Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

With a tip of the hat to Rod Dreher, I find myself very intrigued by English folk/roots duo Show of Hands. Rather than attempt to describe them when I’m still getting familiar with their music myself, check out this song, “Roots,” for yourself:

It’s interesting encountering this at a time when I’m rereading The Lord of the Rings for the first time since a number of things began to clarify my own perspective on, well, what we might broadly describe as the things worth preserving (to say nothing of a first trip to England). I now see, as I never could before, Tolkien’s idealization of the English countryside and the attendant way of life — as well as his Catholic faith — as the protagonists every bit as much as Frodo and Sam. Tolkien understood very well the sentiment expressed in the line from “Roots,” “Without our stories or our songs, how will we know where we come from?” His particularly English mythopoeia was, however much of a retrofit as it may have been, his own reclamation effort on that front.

Anyway, if Show of Hands is available via iTunes US, I will be exploring further.