John and J. R. R.

 

[A while back when I recorded my brother John's collection of Tolkien, I asked him for a short essay on what Tolkien meant in his life. Here it is.]

J. R. R. Tolkien, what he means to me, or how I have taken some part of his poetically visionary construction and danced with it in a nourishing artistic symbiosis. That’s right I love him. His mythic vision of a world where the deepest parts of ourselves are personified and play-acted in a semi-religious fairy tale has been a guide and a balm for me as I’ve navigated the greater part of my time on this planet. Yes, he is cool as hell, and I’ve been in love with his shit since I was a kid. His stories beat them all. Planet of the Apes. Star Trek. Star Wars. The great gods of young male adventure lovers. For me, Tolkien stories beat them all in every possible metric for appreciative attention.

The beasts, the battles, the bad guys – the stories rang with the authority of the Old Testament and the blood and thunder of the Grimmest of fairy tales. But more than that, the sheer poetic grandness of Middle-earth and all its inhabitants and eras swept me a reframing of my own world view. I saw the romance of nature – moon cycles, whispering trees, foamy waves, blazing sunsets, all through the lens of Tolkien’s painter’s eye. I appreciated my own world more after reading about his. What perfect art! From the start the stories hinted at a deeper more foundational understanding of a mortal’s navigation through his time of strutting and fretting. The promise of that deeper understanding was well-founded as I have experienced a maturing admiration for the more existential aspect of the spirit of Middle-earth and its stories.

I still really love his shit, but in a truer, more profound way than before. It has been both gratifying and nauseating to see the supernova of appreciation for Tolkien’s works in the last couple of decades. The decadence of the defilers who bought and abused the myth as a mere IP is a parasitic nuisance, the barnacles that have attached themselves to the whale of the Tolkien legacy, the cost of swimming in the culture’s waters. Still, it is painful to both have to know what’s being done and then to actually see it being done. Like watching a dear friend get beat down in public.

Still, I remain optimistic about the road ahead for my dear dance with the spirit of Middle-earth. No matter what, the original The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion are still here for us on demand. We have the most profound, life-affirming narrative that has ever been conceived and executed, this side of William Shakespeare. Only more so. There, I said it. Yes, I know the great original stories, and they have good bones.