Some griefs are unnameable. Some sadness sits on the edge of definition, flirts with the terms and words we use to categorize. Some, do not.
We know the way to mourn the loss of something specific, we have learned grief when a person, a place, a season, passes on or passes by. What then of those we’ve not yet named, what of those that ache in an unreachable place? What of the grief that comes when you sense with perfect clarity that the world itself is becoming less than it once was? That something is thinning.
That something that once was, faded away forever.
When trapped in the strange limbo that is airport travel recently, I stumbled across a random post that broke my heart because it combined two potent drugs my silly mind is known to crave: Nostalgia, and Fantasy.
It was about Lord of the Rings, in a way, but more than that it was about J.R.R. Tolkien himself, the man behind the words, the story, we all came to know and love. It spoke of what happens after LOTR ends, what becomes of Middle Earth long after Aragorn rules, the Elves depart for Valinor, the Dwarves mine deeper and deeper and more and more secluded into the earth, the Hobbits live in seclusion and eventually becoming completely invisible to the world of Men. The world of Men who are all that remain on Middle Earth, all whom continue on into the Fourth Age and beyond.
Enough time passes, and those same men begin to wonder if there truly was anything before them, if all those stories were merely myth, merely bedtime tales to soothe, or startle into submission, restless children.
I know this is a nerdy post, I know I’m really really showing my freak flag here, but this kills me, and knowing more of who Tolkien was, and when he wrote it, doubly so.
Tolkien lived through the very first World War before watching industrialization completely transform the England he called home. He sat on the precipice of change after World War II, after a great evil was defeated at great cost, war spreading over the countryside that was being swallowed day by day by modernization and progress. He saw old stories being dismissed as superstition, he saw things changing, forgetting, and felt what he once described as a “heart-racking sense of the vanished past” in a letter to his own son. Knowing this, the entire trilogy changes, the entire adventure becomes reframed. Forever I was in awe of Tolkien’s ability to imagine some new world, to build it with his creativity. Now I know different, Tolkien wasn’t imagining a world, he was documenting the departure of one. Of ours, in turn.
Think of it this way, if you’ll allow me to nerd out further: The Elves sailing West forever, and all those that did not fading in both body and spirit over time? Don’t we see this happen time and again in the form of our own elders, haven’t we seen all those that know the names of the plants, the shapes of every constellations, those that carried the oral traditions down, those beautiful native cultures that knew how to truly hear nature and this world of ours, fade away as this world refused to make space for them?
The Dwarves who go underground, who retreat into a world of greed and acquisition, digging further and further for the accumulation of great wealth, those who spend so much time toiling for more, that they forget the sky above them, that there ever was a sky at all. Are they not represented all around us in corporate greed, in the having of more than we could ever possibly need, the hoarding when others stay empty?
The Hobbits, dear hobbits. Forgotten by a world of Men because they lived such small, beautiful, rooted lives dictated by seasonal rhythms, by second breakfasts, elevensies, pipe weed, and parties. They are erased because simply put, no one bothered to notice, they built no monuments to themselves, they lived in harmony with the countryside that got replaced by industry. Lost with them every folk practice, every name for every kind of rainfall or storm, bird, fox, or vegetable they grow.
So what remains? Us. Us who wonder if any of those stories were ever real, at all. This is us, the disenchanted, the doubters, those who hear the myths and believe them false, who ask and ask again “Were they all just stories, in the end?” Yes, yes, and yes again. Myth, and only myth.
This is where magic fades. This is where we forget it ever existed in the first place. This is where the true lesson of Lord of the Rings emerges: the magic of Middle Earth doesn’t explode with Mount Doom, it doesn’t collapse in some great and terrible battle at the end of the Third Age, it’s simply forgotten.
It simply fades away.
Middle Earth is OUR Earth, only much, much earlier. If Frodo and Sam wandered their way to Mordor sometime in the Third Age, I sit here writing you in my own hobbit hole, sometime in the Sixth or Seventh. The land has changed, the seas have changed, the Misty Mountains have moved and merged and cities have sunk and burned and been buried by forests, but it’s here, it’s around us, all around us as we are lost in the disconnect from it, and from the myths it carried so far, and so long.
The tragedy in Tolkien’s story, the tragedy befalling us, is not that Middle Earth and its magic was destroyed, it’s that people just stopped believing it was ever there, at all.
I read his story now, and read it as both elegy and prescription. I read it as a testament to the power of re-enchantment, and as a dire need for it. To rediscover myth and the power behind it, to believe again, to make new stories, to pass them down again. Tolkien believed myth-making as not some childish pursuit, he believed it was the most adult thing a person could do, because it’s in creation that we reach back back back to what we were before we became so damn certain about all things. Before we ruined what could be it with what is.
We traded fairy tales for algorithmic feeds, time to create myth with perfect productivity. We’ve bulldozed forests to put up parking lots, we’ve replaced wonder with optimization, we’ve turned curiosity into a side-hustle.
Like imagination that I lamented a few weeks back, magic has been commercialized and bastardized and we convinced ourselves that the world isn’t magical anymore anyway.
The world didn’t change, friends. We did.
I just want to believe again, and I want others to do the same. Tolkien believed humans were meant to create stories, not as an escape, but as a recovery, as a prescription to SEE again. To walk this world and see ordinary things with fresh, with extraordinary, eyes.
We need Gandalf returning at “First light on the Fifth Day” and charging in with a hurricane of light and joy and hope. We need this hope, we need this light, we need to drive back the orcs and Uruk-Hai and cave trolls and evil dark wizards that are destroying all we love of this perfect perfect Middle Earth we share.
The Elves have sailed on, the Dwarves are underground, the Hobbits have long since been forgotten. But we are here, this world of Men (he meant all of us), this world of Humans who remain and still have the power to bring it all back.
You’re here, reading this, which means some part of you still remembers, or wants to. This is the first act in Tolkien’s beloved myth-making, the first sign of true resistance about what surrounds us. This is the first step back into believing again.
Tell the stories. Write new myths. Name everything your curiosity seeks. Do as Tolkien begged and “Look at green again, and be startled anew.”
Do not abide the fading of magic, do not abide the forgetting of myth.
Fight back, the only way that’s ever worked. Making true things and passing them on.
I love you all.
Be good.
