Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ON THE SHOULDERS of HOBBITS

Moody Publishers

Contents

Foreword..........................................................................7Introduction: Stories to Steer By.................................................9Chapter 1 — The Lure of the Road............................................23Chapter 2 — Responding to the Call..........................................31Chapter 5 — Dangers on the Road.............................................41Chapter 4 — The End of the Road.............................................51Chapter 5 — The Courage to Endure...........................................63Chapter 6 — Temperance and Tobacco..........................................73Chapter 7 — The Wisdom that Discerns........................................83Chapter 8 — The Justice of the King.........................................93Chapter 9 — Rehabilitating Friendship.......................................105Chapter 10 — The Eyes of Faith..............................................115Chapter 11 — Hope and the Happy Ending......................................123Chapter 12 — The Love that Pities and Forgives..............................133Chapter 13 — Forbidden Fruit................................................145Chapter 14 — Perversion and Corruption......................................155Chapter 15 — Blinded by the Light...........................................165Chapter 16 — Egyptian Alliances.............................................175Conclusion: In Defense of Stories.................................................185Appendix A: Tolkien and Middle-Earth: A Bibliographical Essay.....................189Appendix B: Lewis and Narnia: A Bibliographical Essay.............................201Acknowledgments...................................................................219Index.............................................................................223

Chapter One

That life is a journey and that we are all travelers on the road is, at once, a well-worn cliché and a profound and universal truth. It lies at the heart of many of the greatest works of the human imagination (The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Pilqrim's, Progress, Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, the Five Books of Moses, and the Acts of the Apostles), and it speaks to us at the deepest core of our being. No matter how comfortable our situation may be, no matter how permanent it may seem, we never quite feel at home. There is, in all of us, a vague restlessness, a feeling that, to quote the old hymn, this world is not our home. That inner voice ever troubles us with the realization that we are all, finally, pilgrims and sojourners, strangers in a strange land.

Not surprisingly, most of us stay put. Better to suppress that nagging voice than to risk the dangers of the road. And yet, even if we do not go off on adventures ourselves, we are continually drawn to characters, both historical and fictional, who do. Although the taking of pilgrimages to holy shrines and sacred places has played a major role in most world religions (especially medieval Catholicism), today, only Islam maintains a strong and visible commitment to this ancient discipline. True, many modern Americans will take secular, consumer-driven pilgrimages to such places as Disney World or Graceland or Manhattan, while others will take more intellectual and aesthetic pilgrimages to Rome or to Athens or to Stratford-upon-Avon. A number of Jews and Christians will even make their way to the Holy Land. Still, something, I fear, has been lost. Perhaps it is that sense of messianic anticipation that converts the journey into a longing for higher purpose. Perhaps it is that willingness to be profoundly changed that transforms it into a voyage of self-discovery. Perhaps we simply insulate ourselves too much.

Resisting the Road

The Lord of the Rings, like all the great romances of the Middle Ages, is essentially a quest narrative. Here, however, we do not encounter a willing hero (like Homer's Odysseus) whose journey promises him both reward and rest; rather, we have an unwilling hero (like Virgil's Aeneas) who does not wish, at least initially, to leave his home and who, if he reaches the end of his quest, will not necessarily receive either rest or reward. Tolkien's hero, a Hobbit named Frodo Baggins who lives a peaceful life in the rustic, protected Shire, is the nephew of another Hobbit named Bilbo who had himself gone on an adventure nearly eighty years earlier.

As Tolkien tells the tale in The Hobbit, Bilbo is recruited by Gandalf the wizard and a group of enterprising Dwarfs to help them recover stolen treasure from a fierce dragon named Smaug. The bourgeois Bilbo, who desires only a simple, complication-free life, is anything but enthusiastic. Rather than take joy in the twists and turns of the Road, he spends the first half of his journey casting continual backward glances to his safe, warm, comfortable Hobbit hole. Though Bilbo will prove the hero of the expedition, and though he will return to his home (Bag End) a more courageous and cosmopolitan person, his "there and back again" adventure is, in the final analysis, more a Viking raid than a quest or pilgrimage. Whereas Frodo is profoundly tested and changed by his travels along the Road, Bilbo, like Phileas Fogg or Lewis Carroll's Alice, returns to his very "English" Shire and picks up exactly where he left off.

Actually, it is a bit more complicated than that. The Lord of the Rings begins with Bilbo's celebration of his 111th birthday and his decision to leave the Shire and go to Rivendell to spend his closing-years with the Elves. It has taken him over seventy years, but Bilbo has finally realized that his adventure did change him and that he cannot remain forever in the Shire. The Road calls out to him one last time, and he must go. Deep down, he would like to bring his thirty-three-year-old nephew with him, but he knows that Frodo is not ready to leave his home and take to the Road. He tries to explain this to Gandalf, who was his guide on his adventure and who will soon become Frodo's guide on his:

I want to see the wild country again before I die, and the Mountains; but [Frodo] is still in love with the Shire, with woods and fields and little rivers. He ought to be comfortable here [in Bag End]. (I.i.32)

And comfortable he remains, until he reaches his fiftieth year: the same age Bilbo had been when he had set off on his adventure. By then, a wrestling has begun within Frodo: part of him (his Bilbo side) is drawn to the Shire, to all that is safe and familiar; another part (what we might call his pilgrim side) yearns to leave, to experience the far-flung world. In the end, however, he is compelled to depart, for Bilbo has unwittingly left in his possession the Ring of Sauron, the Dark Lord. If Frodo does not take this Ring to Rivendell immediately, he risks destruction not only for himself but for the Shire and, ultimately, all of Middle-earth.

And so, whether he wishes it or not, Frodo is cast out onto the Road, forced to embark on a pilgrimage that he has long desired to take, but would never have had the courage or resolve to begin. But it will take him some time to really leave the Shire behind, to...