“I should like to save the Shire, if I could,” he tells Gandalf. But I feel very small, and very uprooted, and well-desperate.” And I suppose I must go alone, if I am to do that and save the Shire. “But this would mean exile, a flight from danger into danger, drawing it after me. Rather than giving up or refusing to get involved, or feeling there may be no time for futures, he simply gets on with it, despite the fact that he admits he is very scared. A long, hard journey lay ahead.Īmong Frodo’s seminal strengths is one which shines during his encounter with the dark portents which Gandalf brings to him-that he must leave the Shire behind, perhaps forever. News coming out of Italy, China, and a cruise ship off the coast of Washington had placed the Ring of Power atop all our mantlepieces. Like the hobbit, so many of us in March of 2020 suddenly had our collective “Shires” clouded over. Thank goodness you plodded on sir, thank goodness. His son was serving in the British Royal Air Force, a difficult situation for any parent. “In spite of the darkness of the next five years I found that the story could not now wholly be abandoned and I plodded on, mostly by night,” he recalled.
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RELATED: Join a Global Gathering of Researchers on the Importance of Self-Compassion – Free Online He had not finished writing his iconic fantasy books upon the outbreak of the second ‘great war’ in 1939-and had not even finished the first part of the first book. “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years,” Tolkien writes in his foreword. Yet, as unbelievably calamitous as it had proved, twenty years later a new generation was set to do it all again.
The Great War, described at the time as the “war to end all wars” was a singularity. Catching trench fever, he was shipped back to England, after which nearly every young man in his battalion was killed. He was a junior officer at the Battle of the Somme, one of the most tragic events in human history, notable for the sheer empty-headedness of it all. “It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.” “In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly,” he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher later in life. Tolkien became a man in perhaps the worst single moment in history to do so, around 1914, at the dawning of World War I. COVID-19 has been compared to many great crises, sometimes fairly, sometimes comedically, but we can learn from the great writer and his characters that the correct way out of a crisis is to never believe the current disaster is somehow unique in its dreadfulness.ĬHECK OUT: How One Writer Learned to be Productive During the Pandemic Tolkien and his characters reflect, whether he would like them to or not, how the times during which one lives tend to vacuum them up, obscuring thoughts of the future or of the past. They are the ones we learn of in creative writing: can we see ourselves in the characters, are they flawed, do they make the right choice or the easy one, can we relate to their difficulties? The best stories are the ones which are told the best, with all those wonderful literary keystones fitted neatly together. Today, with warnings of waning immunity, fourth waves, and more, I thought an interview with Frodo, Gandalf, and their creator might make for a strong lesson in changing times, and our attitudes towards them. In it I found something which Gandalf the Grey might describe as “an encouraging thought,” a feeling that struck me again as I read the innocence in Frodo’s voice as he realizes he must leave his home forever on a perilous quest from which he likely would never return. In the edition I read (which was not the edition my brother and I owned when we were young), a detailed foreword written by the author explained how the book came to be when he took up his pen in the waxing years of the turmoil that would become World War II.
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