LOTR and your Weltanschauung

[Child of the 7th Age]

Mister Underhill -- This is a great topic!

I first read LotR when I was finishing high school in the mid sixties. Right after that I left to go away to college. It was a time of incredible upheaval. Everyone was questioning everything. I had friends who died in the Vietnam War, and others who ferried people across to Canada who were philosophically opposed to the War and preferred to leave the country rather than fight.

I myself felt like a fish out of water. I grew up in a working class neighborhood, and was the first in my family to go away to college. My parents were loving but could not understand why they had a daughter who was extremely academic and fascinated with strange subjects like medieval history and the legends of King Arthur.

What does LotR have to do with all this? It was a place I could go to be myself. It was a world where moral choices seemed simpler and more direct than those I faced when I turned on the evening news. It gave me strength to make my own decisions, to realize I was different from many around me in my neighborhood. At the same time, it reminded me that they too were decent and caring people, and that ultimately we were all in this thing together.

And finally, at a time when I was questioning organized religion, it hinted at a way that there could be a world with a framework of ethics and even underlying spirituality which did not insist on rigid beliefs. This far I could go, and it felt comfortable. In later years, as I studied Tolkien and his Letters, he helped me to realize that I needed to find my own formal path, different from that of my parents or this author, but one which made sense in my heart and brought me closer to the Light.

The books also instilled in me a real love of story, of things in history, because, on some level, I thought of it more as history than literature. I eventually majored in history and went on to earn a doctorate in medieval English history.

Was it the only book to do this? No, but it and one other, "The Once and Future King", were certainly the most important ones.

I feel I was lucky to have found these writings long before there was an internet or film adaptations. For they were part of my growing up and helped make me who I am today.

sharon, the 7th age hobbit