LEAVES OF A MALLORN:
A Sample Essay
BEING A HOBBIT
We all love to see the little guy, the underdog, win the day. It may look corny or trite in some tellings, but prevailing against all odds makes a great story any time. And when the hero or heroine is one of the ‘little people’, like you or me or Frodo Baggins or his uncle Bilbo, in whom the extraordinary qualities of courage and decency may lie deeply hidden, we celebrate the victory even more. And finally, when the protagonist’s losses loom at the end, we embrace him or her tenderly, because we understand loss.
In what follows, my thoughts take on a more serious turn. If it all seems too heavy in its tone, please forgive me and pass over it. But I think some of the mystery of our bonds with Middle-earth can be explained, and I’d like to try. I’ll be revisiting this theme in later essays as well.
In what follows, my thoughts take on a more serious turn. If it all seems too heavy in its tone, please forgive me and pass over it. But I think some of the mystery of our bonds with Middle-earth can be explained, and I’d like to try. I’ll be revisiting this theme in later essays as well.
Most of us Americans are not primarily attached to Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill or the other larger-than-life figures of our own raw and juvenile mythic past. For modern generations such heroes as Batman, Superman or Iron Man are just as mythic, and just as unapproachable. We may hang on their escapades and adventures, but we know it is all fantasy – there are far more Frodos and Bilbos among us than there are Aragorns or Boromirs, Supermen or Catwomen.
But we Frodos and Bilbos are all swept up in the dark storm of our chaotic reality. I live between American generations who bear the deep dark scars of war and now live everyday neighborhood lives, trying to cope with what comes in the night to them, with what flashes them inexorably back to some desert or jungle, with what makes their hands tremble or their words come haltingly. These soldiers of the World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and all the wars and battles in between and after, right through the Iraq Wars and the Afghanistan War, are in many ways a people set apart from the rest of us, as surely as Frodo’s experience of the Ring set him apart from his fellow Hobbits.
War is not the only source of such isolation. Violence stalks our sleep, and occasionally our lives. The traumas of imprisonment, of urban street fighting, of torture, of arson and murder, of bombings and mass shootings, of coping to the ragged edge in a hospital emergency department with the destruction and torments that curse our age, all these terrors generate heroes by the thousand, who must come home to try to rest for the next day’s onslaught. These people, just as do the soldiers, become isolated in their wounds, their witnessing, and their actions, and find few places where their pain is understood. In America, as in the Shire, we see such wealth and order and calm; why are we so filled with fear and pain? We seem to think that fear and pain can only be justified by living in the midst of total upheaval, but in upheaval we lose touch with one another. Isolated inside our pain, we become Frodo.
Perhaps this seems a bit overblown. But I have read comments over the years from readers of The Lord of the Rings, and many of these readers come from backgrounds in which trauma has played, or still plays, a large role. I can’t help feeling that one’s love of Middle-earth connects very strongly with the desire, the need, to be understood for one’s secret pain.
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