On reading The Lord of the Rings

It was a great summer, 1969. I went to Woodstock, played folk music at local coffee shops, bought my first Santana album, and I read The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was a world-renown expert on languages. Having mastered Latin, Greek, medieval history, Gothic, and the sagas and language of Finland, Tolkien possessed a rare treasure trove of ancient symbols and myths to draw from in his story telling. Coming from the trenches of World War I and having lost many of his closest friends to the savagery of war, Tolkien also knew, in a personal sense, the meaning of heroism and the costs of conceding victory to evil. Out of this background, first The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings and his later stories sprung. The three books of The Lord of the Rings tell the story of the fellowship that was founded and guided by the wizard, Gandalf, to return the ring of power to the one place where it could be destroyed, thus saving the world from the evil Sauron who would stop at nothing to take control of the ring and wield its power over all. Countless years before, a set of rings had been forged and distributed amongst the elves, dwarves and humans. Unbeknownst to them, one ring had been forged to bind them all together, one that had the power to rule them all – this was the ring held by Sauron, but was lost during a fateful battle. Anyone who wore the ring risked becoming possessed and destroyed by its power. Eventually, the ring was lost and was thought gone forever. The story of the ring’s reappearance begins in The Hobbit and comes to its completion in the Ring trilogy. The Hobbit was written as a children’s tale. The Lord of the Rings tells a much darker story, one whose intensity and scope makes it less suitable for younger children and some pre-teens, but for the young at heart adult reader it tells an extraordinary adventure, filled with wonder and rich with emotional complexity. The first two films, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, were both directed with masterful vision by Peter Jackson. I have no doubt that Mr. Jackson will deliver an equally magnificent conclusion when The Return of the King opens on December 17. Woodstock was a musical and social event that presented me with some of my first experiences of the possibility that we might all one day be united in peace. At the age of nineteen, The Lord of the Rings revealed to me wonders of imagination and mythic qualities of good and evil, through its tales of hobbits and brave men in partnership with worldly dwarves and otherworldly elves, side by side, trying to save Middle-earth from certain domination. I remember well the mixture of joy and sadness that I felt when I had reached the end of the last page of the third book. I so wanted for there to be more – I wanted it all the more because of the fulfillment that the story had already given me. What is so special and made uniquely possible by our participation, becoming fully engrossed in the page by page reading of such masterworks as The Lord of the Rings, is a kind of direct engagement, a dialog of increasing revelations, insights and understandings, wherein our interactions with these works and their writers moves and inspires us to realize some of the best qualities in our own selves and each other. Why not give the gift of a great book to someone you love during this holiday season?

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