the tat value of a genuflexion at Et Verbum caro factum est that did it, or perhaps the extra few seconds saying a few prayers was too much for the congregation to bear, who knows?

As of now I shall restrict attendance at Eucharistic services to the three Great Feasts of the year, and Holy Week as my services are required. That way I shall be considerably less scandalised, and therefore less miserable, for the duration of this sojourn in the wilderness.

A fine priest...

This splendid photo is of Fr Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, 1874-1959, a prominent Anglican Papalist, who was from 1922 unto his death rector of St Magnus the Martyr at London Bridge (which he beautified extensively). Coeval with the great Dr Adrian Fortescue, Fr Fynes-Clinton was very interested in the Eastern churches, and in the spirit of his catholicism re-founded the Fraternity of Our Lady de Salve Regina in 1922. There is a reasonable wikipedia article on his life here. I am privileged to know a few good men who knew Fr Fynes-Clinton personally.

Papa loquitur...

I thought this was funny!

By the way, the C.S Lewis text to which I referred (I think) in the last post is: Homo post-Christianus non similis homini pre-Christiano. Tantum distant ut vidua a virgine: nihil commune est nisi absentia sponsi: sed magna differentia intra absentiam sponsi venturi et sponsa amissi! (The Latin Letters of C.S Lewis, no.23). Perhaps I should have substituted the word ''whore'' for ''widow,'' though. In hindsight it would have worked better; I am not, after all, interested in or experienced in other religions than Christianity, and the former has a nasty, misleading connotation.

I am at this time re-reading The History of Middle-earth in anticipation of the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit. Perhaps this is not the best way forward, since The Hobbit was not at first conceived as part of the history of Middle-earth - one of the reasons Christopher Tolkien refused to compile a ''history of The Hobbit.''

Updates...

Hullo readers,

As some of you may have noticed (notwithstanding the dramatic fall in my stats) I have given the 'blog a makeover, in some ways to better reflect my present inferior circumstances. Well, post-Christian man is hardly the same as pre-Christian man, is he? I feel like a whore (as any apostate would) if I'm honest, even if my conscience (trained to the domination of...things) is a nagging old lady and puts me off breakfast. Anyway, if any of you use Facebook I have created a page for Liturgiae Causa, which I shall use on a semi-regular basis to post updates and whatever else I feel is apt to the renewal of things liturgical.

Please like my page :)

Sixty Glorious Years!

I'm going to have to keep this brief, as I am giving the 'blog a rest (for a while), but the matter is too important not to say anything.

It is my belief that Our Sovereign Lady Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is the best lady in Europe (if not the world). She quickens in me a sense of piety and devotion which no liturgy, no sermon, no bishop has ever bestowed. She is certainly the last Christian symbol of British government, for which even people who despise the Royal Family (a fair number of Roman Catholics) ought to be grateful. My family come from a region of the United Kingdom where two very different figures, The Queen and the pope, are as much adored in one community as they are reviled in the other. In fact, both my parents are Jacobites (a position which doesn't make much sense to me), although they did go to Epsom Derby on Saturday. But I look to my maternal grandmother (a communicant member of the Church of Ireland), who has much cordial affection for The Queen, and know by her wisdom and example who are the real enemies of the Church - namely them that despise The Queen and the Monarchic institution. Royal Unction is as much a sacrament as the Holy Eucharist, and kingship is the only legitimate form of Christian government. It is as Tolkien said, ''δημοκρατία was not in Greek a word of approval but was nearly equivalent to 'mob rule'; and...Greek Philosophers did not approve of it,'' (Letters. no.94). (Tolkien believed in unconstitutional monarchy by the way). This is not going to be a treatise de monarchia (for which Lord knows I am not qualified), but as someone who believes in Monarchy, Aristocracy, Monasticism and the Family, which together form the foundation of a good Christian society, I thank God to have been born in England and rejoice to be a subject of The Crown. Sixty years of fidelity to God and her people! She is the only thing that stands in the way of tyranny.

I commit Her Majesty to the care of St Edward the Confessor, patron saint of the Royal Family, and invoke on Her all the temporal and spiritual blessings in The Lord. God save The Queen!

Two years later...

Well, well, Liturgiae Causa is over two years old. I had quite forgotten, having lost all interest in Liturgy, and polemics. I have had just over 93,000 ''hits,'' according to my sitemeter, and 47 followers, which is more than I had expected. I am genuinely flattered that people think I have anything worthwhile to say. Presently, I think I have nothing to say. Maybe, for example, the fact that the Authorized Version is not an authorized translation for the Ordinariate, that hosts of people see nothing wrong with celebrating St Philip Neri instead of the Pentecost Vigil, and that the papacy still exists actually all make perfect sense, and I am just mistaken, or maybe Christianity is a load of rubbish? But no...I had two posts in preparation, which I have since abandoned. One, about C.S (''Patrimony'') Lewis, containing a few choice quotes by Lewis about the Roman church from his book on prayer Letters to Malcolm, and Tolkien's unpublished The Ulsterior Motive; the other about halal meat in the British food industry, in which I wrote unashamedly that I think Islam is one of the great evils of this world; but it can all go hang. Religion undoubtedly brings out the worst in people.

I have lost my faith, and I am not interested in Liturgy anymore.

From W.H. Auden...

Thanks to a friend of mine. W.H. Auden was very friendly with J.R.R Tolkien, and was one of the more supportive critics of The Lord of the Rings, when it was not very fashionable to be so. I wonder if Tolkien knew of Auden's choice of lifestyle? If he did, he didn't make a fuss about it, or simply cut him off (which seems to be the typical Roman Catholic reaction to it)...

''From high places...

...it is easy to fall low.'' Thus spake Sador, a servant in the house of Húrin, to the boy Túrin, who, after the death of his sister Urwen, asked after the manner of the fate and history of Men.

It is very apposite for our time, I daresay, and I have used that quote before. As C.S Lewis said, post-Christian man is as far removed from pre-Christian man as whores are from widows. I digress. But, how I grieve for the great Fr Hunwicke, feeling for his shame! It seems that, after being treated abysmally by the Roman Catholic church, he has agreed to give a talk for the Latin Mass Society, who are holding a one day conference on Saturday 9th June. There are several speakers, one of whom I have never heard of, and no subjects are given, but it will probably be the usual drivel - that the Ordinariate can serve only to quicken the barren wasteland of Latin Rite liturgical life (with similar hopes for the $$PX), that we all love the liturgical books of 1962, that Benedict XVI is the greatest man who ever lived, and blah, blah, blah. Heaven forbid that they cease this grotesque charade and face the facts!

The liturgical books of 1962 need no explanation here, having been the shibboleth of Liturgiae Causa for these two years. The Ordinariate is in a similar vein - with just as much pretence, historic revision, etc, as Summorum Pontificum. The pope's obsession with the $$PX is certainly telling. John Zuhlsdorf often calls Benedict XVI the ''pope of Christian unity.'' If by ''unity'' he means some sort of relativistic fudge, where a variegation of traditions exist side by side having only their shared communion with the occupant of a certain bishoprick in common, and brought about by aggressive proselytism, then I think he is right. On this point no doubt Roman Catholic apologists would bring up my very own objections, and say: ''well, you spend half your time criticizing Ultramontanism, saying that ''catholicity'' is not synonymous with ''uniformity;'' now you seem to be objecting to precisely the opposite of that. Are our uniate cousins not in possession of a venerable complexity of traditions and devotions, and does not the pope protect them from Latinization?'' Well, he might, but that is not the point. In terms of Western Christians, what do Anglo-Catholics have in common with the $$PX? Absolutely nothing! This is not so much about the externals of Divine Service as cultural and psychological factors. Christians of the Anglican tradition are very different. I can hardly imagine Richard Williamson adding the Sermons of +Lancelot Andrewes to his library because his lord pope is suddenly enthusiastic about Anglicans anymore than I can imagine anyone like the good Fr Hunwicke taking much notice of some ill-informed tract published by the $$PX on the heresies of the Prayer Book of the Church of England (which itself is far more catholic and traditional than the liturgy celebrated eagerly by the author, I doubt not. St Joseph the Worker is not in the Book of Common Prayer. If Rome took Anglicanism seriously, maybe she would look to the Prayer Book kalendar of saints days and see how many discrepancies there are now between that and her own bastardised kalendar, which was before, in many ways, consonant with the Prayer Book). Or maybe, in time, the pope might say something like: ''you are in communion with us whether you like it or not,'' and we can watch a host of longed for (on my part) internal schisms come about.

To come back to Fr Hunwicke, perhaps Rome's very real ancestral disdain for the Church of England is seen most clearly in her refusal to even give him even the honorific title of ''father,'' or ''reverend.'' Now, I am ignorant of much that I ought to know, as a catholic and as a person, but I had hitherto always conceived of conversion as entailing some sort of ''prodigal son'' scenario, and that all the inconveniences of conversion were thrust upon one by people and institutions outside the visible confines of that church or faith community. It seems to me to be quite the opposite with Fr Hunwicke, and that maybe his newfound religion finds him dangerous, or in further need of more draughts of the Ultramontane drug. Who knows? I just find this whole matter very grievous.

Orate pro eo.

Art: Ted Nasmith. A sketch depicting the child Lalaith (Urwen), sister of Túrin, before the Evil Breath came out of Angband. ''Lalaith'' is Sindarin for ''laughter.''

Worthy to be followed...

That if thy right eye cause thee to stumble, pull it out, and cast it from thee; for it speedeth to thee, that one of thy members perish, than that all thy body go into hell. Matthew 5:29.