This is not an essay about Lord of the Rings, about Tolkien, about theological engagements with Tolkien or literature or anything like that. It is simply a story about what happened when I tried, again, to learn to read stories. Any observations I make are simply my own encounter with a great book that I have never before read and do not need to be taken as any more than that.
Already in the Prologue I am dropped into a world I have never known; oddly enough, I feel comfortable here. My friend Chris gave me some advice before I began reading. Fantasy and world-building books, he said, require a different kind of engagement, one quite different from reading for academic study. While I often take notes and track an author’s argument or main points, making such lists of Tolkien might leave me frustrated. This, as far as I can understand it, is because world-building books drop you in the middle of a new place without orienting you to it fully. The world is revealed as you live in it a bit. For a reader with a control-streak, this could be frustrating.
For me, after nearly two years of disorientation, it felt strangely comforting. Tolkien is of course an excellent writer but not the kind who tries very hard. His prose is clear and direct; he is often funny; he wastes few words with rhetorical flourishes.
The Prologue drops me in the middle of the Shire, a place with notable prehistory. The history of the Shire begins in the year 1601 of the Third Age, when the Fallhoide brothers pass the Bridge of the Stonebrows and found this place the Hobbits now call home. Tolkien writes,
“The Hobbits named it the Shire, as the region of the authority of their Thain, and a district of well-ordered business; and there in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk. They forgot or ignored what little they had ever known of the Guardians, and of the labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire. They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it (5).”
The Shire is a place that is terribly easy to love, even as we know we will not stay long. The way the Hobbits feel about the Shire is how I feel about parenting young children, about my own fleeting youth, about the family home I remember from my childhood with longing broaching into grief. Good things now lost to us are perhaps the most familiar refrain; the Shire is all of these things at a glance. The Hobbits were “sheltered, but… had ceased to remember it”. They did not realize that their comfort and shelter were built upon the existence of another world.
But the funny thing about the Shire and the Hobbits who live there is that, although likable, although the source of great longing, the things that make them likable are not necessarily good things.
Hobbits are funny creatures. Their bodies are sturdy and functional, if somewhat poorly designed (much early attention to the utility of hair on the feet, natch). They are tough and somewhat utilitarian; “they were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them” (5). They could survive poor-handling and worse weather in a way that was not revealed by their “bellies and well-fed faces” (6). (New Englanders, perhaps!) They love gifts and food (especially food), they love parties.
They are collectors of mathoms, of weapons and tools, useful implements that they have little use for but keep around just in case. They are not war-like creatures, but this is mostly because there have not been any wars. They have no use for war.
They are, to put it squarely, somewhat lazy. Economical but somewhat dim, bon vivants but too naieve to know the goods with which they’ve been entrusted.
This question of what is of “good use”; whether it is mathoms or warring or giving presents instead of receiving them for birthdays- this seems quite consequential to the Hobbits. Put another way, Hobbits seem to be those who put things to good use. These traits of economy and orderliness square up against the clear sense, already, that there is little use for a Hobbit. They are simply creatures who love home and its comforts, but they do not do much of anything, nor does their time have much sense of a future to it. There is not much to look forward to, besides re-giving gifts and having yet another birthday party.
There is nothing wrong with the world in which they live; nothing at all. In fact, there are only hints, in the Prologue, that there is any other world. The Hobbits lived in burrows or holes in the ground, having believed that they had always lived there (6). But they have not always lived there.
The first hint is the mention of the Sea.
The second is the first mention of the ring.
The Sea is of course often in literature and myth that site of great unrest, of encounters with life and death and the limits of human control (one thinks, or at least I think, immediately of Mark 4 and the coupling of Genesis’ myths of chaos and Revelation 21). The Hobbits, we are told, have never seen the sea, and can’t remember how to get there.
The ring appears already in the Prologue, and with it a significant instruction; this ring they are not to “make use” of; an odd thing for a Hobbit. They indeed “make use” of everything- even collecting things that one day might be needed! But perhaps they cannot be trusted, or perhaps there is no good use to put the ring to. Either way, clearly the ring is beyond the control of their home comforts.
I cannot write at this length about every chapter, I know- but there was a truth in the Prologue I wanted to suss out a bit. It is this question about pre-history, about memory and longing and how past realities can haunt us. The Hobbits are ignorant of what has gone on before them in the cozy shire where they live. Their houses are built on lands recovered through war; they even store the implements they uncover, without memory of their previous use. They are, as I’ve said, a people defined by comfort.
And yet there is also, I think, a sort of longing that haunts these Hobbits.
I will not make these essays predominantly about me and my own mid-life musings (is this already midlife, she wonders?) But I will say that many of us are accompanied by a longing for lives we used to lead. In my case I long for a life that never was, one whose reality I tasted for a season but have been removed from. I am learning to live with the memory of a life I never got to live. I planned for it for years and it was the dreams of what might be that fueled me through long days and early mornings, through relationships with difficult people, through cross-country moves and French and German exams (with infants in tow), through that kind of precocious impenetrability that graduate school demands. Those dreams needed to become concrete, to fuel such a pattern of work, and they generated almost an apparition, a ghostly woman who must have been real, for as much as I loved her. But she is not real, and will not be real, and I have learned to abide the loneliness that the loss of her has brought. I have made this loneliness my friend, learned to live with her and honor what she has taught me.
Forgive the therapy-speak if you cannot abide it. But the loneliness I hold for the life that wasn’t mine reappeared when I read about the Shire and read about the Hobbit’s forgetfulness of the Sea. I am no longer vulnerable to the religious obligation to “do great things for God!” (Perhaps 2022 will be the year I write my take-down of John Piper’s “Seashells” sermon). But I do know what longing for another, grander landscape feels like- a landscape where one might feel small, against the possibilities of what might be, what one might become.
I feel this way when I see a whale at the ocean, or an owl on my walks. It is seldom that I encounter such a creature, but twice I have encountered an owl early in the day, when my wakefulness meets his transition to sleep. Both times these owls have been almost motionless. On both occasions, I saw them only as they came to rest upon a branch. On both occasions, I had the sense not of seeing the creature, but of being seen by it. There was a recognition there, one that brought the deep loneliness I live with to the surface. I wanted to stay with the owl, with the whale. I do not know what this means, or if other people live in the world this way. But I felt the same way about the Shire as I do about the owl. I recognized both. I know what it is like to live in a place that appeared extremely comfortable (in our modern speech we say “privileged”), but to live there with the longing for something grander, even if more precarious. I too have longed for the Sea.
There is nothing wrong with the world in which the Hobbits live; nothing at all. In fact, there are only hints, in the Prologue, that there is any other world. But there is another world.