Description
How do we live in dark and difficult times? There are lots of places that people look to answer those questions. One place I find wisdom is J.R.R. Tolkein’s classic story, The Lord of the Rings. In today’s episode how these stories became so much more than a fantasy escape, what they have to say about the role of stories in our lives, and the inspiration that I find for living through the darkness. This I Heart This, everyone. I’m Ben Lord. Let’s talk about what we love.
Helm’s Deep
In the fall semester of 2021, teaching was impossible. The isolation of the pandemic had been lonely, but it was nothing compared to the chaos of coming back to school. Students would scarcely talk to each other in person, but seemed incapable of turning off their phones. High school kids would buckle and claim mental exhaustion after writing a single paragraph. Dysregulated kids shouted obscenities in the hallway while our security officers patiently waited for them to calm down. Vandals flooded toilets and ripped mirrors off the wall.
At our faculty meetings, we talked about rebuilding a school culture, but it was a joke. Holding a field day or some socially distanced pep rally wasn’t going to fix this. I was hopelessly outmatched by the scope of my work and throttled by one emergency after another. Then, one fateful day in late October, I looked up from trying to cajole a student to put something . . . anything . . . on their paper, only to see that not a single person was doing the assignment. Not one. It was like the nightmare teaching scenario out of a movie.
Even in the miserable depths of my first year, I had never seriously considered quitting teaching. But I did that day. I was making no difference to anyone. And I could see no path forward. That night, instead of planning a new lesson, I sat morosely on the couch.
My family had been watching the Lord of the Rings movies, and feeling the futility of doing anything else, I agreed to watch with them even though it was a school night. I had seem them before, of course, but that night I was swept up in a way that I’d never been before or since. The utter hopelessness of the characters’ situations felt so much like my own. The fellowship had been broken. Merry and Pippin had been captured. King Theoden of Rohan had watched his country pillaged by monsters, its villages burning, its people turned into refugees. And now, holed up in Helm’s Deep, the final stronghold of his people, the walls were breached by a monstrous army, and they were about to be overrun. The people huddled in caves trying to console their frightened children while the battering rams of the enemies buckled the doors of the keep.
And Theoden, despairing, asks aloud, “What can men do against such reckless hate?”
I’ve never been in so much as a fistfight, but that night, I knew the king’s despair. I knew his helplessness. And tears welled up in my eyes because his question was the one playing over and over in my mind about my chaotic school. “What can anyone possibly do? What can I do?” My questions and Theoden’s were the same.
And so, when Aragorn, Ranger of the North, answered, it cut directly to my own heart.
“Ride out and meet them,” he said.
The enemy hordes were so numerous they looked like a boiling swarm of insects. Theoden knew it is suicide. But he looked Aragorn in the eye. You could see his resolve returning, and he said, “For death and glory, the horn of Helm Hammerhand will sound in the deep one last time.”
And right there I knew what I was being called to do. . . . I didn’t know whether it would make any difference to go back into that classroom tomorrow and try again to inspire some teenagers to care about science or each other or even themselves. But I did know that I would rather be the one who dared to ride out and meet them, than the one who remained huddled in the keep.
The Shadow of the Past
When I was eleven years old, I found my dad’s old, musty-smelling boxed set of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings on some shelves in the garage. It took me three tries and four years to finish reading them. I’m not the only person who struggled through them. Tolkien was a passionate student of old English, and in many ways his writing is reminiscent of Beowulf. His voice is formal. His prose is full of long discursive passages. Long interludes of lore and song interrupt the story.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t love it. For a good portion of my early teens, I was obsessed with the details and mysteries of Middle Earth. I loved the meticulous world-building, the hints at mysterious histories that never get fully explained, the enduring themes of good and evil, the fact that he invented several languages, complete with their own grammars and scripts. And the fact that he single-handedly recreated the genre that we now call fantasy.
But mostly I loved the vibe. I wanted to live in Middle Earth, a place with its own problems, to be sure, but ones so different from the actual loneliness and insecurities of my own life. Inspired by Lord of the Rings, I became an avid player of Dungeons & Dragons and spent long hours rolling dice and dreaming of what it might be like to have the magic and wisdom of a wizard like Gandalf the Grey.
In an article for the Guardian many years ago called “Why I Hate Lord of the Rings,” Jon Dennis writes that, “You won’t find many [Fans of Tolkien’s] working to make the real world a better place . . . “They are just too nerdish to participate in real life – they’re more likely to be found lurking in one of those shops selling candles, incense, fake skulls and other crappy knick-knacks which help turn your home into some dreadful grotto. Or playing Dungeons and Dragons while listening to the collected works of Rick Wakeman.”
And while it might not be flattering to admit, I won’t deny that he wasn’t far off the mark for me. The shy and nerdy kid I was often found the real world too confusing and difficult to bear. And in fantasy, I could have the strength and courage and certainty that I never seemed to be able to muster in the painfully real halls of junior high.
I really did read the Lord of the Rings to escape. But escape is not the only thing to be found in these stories. Today, I find myself returning to them for something else–for the resolve and courage to meet the seemingly impossible challenges of the real world.
Where before I saw mostly swords and sorcery, I now see themes of loss and homesickness and companionship and folly. Where before I saw heroes and chivalry, I now see characters full of all-too-human doubts and fears. Where before I saw monsters, I now see the all-too-human specters of fascism and hate and hunger for power.
Like Frodo, my own times are beset by a darkness threatening the home that I love and forces so powerful that it seems inevitable that they will win. Like Frodo, I often feel like the only chance that the free peoples have of success is to unite in common cause, but such an alliance seems impossible in light of their histories of mistrust and petty betrayals. And like Frodo, I feel uselessly small and wishing that these shadows “need not have happened in my time.”
And Gandalf counsel seems so relevant when he replies, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
And this is why I still read the Lord of the Rings today . . . because it gives me insight into how to live in dark and difficult times . . . how to decide what to do with the time that is given me.”
Tolkien would be the first to say that he wasn’t writing with any kind of moral in mind. While he, himself, lived in difficult times, and while he composed much of the story during World War II, he vociferously denied that Lord of the Rings was an allegory.
Still, he did hope that his readers would find in it something applicable to their lives. At the end of the Two Towers when Sam and Frodo are stuck on the precipitous stairs of Cirith Ungol, trying to sneak into Mordor, the heart of darkness itself, Frodo laments that everything in their path seems cursed. And Sam answers,
“ . . . we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t . . .”
And Frodo said, “that’s the way of a real tale . . .You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know.”
When I was young and wanted to escape from a suburb where I had few friends, I missed the power of this passage. Like Sam, I really thought of adventures (and adventure stories) as antidotes to what was dull and meaningless. But in this passage, Tolkien risks pulling us readers out of the story’s trance to explicitly point out what the story is doing, what the story is for. I watch Sam and Frodo almost playfully thinking of themselves as heroes, something I, as a reader, can so clearly see that they are. And I can see the light of hope that it gives them. So powerful is that light that even in Morder, even weighted down by the Ring, Frodo “laughed, a long, clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in that place since Sauron came to Middle Earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening.”
The tales that really matter, matter because they are windows onto ourselves. They make me mindful, just for a moment, that I am living a story too. They put me in the hero’s place. I step into their courage, and, simultaneously, see my own. When I find something beautiful in the hero’s courage in those tales, I can see how beautiful that same courage might also be in mine.
In the climactic scene of the Lord of the Rings, Sam and Frodo are spent. Everything hangs in the balance, and everything hangs on them. The only ones who can save the world are the smallest people in it. Like it does in the real world now. Like it always has. Frodo, weighted down by his burden, cannot go on. There is no one who can understand how the Ring has hollowed him out, left him empty. Not even Sam. Like our anxieties, our despairs, our addictions, and our pains, no one can carry Frodo’s burden for him. He is utterly alone at the end of the world.
And most painful of all, Sam knows it. Sam, who loves Frodo, who has always loved Frodo, who would have gladly given his life for him, can do nothing to relieve that burden. And so, he does the only thing he can. He pulls Frodo onto his back and carries him.
Every story ends with its climactic choice. Where the hero must face his greatest fear, see with true insight, and decide to sacrifice his old self. But when they finally arrive at the Cracks of Mount Doom, Frodo fails. There, overlooking the yawning pit of fire, instead of dropping the Ring into the flame, Frodo claims it as his own. The Eye of Sauron turns upon him, and all seems lost. The Ring is only destroyed because of the mercy they have shown to the deceitful creature, Gollum, who had tried to kill them several times and nearly succeeded who betrays them once again, bites the finger and the Ring from Frodo’s hand and tumbles into the pit with it.
So what do the tales that really matter have to say? “How will I deal with these dark times?”
Stuck with burdens we did not choose to bear. In dark days we wish had never come.
We ride out and meet them. For death and glory. Despite the impossible odds. We hold true to our friends and forgive them when they fail, as all of us someday will. And when we cannot walk on our own, we carry each other.
Outro
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I Heart This is written, edited, and produced by me, Ben Lord. Our logo was designed by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Our website is iheartthispodcast.com. Follow us on FaceBook at I Heart This Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And, as always, Be kind. Be curious, and be thankful.