Saturday before Christmas Day
Earth is just one of 3.2 trillion planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Our sun is just one of 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is just one of 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. What may lie outside the observable universe in the entirety of the Pantokrator's creation boggles the mind incomprehensibly.
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It's just you and me, Lord. A man IS an island after all, isolated, an island, it's just us, it's just you and me.
And then nothing - - unaware dust - - not even the darkness of oblivion. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return - - to disperse in a whiff of breeze, Ruach, the breath of God.
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Now and then, from Time to Time, an essay, meditation, or other sort of article appears that is so exquisite to me as to warrant copy and paste into my weblog. From the NYT, today's Opinion essay by MDC Drout is such, beginning with my identification with what he says about JRR Tolkien and his Middle-Earth, a real place one can escape to if or when one needs not to deal with a present moment of life itself.
Drout is a qualified professor of Tolkien (and no doubt CS Lewis, maybe Harry Potter and other fantasy fiction), a quarter century ago I was an Episcopal school chaplain and religion teacher trying to give students something to remember about the NT Greek word agape in their years ahead, and memories, a bit of practice, for spotting that kind of Love in life. My lifelong view of Tolkien's uniqueness made me stop at Drout's headline this morning, read his offering, and decide to share it here.
It's below (scroll down) for fellow Tolkien faithful. Or anyone.
T90
Why I Keep Returning to Middle-Earth
Dec. 19, 2025
Credit...
Wesley Allsbrook
- By Michael D.C. Drout
Dr. Drout is a professor of English at Wheaton College and the author of “The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation.”
When you are reading aloud to a 7-year-old, once you start using a particular voice for a character’s dialogue, you are stuck with that voice for the rest of the book. When that book is J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy epic “The Lord of the Rings,” there is plenty of time to regret a careless choice in an early chapter. My father, wisely, used only his own voice when he read it to me. Fifty years later, I can still hear his particular mispronunciations of some of the names, Elvish in a New Jersey accent. Still, when it came time to introduce my daughter, Rhys, and later my son, Mitchell, to Middle-earth, I tried to make each character’s dialogue distinctive.
Then we reached the Council of Elrond, a meeting of the free peoples of Middle-earth and the fulcrum on which the plot of the first book turns. It would have needed 23 voices.
Trying to come up with two dozen accents would have so exhausted my repertoire that some unfortunate elf probably would have ended up sounding as though he came from Pittsburgh, not Mirkwood. Fortunately, my son didn’t make me try. A generic elf voice was born.
But the multivocality of “The Lord of the Rings” includes what is said and who says it. During his council, the half-elven sage Elrond claims that if Frodo accepts the quest to destroy the perilous and powerful One Ring, his stature and fame will be comparable to “Hador, and Húrin, and Túrin, and Beren himself.” Readers can recognize only the name of Beren — those other “mighty elf-friends of old” are a mystery — but in this world, these names are normal cultural knowledge. “The Lord of the Rings” is littered with similar allusions: a battering ram is named Grond, after the “Hammer of the Underworld”; when he rides into battle, a king seems like “Oromë the Great.”
These mentions are presented without explanation, yet a reader cannot understand them, as if a great gulf of time separated the contemporary reader from its original audience. They are broken references, and they are one example of a reason “The Lord of the Rings” has endured: Both by intention and by providence, Tolkien wrote a world that is beautiful because it is as broken as our own.
This feeling of solidity and realism is heightened by the impression that the book itself is eroded and damaged by age, discovered and patched together. The experience of reading “The Lord of the Rings” is, for its fans, less like paging through a novel than it is like entering a different world, one in which we do not escape from our pain but one in which we can imagine that we may one day be healed.
It’s not uncommon, especially in the wake of Tolkien, for fantasy and science fiction writers to insert illusory broken references into their work as texture, casually mentioning Grabthar’s Hammer or the Doom of Valyria. But Tolkien’s allusions are not illusions, and he did not originally intend his references to be opaque.
They are real references to what Tolkien considered his true life’s work: a vast archive of poems, prose tales and quasi-historical annals that he began to compose in earnest in 1917 in a temporary hospital while convalescing from the trench fever he contracted at the Battle of the Somme. He always intended for readers to be able to read this work before “The Lord of the Rings” or at least alongside it. But he was never able to tame this unruly material into publishable form.
But in all his extensive revisions Tolkien never edited out the many allusions to a legendarium that was not published until after his death, as “The Silmarillion.” These broken links and oblique hints help produce the impression of depth that appeals to so many readers because they are not just tossed-off fakes. They are references to a fully realized imaginary world with its own cosmology, history and languages.
Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden that he had found “something in the air” in the Finnish “Kalevala,” an ineffable feeling that Tolkien wanted to capture in his own writing. That feeling came from the fact that “The Kalevala,” “Beowulf” and other northern epics were textual ruins. The scars of centuries of linguistic and cultural change — the damage only partly repaired by the patient work of scholars — gave these works their aesthetic power.
Poetically, Tolkien’s long struggle to realize his vision — the self-doubt that led to long pauses in composition, his frustrations with publishers and his general inability to be satisfied enough with his creations to stop tinkering with them — helped give his works some of the characteristics of his medieval inspirations.
While the broken references are there on the surface, another characteristic of genuinely old works lies beneath. Subtle variations in Tolkien’s writing style across its 62 chapters generate the impression that “The Lord of the Rings” is a compilation of other texts. This pattern is largely invisible even to careful readers, but new methods of computer-assisted analysis throw it into sharp relief. An algorithm can compare the vocabularies of the chapters and cluster those that are similar.
Some novels have a consistent style, so there’s not much clustering. Others cluster based on the character from whose perspective a particular section is being told. If you cut William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” into arbitrary 3,000-word chunks, those chunks will cluster by point-of-view character, as do nearly all of the 72 chapters in George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones.”
“The Lord of the Rings” is different. Its chapters group in a complex hierarchy with three large groupings and several outliers, a pattern of clustering not typical for a modern novel. It is closer in form to multiauthor composite texts from the Middle Ages. Not only do the clusters not match the point-of-view characters; they don’t seem to be related to volume, book, setting, type of action or pacing.
Revision history, it turns out, reveals the structure. In any sequence of chapters, those that required only one draft are most similar, the most heavily revised chapters cluster, and the rest are arranged in more complex patterns. This stylistic variation was, at least initially, completely unintentional, a byproduct of Tolkien’s laborious and agonizing 17-year effort to complete the book.
Tolkien had aimed to make “The Lord of the Rings” feel as if it had been discovered and assembled; the frame narrative of the book is that it’s a translation of a diary that was expanded into a history and augmented by later scholars. His struggles, providentially, helped him achieve that effect. As a result, although it is written in a generally contemporary idiom, using all the techniques of a modern novel, “The Lord of the Rings” has a distinct grain. It feels worn and weathered, damaged by time and only partly repaired.
A ruin preserves the memory of what has been, at the cost of making it impossible not to recognize the permanence of the loss. When Tolkien was 4, his father died suddenly, leaving his young family in poverty. Tolkien’s mother was cut off by her family after she converted to Catholicism, making their financial situation even more precarious. Her health worsened under the strain, and she died when Tolkien was 12, leaving him and his younger brother in the care of a priest. Waiting to be sent to fight in France, in a war that would kill all but one of his close friends, Tolkien wrote that “because Death was near,” his perception of beauty was intensified but weighted with regret: “All was intolerably fair, lost ere grasped.”
This kind of sorrow is the dominant emotion in all of Tolkien’s works. It is an ache that begins when Frodo looks back and wonders if he will ever see his home again and never stops, even in the book’s last line, “Well, I’m back,” which leaves unsaid the grief of Sam, Frodo’s steadfast companion, at their separation. But along with the heartbreaking sorrow, there is a grandeur to this view of human life, to the ruin persisting long after the tower has fallen. Deeply and essentially true, Tolkien’s vision can give shape and meaning to those griefs we as humans cannot escape.
My son, Mitchell, died from a fentanyl overdose in June 2022. He was 18.
I read Mitchell “The Hobbit” when he was 5, and I read it again and “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Silmarillion” to him when he was 7. As he got older, he became more interested in sports and doing things than in fantasy and reading about them, but he still sat in on my classes and traveled with me to conferences.
When he was 15, he took some beat-up paperback copies of the three “Lord of the Rings” books from my office. He kept those volumes next to his bed, and along with a new copy of “The Hobbit,” they were among the things that came home from his apartment after he died. That new copy of “The Hobbit” makes me wonder if he reread the books in his last months. I hope so.
In the first terrible days after Mitchell’s death, I could only pace, frantically treading water in the great black wave of anguish that swept over us. Nearing the end of his quest, Frodo tries to explain what the terrible consuming burden of the One Ring has done to him: “No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star is left to me,” he says. “I am naked in the dark.” Shapeless darkness was all there was for me, also.
In 1939, when he was beginning work on “The Lord of the Rings” in earnest, Tolkien gave a lecture, “On Fairy-Stories,” in which he argued that fantasy can be an escape from sorrow, even a source of joy, through what he called “eucatastrophe,” the sudden, unexpected turn that results in a happy ending.
Tolkien ends the essay with a passage from “The Black Bull of Norroway,” a Scottish fairy tale in which a washerwoman’s daughter, who has endured a series of awful tasks, is given three chances to wake her true love from enchanted sleep. Twice her singing has failed to rouse him. Despairing, she ends her song plaintively: “Wilt thou not wauken and turn to me?” He hears and turns to her.
This is the moment of eucatastrophe, when, despite certainty that there can be no happy ending, there is one. But in our story, on the very worst day, when the tears of his mother, father and sister all fell on his face, Mitchell did not waken and turn to us. He did not smile his enormous smile and laugh his deep laugh and ask us why we were crying. We were not in that kind of story. We do not live in that kind of world.
But we can imagine that world, one in which we get, as Tolkien says in the essay, “a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story and lets a gleam through.” We can imagine that world because he created it for us, a world in which the horns of Rohan sound at cock crow, in which a standard unfurled on a ship with black sails shows a white tree and seven stars, in which Gandalf cries, “The realm of Sauron is ended,” and it is.
That the same Middle-earth is filled with sorrow and unrecoverable loss — that the work itself seems battered by time and change — only helps us believe that perhaps the sudden turn to the good may happen in our own fallen existence. A light springs in the shadows, a single star gleams high above the cloud-wrack, and we catch a glimpse of the joy beyond the walls of the world because it is real. We see a path toward a place not free of sorrow but in which tears are blessed without bitterness because beyond the circles of the world, there is more than memory. We find hope.
Michael D.C. Drout is a professor of English at Wheaton College, an editor of the journal Tolkien Studies and the author of “The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation.”