Magic in Middle Earth
A Tolkien story from Lembas for the Soul
For this posting, I’m going to recycle some older material - the recycling part should make some Dumocrats happy.
I LOVE J.R.R. Tolkien. - everything he has ever written, Middle Earth related and otherwise. I used to read Lord of the Rings (LOTR) about every other year - before four children arrived and spare reading time became reallocated to things like baseball and fly fishing. There is literally an entire section in every bookstore in the world because of Tolkien - he invented the genre of adult fantasy.
He was also one of the more prominent and influential Roman Catholic laypeople of modern times. While he explicitly stated that he detested outright allegory, the Catholic themes and significance in LOTR are clear. Lembas is a flat, bland, tasteless bread that can nonetheless provide supernatural levels of sustenance. Does that remind you of something? And who can miss the irresistible temptation of the One Ring as being a metaphor for sin?
This side of the Holy Bible, The Lord of the Rings would be my choice for a “desert island” book.
Tolkien’s Middle Earth is also the best and richest fictional universe ever created, bar none. Middle Earth is Tom Brady, while Harry Potter, (non-Disney) Star Wars, and everything else falls in the John Elway / Joe Montana category. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia might be the “1A” candidate.
In 2005 I had a piece published in a collection of Tolkien-related essays called Lembas for the Soul. I present that essay here, which is a brief account of how I first discovered Tolkien. Some details are a bit dated, notably my youngest two boys were not yet born. By way of updates, today my three oldest boys - one of whom was not yet born when I wrote this essay - have all read the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I am in the process of distributing my considerable collection of Tolkien schwag to them, and one of my boys has his own impressive collection of Tolkien swords.
I commit to producing more Tolkien-related material for Beware of Truth in the future - stay tuned!
At the end, there are links where you can order the full Lembas for the Soul book - and it IS Christmas time.
Enjoy:
One of the most stunning achievements in the history of literature is The Lord of the Rings trilogy - and with the eleven Oscars won by The Return of the King in 2004, Tolkien's saga has become no less of a masterpiece of the film medium.
While this has been the subject of abundant news coverage worldwide, for me there is a very grassroots connection to this epic in my own hometown of Dedham, Massachusetts, just south of Boston. This is the person of the late Jean Roberts, a longtime Dedham resident and English teacher at Oakdale Elementary School.
Our favorite teachers are the sort of people who remain a part of us throughout our lives. For many, there is that certain educator who stood out, who had a profound influence on forming who we would become and what we in turn would pass on to others. Mrs. Roberts, who passed away in December of 2000, was just such a teacher for me.
She was my homeroom and English teacher in the sixth grade, and above all she loved books and reading. I have two sons myself now, ages four and one, who are already lovers of books. This is partly due to my passing on to them what Mrs. Roberts imparted to me.
The Middle-earth connection comes through her "Hobbit Club", one of the warmest memories of my formative years. Mrs. Roberts loved the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, felt they had tremendous educational value, and burned with desire to share them with her students. Her Hobbit Club was an optional part of the Oakdale experience offered to her sixth-grade students. It met twice a week in the school library at seven in the morning before classes started. She actually held two separate groups to accommodate all the interested students, so Mrs. Roberts arrived at work early four days a week for the entire school year.
Over the course of the year, we were assigned a chapter or two to read for each morning's session. We started with The Hobbit, then moved on to The Lord of the Rings. The morning meetings were devoted to discussion of the assigned chapters. In particular, I recall she assigned the Council of Elrond chapter twice, due to its complexity. The mornings were not limited to discussions of the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. Mrs. Roberts insisted that we locate new vocabulary words in the reading assignments for each and every session and bring the definitions to the group. Additionally, she required that we identify figures of speech used in Tolkien's vivid descriptions: similes, metaphors, and personifications. My copies of the books -which I keep to this day - are marked with underlines of words such as "escarpment" and "victuals", and expressions such as ”as thick as summer moths around a candle".
Aside from the Hobbit Club, which was above and beyond her normal duties as an English teacher, she ran a challenging sixth-grade reading curriculum. Book reports were due every two weeks, and she would never abide books which she believed were below a student's reading level. Her passion for the fantasy genre brought me not only to Middle Earth , but also to the worlds of C.S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, and Susan Cooper. She extolled the virtues of avoiding television. She once stated she had watched a single program during the course of the year, that being coverage of the Pope's first visit to Boston. I'm certain she would not be pleased at the amount of time I spend watching the Boston Red Sox these days.
I also distinctly remember that she categorically detested film adaptations of books. She felt they spoiled her own mental picture of how the characters and imaginary lands appeared. I don't know how she would have felt about Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings adaptations, but no doubt she would have been disappointed that many peoples' only experience of Middle Earth would be through the films and never from the pages of Tolkien's books.
Her reverence for books was illustrated most vividly in one amusing mannerism: she would be beside herself at the folding a book back while reading it. My copies of The Lord of the Rings, for all the wear they have had over the years, still lack the telltale creases on the bindings which made Mrs. Roberts wince.
Furthermore, I will never forget the spelling of words such as "necessary” and "receive", thanks to Mrs. Roberts ' simple rhythmic memory devices: N-E-C-E-"DOUBLE S"-A-R-Y. This is typical of the sort of"bag of tricks" all gifted teachers seem to possess.
It is over a quarter of a century since I was a student of Jean Roberts, and life's path has brought me to a place which resembles Middle Earth in many ways: the shadow of the Rocky Mountains in Denver, Colorado. I have a family of my own there, although my mother and father still live in the same home just south of Boston.
But if I live to be eleventy-one, there will always be a way to Middle Earth through the Oakdale School library, born of the magic of Mrs. Jean Roberts. Like Tolkien's immortal Elves, she has sailed to her place of rest in the Far West, but her spirit will endure as I read The Hobbit to my own children at bedtime.
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They make GREAT Christmas gifts!
Lembas For The Soul - paperback
Further up and Further in!