Tolkien Month
July marks the 72nd anniversary of the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, and that feels like as good an excuse as any to spend the month talking about Tolkien.
Not that anyone really needs an excuse.
There are certain books that stop being just books and become landmarks. You remember when you first encountered them, who handed them to you, what edition you owned, what the cover looked like, where you were sitting when the road first went ever on and on. For a lot of fantasy readers, The Fellowship of the Ring is one of those books. It is a door to a whole new world.
And what a strange door it is, too. It does not open with a battle, a prophecy, or a map covered in skulls and storm clouds. It opens with a birthday party. With gossip. With fireworks. With an old hobbit being odd in public. Then, little by little, the cozy world starts to show cracks. The shadows lengthen. The old stories prove to be true. The road out of the Shire becomes the road into myth.
That is part of what makes Tolkien worth returning to, especially now. We live in a fantasy landscape shaped so thoroughly by Middle-earth that it can be easy to forget how particular and personal Tolkien’s work actually is. Elves, dwarves, dark lords, ancient ruins, lost kings, magic swords, and dangerous journeys all feel familiar because so much later fantasy borrowed the furniture. But Tolkien’s power was never just in the furniture. It was in the ache behind it. The sense of a beautiful world already wounded. The grief of lost things. The courage of small people. The hope that survives after certainty has failed.
So, for July, I want to wander through Middle-earth a bit. Not as a scholar in a tower, though there is plenty of scholarship worth discussing, but as a reader who has been walking these roads for a long time and still finds new things along the way. We can talk about the Third Age as a post-apocalyptic setting, the strange holiness of eucatastrophe, the sadness of the Elves, the humanity of Boromir, the quiet bravery of Sam, and the way Tolkien’s invented world continues to haunt every fantasy table we sit down at.
After seventy-two years, the road still goes on.
