This newsletter isn’t meant to be a journal, a confessional, or anything personal. But I’ve been adrift, lately. I have three kids. I’ve gained weight. For weeks, I’ve been unable to read at any length without falling asleep. I also work full-time in a “semi-urban library environment,” which is a euphemism for “we are a semi-hub for drugs and homelessness.” I love this job, but like anyone in service work of any kind, the grind grates. Callousness seeps in.
Unfortunately, one lesson of adulthood is that your values are not embedded in your temperament. Compassion above all, in my opinion. But I am often the (fair, respectful) iron hand of the library. “Knock, knock,” I tap on the men’s bathroom door. “A metallic burning smell was reported and I’m required to check in on you.” I am lied to. I am yelled at. I am helping yet another patron figure out how to overcome the never-ending digital hurdles between themselves and a job at Wal-Mart, their tax return, the aid which the state promises but withholds from anyone who can’t survive the labyrinth of clicks erected as a punishment for needing aid.
Anyway. This post is somehow, impossibly, about Lord of the Rings.
I recently wrote a “15 Books in 15 Minutes” blurb that I’ve seen other literary bloggers do in the past. Not, to be clear, that I’m a blogger. I’m just bored. I tried the experiment while at my library, sticking to the time limit even as I was interrupted with questions ranging from the simple to the complex. I knew immediately I should put Lord of the Rings on the list. But I didn’t, for some reason. Over the course of my life, there’s probably no book I’ve thought about more, except maybe the Bible. Not intellectually or rigorously, perhaps, but Middle-earth is a consistent reference point.
I’m not especially interested in why I didn’t include it. Time panic, mostly, and a desire to surprise myself, probably. The books I listed were fine, even true to this moment in my life. Maybe I gave Annie Dillard too much credit. But the result is that I’ve been thinking about Lord of the Rings even more than usual.
These days, I often feel that enchantment is somehow born of ignorance. Parenthood can be very disenchanting, for example. The mythic landscape, good or bad, of your own childhood is revealed as more or less happenstance. We lived at such a place and for such reasons and attended such schools because our parents found themselves painted into a corner of opportunity, values, and temperament they rarely had much choice in devising. There’s a difference between understanding this intellectually and experiencing it from the other side of the magic curtain.
And yet Lord of the Rings, despite all its imitators and adaptations and misinterpretations, is enchantment for adults. I discovered them young enough I can’t guarantee I’d find either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings as captivating as an adult-only read. But in re-reading Tolkien, I’m not drawn to the fantasy in the same way I was at age twelve. For one thing, did you ever notice how everyone correctly predicts/prophesies what might happen, good or bad, and yet that foresight helps the Fellowship… not one bit?1 Elrond has a foreboding feeling about Pippin and Merry, but still they go with the Ring and—Elrond was right!—the Shire is burned.
Adulthood, and parenting, is often this sort of Pyrrhic correctness on repeat. I maintain our democratic policies on library bathroom usage, I block the tile gaps where drugs might be hidden, I train employees on procedure and process—the drugs are still here, the non-using patrons are still lost in our increasing digital abyss. Merry and Pippin should stay home? Yes. But reality is mostly indifferent to foresight.2
Tolkien is never as cheap and simple as all the summaries of Tolkien. His enchantment doesn’t depend on ignorance or escapism. I don’t finish Lord of the Rings and wish I could just start all over and, you know, live in Middle-earth. Tolkien may have inspired, but he didn’t create, a literary theme park. The power of Lord of the Rings is that the more you know—about languages, about Nordic myths, about regional British accents, about different kinds of trees—the more wonderful the world.
I’m not suggesting that Tolkien is a cure-all for my listlessness, my sense (at times) that my efforts are being wasted in most areas of my life. Almost the opposite. Tolkien has withstood my general, and my acute, disenchantment. I have become a literary snob, a father, a librarian obsessed with the local problems of our damnable (often corporate) bureaucracies. I don’t even read Tolkien to forget the atrocities in Israel and Gaza, or the ones we funded in Saudi Arabia and Yemen before we funded those in Palestine. Tolkien survives living in the world. Tolkien, impossibly, is almost anti-escapism. If you read him well, he draws you further into the complexity, the paradox, of such goodness among such horror and waste. The dead are legion. The world is burning.3 The hobbits are correct to love their gardens.
Maybe Tolkien was too big a symbol for my list, a cultural presence who provokes too many reactions. Whatever the case, I think about him all the time.
I love you all.
I’d like to write an essay on this sometime.
I realize some people can’t even hear words like “Ents” and “elves” without flinching. One’s taste is one’s taste. I feel cheesy, almost glib, invoking Tolkien after mentioning any real-world horror, but that’s the point of this post: if you don’t mind the fantasy, Lord of the Rings is a force on behalf of reality.