Today happens to be one of my favorite nerdy holidays, Hobbit Day. September 22 is the birthday of hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This has become a day to celebrate Tolkien’s writings as well as the simple living of a hobbit from the Shire. It’s also an opportunity to partake in second breakfast. :)
If you have known me for any significant length of time, you know that I am a huge Tolkien fan. I have clothes, jewelry, and home décor that nod to the stories, and I know a couple elvish greetings. But what I want to talk about today is why The Lord of the Rings captured my imagination as a child and why I still love the extensive mythology that Tolkien created. The simple answer is that Tolkien’s work is a dim reflection of the great story that God has written through history.
Tolkien did not originally set out to write a masterpiece of storytelling. He was first and foremost a philologist, a studier of language. He enjoyed studying the history and origins of the English language and began creating languages of his own. But he didn’t settle with merely creating languages, he wanted to explore the evolution of language over time as peoples move toward and away from others. This resulted in an extensive mythology detailed in the well-known The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as works published posthumously such as The Silmarillion and The Histories of Middle-Earth.
Though one can enjoy The Lord of the Rings on its own, it becomes richer when one has also read Tolkien’s other works detailing the history leading up to those stories. There are countless moments throughout the trilogy that refer back to what happened in previous ages. Sam Gamgee makes an interesting observation as he and Frodo are discussing their journey: “Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?' 'No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. `But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.'” Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship are a small part of the greater story.
“The Gospels contain a fairy story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality.’ There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical [sic] men have accepted as true on its own merits.”
He goes on to write, “It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be 'primarily' true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed.”
This is why stories such as The Lord of the Rings appeal so strongly to me. Smaller stories that weave together into greater stories give such a rich picture of how the world works. We all affect each other in seemingly small ways that ultimately tell a greater story. And not only is God the Great Storyteller, He entered into his own story as a character in order to redeem us. What story could be better than that?
--Concetta Swann
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