March 25th is Tolkien Reading Day, a day started by the Tolkien Society to celebrate the written works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
I've been a fan of Tolkien since the late 1980s when I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in jr. high school. I still have the paperback box set I received as a gift back then, and have added to my collection steadily over the years, as you can see below. Although I have many of his books that have been published – some in several editions – I still have a ways to go, especially with the 12-volume History of Middle-earth series (I really like the dark trade paperback editions, though if I could get my hands on all first edition hardcovers, I wouldn't complain). The picture at the top is the 2 shelves of one of my bookcases devoted to books by and about Tolkien.
While I studied literature as an undergraduate back in the late 1990s, over the next decade or so I was pulled away from Tolkien and many of the fantasy and science fiction works I loved to read growing up. I got a corporate job, started a family, bought a house. Very quickly I found myself having less and less time to read, and I got rid of a lot of my books. I was involved in more and more things that simply brought little to no joy in my life. Then, in the course of a few short years my marriage ended, I sold my house for a (small) loss, and I was laid off from that corporate job that had been sucking at my soul.
About this same time, I rediscovered my love for reading fantasy and science fiction. I stumbled upon a podcast by a guy who called himself the Tolkien Professor (Dr. Corey Olsen), and I was fascinated by attention the to detail in his study of Tolkien's works, which I had read several times but never with the same scrutiny and scholarship. When Dr. Olsen announced his plan to begin an online university focused on the study of speculative fiction, I signed up for the first class.
All of this is to say that this Tolkien Reading Day is special for me because just this past week I submitted the 2nd draft of my MA thesis. Bilbo Baggins famously sings, "The road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began," and while I have walked out of more than one door on this journey – both figuratively and literally, as I've moved four times in the last seven years since selling my house – looking back it's strange and a little exhilarating to see how much Tolkien's work is responsible for where I am today. (And yes, I quoted him in my thesis, of course.)
In celebration of Tolkien Reading Day, today I chose to revisit my favorite poem of his, "Mythopoeia." In it, Tolkien outlines his theory of mythmaking, and there is one particular quatrain that has always stuck out at me:
Blessed are the men of Noah's race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.
I am not a religious person, and I don't have the same faith in a Catholic God that Tolkien had. But I do believe there is some level of "faith" in every action we take as individuals – whether it's simply getting out of bed in the morning or whether it's working on some lifelong goal that we've held since childhood. Nobody really knows if the things we do will work out the way we want them to, or even whether working out how we want them to will end up being good for us anyway. But if we didn't have faith on some level or other that our actions would improve our lives, and hopefully the lives of those around us as well, then we wouldn't do them. And note that it's not just the building or the steering that makes the "men of Noah's race" blessed, but both of those things together, both the strategic vision and the tactical day-to-day decisions.
Anyway, whether you participated in this Tolkien Reading Day or not, I hope it was as good a day for you as it was for me.
