"I'm going on an adventure!" Reading Tolkien

When asked to give the opening remarks for a meeting at my university, I decided to talk about Hobbits. This is one of the things I had to say:

"Just as the hobbits of the Shire forget about the greater problems of the world because they’re watched over by the Rangers of the North, our students don’t realize that the ability to learn about psychology or music for a semester is made possible by a whole host of individuals – staff, administration, donors, faculty – working to create this space. And it’s not just any space, right? It’s one where the consequences for starting over, trying again, or messing up aren’t quite so dire as those outside. So, I’ve decided to think that all of those comments about the real world mean that we’re doing are job so well that students are able to forget that what we’ve created isn’t something separate from the real world – but something sheltered."

Giving students the space and the time to think about literature is a wonderful thing and when I teach British Literature especially I think about those early writers who had to carve out time for art in between invasions, religious persecutions, famine, and other horrors foreign to me in this time and place. So I'm grateful for the people who keep my corner of the world safe (military, police, etc.), the educators and mentors who gave me time and space for learning, and the family that always saw me well supplied with books and never questioned my need to roam into imaginary places like the Shire. 

I still return to those well trodden paths, saying with Bilbo:

"Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.."

 When teaching my class on Epic, I asked students to compare one chapter from The Lord of the Rings to one scene in the film, discussing adaptation choices and elements we'd learned from Paul Inne's Epic text. I intended to read the entire trilogy as we worked through the semester, but I stalled at Fellowship - which is my favorite book because it introduced me to Middle Earth, and my least favorite in terms of plot. It seems to take forever to escape from the sheltered confines of the Shire and move into the story, but maybe Tolkien is teaching us about the value of home and the familiar?

I really enjoyed Shippey's work and it truly illuminated some of Tolkien's thought processes and word choices, but it is a true work of scholarship and, for that reason, it merits reading in small bits. Thankfully, Shippey (or his editor) is wise enough to realize this, and obligingly broke the work into small sections. My favorite discussion connected Bilbo Baggins back to the Victorian concept of the gentleman. Maybe I became a scholar of the nineteenth century later because I was a lover of the Shire, first?