Tolkien
Where I grew up, “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien, was a required reading book for one of my high school English classes. The book is only about 130 pages long and weaves a story of an adventure by a group of dwarfs and a single hobbit to recover their families fortune from a dragon. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it.
This was my first taste of the world that J.R.R. Tolkien created. I’m pulling this from memory, but he was a trench soldier in WWI and ended up teaching at Oxford university (and was friends with C. S. Lewis). Anyway, his first book was The Hobbit, which I love. After that he wrote…no wrote is not the right term…he created the universe which resulted in the Lord of the Rings series of three books (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of The King). These are my favorite fictional books and I’ve read them probably a dozen times (even though they clock in at around 500 pages each).
After Tolkien passed away, his son Christopher published a book entitled The Similarion. The best way I can think of to describe it is this universe that JRR Tolkien created entailed pages of notes of background stories, lore and language. I’ve tried to read it a couple of times but there is so much detail, I get lost trying to keep it all straight.
As gear headed as I am about The Lord of The Rings, there are many more that are stricken with Tolkien’s universe way beyond my love of it. This morning, I found an article by Eugene Terekhin regarding a letter that Tolkien sent to a reader that asked a question about one of the characters,Tom Bombadil. The part of the book that has the Tom Bombadil substory (it really doesn’t impact much of anything in the overall story), is a transition from one part to another and, as I recall, was considered to be removed for the movie.
Anyway, in Tolkien’s letter, he acknowledges that Tom is not important to the story but he felt compelled to leave him in. He went on to state that he ceased to invent the story and let it write itself. Tom spoke in rhyme, sang “stronger” songs and was a very old and jovial character.
In the Similarion, music was described as how the world was created which fits in with Tom’s character. Tolkien was a devout Christian and may have borrowed this concept from it.
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” - Colossians 3:16 ESV
“Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!” - Psalm 95:2 ESV
Anyway, as much as I love Tolkien’s universe he created, I know it is a work of fiction. There are a couple of irreconcilable timeline problems that I’ve read about over the years that, if nothing else, would cause me to question it being anything more than a work of fiction.
Last night, I was at a Bible study where one of the things we discussed was how we would respond to someone questioning the legitimacy of the Bible. We discussed several important facts such as the number of writers over an extended time period, the eye witness accounts of the life of Jesus, and the overall consistency of all the books. After a lengthy discussion, we realized that getting to know the person asking the question and developing trust and ferreting out what the real intent of the question was, at least as important as the question itself. We also
acknowledged that planting a seed, we may never see the outcome.
In the Lord of the Rings, the Tom Bombadil character was an extremely powerful character that was so old no one seemed to know whether they could trust him to help with the conflict the books are centered around. We, on the other hand, have a God that has a plan that is so all encompassing that we can’t understand more than brief glimpses into it.
