[Aiwendil]

I usually don't go in for these human interest type threads, but somehow this one has interested me.

Did LotR shape my world view? Like doug*platypus, I have to say that my first reaction is no. As a matter of fact, I have a rather different view of things, in some respects, than that presented in LotR. I am not religious; I tend to look at the world in purely rational, scientific terms. So I can detect no real conscious influence of Tolkien's writing on my personal philosophy, except in the area of literary theory.

But I suspect there may be an unconscious influence. I first encountered Tolkien when I was very young; my mother read The Hobbit to me when I was about five or six, and this was soon followed by The Lord of the Rings. I don't really remember hearing them for the first time very well; and I can't remember a time before I knew their plots (it's similar for me with the original Star Wars movies). So it's sort of as if those books were just innate parts of my mind, part of the basic vocabulary out of which I constructed all my concepts of the world.

So maybe Tolkien has shaped my view of life in ways that I'm not conscious of. I suspect, at the very least, that he had a profound impact on my literary taste, causing me to reject modern and post-modern literary theory instinctively.

As for the general question of whether books can change one's life - I must say that I have never encountered a work of fiction that has had a profound effect on my personal philosophy. I've encountered works of fiction that I've thought are profoundly good or that touch upon profound issues, but I can't recall ever actually having my view of one of these profound issues changed by such a work. However, I've read a few works of non-fiction that have profoundly affected my life - some popular science books in which I first encountered quantum mechanics years ago, some early works of Marx (no, I'm not actually a communist or a socialist), some papers and books by Carnap, Schlick, and Wittgenstein.