Where the Stars Are Strange: J. R. R. Tolkien and Me

“The best books show us who we were when we first read them, who we are now, and who we may yet become.”

I first read The Lord of the Rings in a haunted house. I was home from college for the summer and working at Charleston’s historic Aiken-Rhett House, where my job consisted of selling audio tours to tourists, directing people through the house, and answering the occasional question. My boredom was as stifling as the Southern summer heat. I spent most of the day plunked in a folding chair in front of a noisy fan on the second floor, keeping watch over the old bedrooms to make sure nobody touched anything. The only excitement came when I had to retrieve an item from the house’s supposedly ghost-inhabited attic.

When the second floor was empty, I’d open The Lord of the Rings and read until the creak of the stairs alerted me to new visitors. I’d read The Hobbit and started The Fellowship of the Ring on a family road trip earlier that summer, but it was in that hot, crumbling mansion that I truly lost myself in J. R. R. Tolkien’s world, wandering wide-eyed through Moria, Lothlórien, and Gondor. Like the Aiken-Rhett’s tourists, I was spellbound by this glimpse of the past: the bygone splendor and unspeakable horrors.

By the time I’d finished, though I hadn’t gone beyond my folding chair in front of the fan, I felt not unlike Aragorn himself, who tells Boromir, “I have crossed many mountains and many rivers, and trodden many plains, even into the far countries of Rhûn and Harad where the stars are strange.” The conceit of The Lord of the Rings—a conceit stretching back to Tolkien’s earliest Middle-earth writings, when he imagined his legends being related to an Anglo-Saxon sailor—is that it’s a secret history of our own world. While reading the book, the woods by my own house suddenly seemed full of Elven magic. At the beach, I could picture immortal continents sitting just beyond the sealine: Here are dragons. When I reached the end of the book, I wanted more—more epic quests, more continent-spanning battles, more unimaginably ancient ruins, more ethereal magic.

The next summer, I visited Oxford and made a pilgrimage to The Eagle and Child, the pub where Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and the other Inklings gathered to drink ale and share the tales that became Middle-earth and Narnia. Tolkien claimed that Oxford sat in the same geographic spot as Rivendell. Wandering its medieval streets, I could imagine the lore and wisdom of the Noldor taking root in the black soil and, many millennia later, sprouting a university.

I felt I was walking in Tolkien’s footsteps, and in Elrond’s, too. Reading The Lord of the Rings had convinced me I was bound for great adventure. I was a privileged college student with my whole life before me, and I imagined myself as Aragorn, ready to leave the comforts of the Last Homely House and strike out into strange-starred lands. But, as I soon discovered, I am more hobbit than Ranger.

*

After grad school, I taught English in Japan, which had the advantage of being both a far country and a comfortable one. There were ancient castle ruins in the forest and Frosted Flakes in the grocery store. The stars in the sky were the same as in America, but at night the squid boats from my town would go out to sea and light enormous bulbs to attract their catch. From the shore they looked like floating stars, or a fleet of Vingilots, Silmarils at their bows, sailing through the Door of Night.

In those moments, I did feel a bit like Aragorn on his journeys, but I had also realized I was no true wanderer. It wasn’t the shining squid boats or mist-covered mountains that I loved most—it was the comforting routines of teaching, playing with my students at recess, and chatting over drinks with friends at the local fishermen’s izakaya, a pub as lively and inviting as the hobbits’ beloved Green Dragon.

Even after I outgrew my dream of being a noble warrior-vagabond, The Lord of the Rings remained a profound influence on me. I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, and I knew just what I wanted to write: my own high fantasy. In my mid-twenties, I wrote a sweeping saga of epic clichés and vast terribleness. I recently rediscovered the manuscript when cleaning out my old bedroom, like Gandalf coming across Isildur’s account of the One Ring in the archives of Minas Tirith, and could only cringe at the entire affair. (Someday I will bequeath it to my son and charge him with carrying it across the land and throwing it into a volcano.) I moved on and tried to write “serious” literature, but the shadow of Middle-earth lingered in my mind—the thrill of great adventures, deep history, and weird magic.

Most books change for us as we grow older and encounter them again with wiser eyes. We see different themes, characters’ actions take on new perspective, and sometimes we catch on to the author’s narrative sleights-of-hand. But the best books are mirrors, like Galadriel’s, liquid and glimmering. They show us who we were when we first read them, who we are now, and who we may yet become.

*

When I reread The Lord of the Rings last year, I wasn’t sitting on a folding chair in a haunted antebellum mansion as I had been the first time, but on the couch in my own house in the suburbs of Chicago. At night, after my son Liam had gone to sleep, and the cooking, dishes, laundry, and other chores were done, I’d park my tired body on the couch and read until I fell asleep—the book splayed across my chest, the living room lights still on. I thrilled at wandering again in Middle-earth, but this time I especially loved the quieter moments in seemingly peaceful countries—the cozy cheer of the Shire, the rustic bustle of Bree, the fragrant woods of Ithilien. The once-exciting battles were now the parts that often left me snoring on the couch. It seems I no longer fantasize about escaping a stifling job to go on dangerous quests in far-off lands; instead I fantasize about a comfy armchair by a roaring fire, book and beer at hand.

Now, when my wife Ayako wakes me on the couch after I’ve fallen asleep reading, my teeth ache from grinding and I grumble at myself for how much electricity I’ve wasted leaving the lights on. I go upstairs and try not to think about how few hours I have to sleep before I need to wake up, get my son ready for daycare, and head to work. If I once imagined myself a young Aragorn, now I identify with the elderly Bilbo when he describes feeling “sort of stretched . . . like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.” Having lost half my hearing two years ago, I understand, in a way college-aged me never could, the decay of time.

As I get older, my hearing will only worsen. I dread the day I’ll no longer be able to hear my son’s voice. Rereading The Lord of the Rings, I couldn’t help but wish for one of the three Elven rings, whose power lies in preserving an eternal present. Sometimes I dream about turning our house into our own suburban Lothlórien—the Christmas lights always up and twinkling, Ayako’s warmth always next to me in bed, the sounds of Liam’s giggles and pattering footsteps always in my ear. But even the power of the Three faded in the end. No matter what I do, Liam will grow up, and Ayako and I will grow old. The house will go quiet, and the lights will come down.

The Shire that Frodo returned to wasn’t the same as the one he’d left; neither was it for me. The conceit of Middle-earth as a lost age of our own world had once seemed romantically melancholy to me, like the ruined grandeur of the Aiken-Rhett House, but now it struck me as profoundly sad. The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter series hold out the promise—no matter how much you know it’s not true—that one day you might walk through a wardrobe into a snowy, lamplit wood, or receive a mysterious acceptance letter to an oddly-named school in Scotland. But we can’t daydream about stumbling into Middle-earth; we can only long for it, like characters in Tolkien’s stories long for the vanished realms of Khazad-dûm, Númenor, and Beleriand. The Elves have gone away. The forests are dark. Here were dragons; they are no more.

Yet Tolkien doesn’t end his story with that loss: with Frodo, wounded beyond recovery, sailing into the Uttermost West with Gandalf, Bilbo, and the last of the Noldor. He ends it with Samwise, the gardener, at home with his family. Maybe I can’t turn my home into a Lothlórien, but I can try to make it a Bag End, for a while, at least—warm, lightful, and well-tended.

*

Rereading The Lord of the Rings didn’t provide me an escape from the worries and aches of adulthood as I’d hoped it would—if anything, Frodo’s struggle against despair and the grim burden of the One Ring called to mind my bouts of depression after my hearing loss. His rage when Sam offers to carry the Ring reminded me of my own flashes of anger when, tired and irritated, I’d snap at my son over minor misbehavior—and I didn’t even have the excuse of demonic jewelry draped around my neck. Some nights, when I curled up on the couch with the book, the house dark and quiet around me, I’d spend a few minutes being mad at myself before reading. Mad for losing patience with my son, or forgetting to pay a bill on time, or not writing as much as I should.

If The Lord of the Rings didn’t provide an escape from my troubles this time, it did give me a gift—the gift of pity, the assurance that we can be more than our faults and failings. The Lord of the Rings is often dismissed as a simple story of good versus evil, but it’s more concerned with how good can be maintained against the corruption of evil. Frodo doesn’t save Middle-earth at the end of The Return of the King when he stands above the Cracks of Doom—there, even he succumbs to the power of the Ring. He saves the world two-thirds of the way through The Two Towers, when he spares Gollum from Faramir’s archers at the Forbidden Pool. It’s that earlier moment of mercy, selfless and undeserved, that ultimately ends Sauron’s reign.

The Lord of the Rings had never made me emotional before. But this time, when I came to the end—with Samwise holding little Elanor on his lap by the fire—I had tears in my eyes. Frodo’s failure, and his inability to fully recover from the trauma, felt like an act of pity itself: a reminder that we’re all stumbling towards Mordor, heavy burdens around our necks, our minds clouded at times by fear and anger. Whether we make it to the fire or not doesn’t matter; it’s the mercy and compassion we show along the way that can save us.

The next time I read The Lord of the Rings will be a few years from now. My son Liam is three years old, still too young for Tolkien. But I’m looking forward to introducing him to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit when he’s ready, and revisiting Middle-earth with him. I hope he’ll be as enchanted by the deep beauty of the book as I am, and I hope he’ll take to heart its messages about the corruptions of power and the gifts of pity. I smile when I picture us sitting in the rocking chair in his room, him snuggled on my lap, and me opening the book to the first page. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” I’ll begin, and we’ll set off, out of our own comfortable Shire and into far, strange countries.