I'm Not Trying to Rob You!

Psyching myself out to step out the door.

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.

Bilbo had packed his bags, made his arrangements, and thrown an unprecedented farewell party. After long and careful planning his eyes were on the road ahead—he was going now. He was leaving! Yet as he arrives home to gather his belongings and set out on his journey, he faces an obstacle. He has to leave his magical ring behind, and suddenly that task feels impossible and undesirable. 

Gandalf intervenes with some tough love and hard truths, until at last Bilbo relents and drops the ring on the floor. With a thud or a thonk, you pick. 

Bilbo feels better already. Now he’s off!

If I Gandalf myself just right, I’m hoping this could feel just like that—I have an adventure in mind that I’m eager to take, but getting out the door feels hard. 

Bilbo finds it suddenly hard to part with his magical ring.

I first encountered Tolkien’s Middle-earth¹ on December 19, 2001 when my LAN-Partying, Magic The Gathering-loving boyfriend and I smuggled six lukewarm Cupid’s chili dogs under chintzy hooded cloaks into opening night of The Fellowship of the Ring. At peak 16, Aragorn, Arwen, and Gandalf heavily informed my internal sex and gender landscape. By my mid-twenties, my relationship with LoTR became like most relationships forged in high school: nostalgic and far-away feeling, sometimes rekindled when everyone was back home for Christmas.

Last summer things heated back up.  I’d be in a meeting and Aragorn would pop in to whisper something in my ear (confident, commanding, extremely hot). Galadriel’s freaky-beautiful face showed up in my dreams for weeks, I started playing around with conjuring up members of the Fellowship² and others in Middle-earth when I needed their help. Tom Bombadil held my hand extra tight in January and February.  I read the books, then I listened to Robert Inglis read them, then I listened to The Silmarillion, then I read the books again, until my “normal” internal chit-chat had been fully replaced with an ongoing conversation between my own lived experience and Tolkien’s sub-creation. 

This conversation has been keeping me better company than any I’ve ever known, and has been an unexpected but very brave and sweet container for my personal and spiritual work³.  I unfurl my own brain map and overlay a map of Arda, and each time more details come into focus. Mountain ranges shift and new paths appear through old forests. 

I want to try to write about what it’s like to have a costume trunk full of Elf, Men, Wizard, and Hobbit garb to rummage through and try on as I go about my day⁴. 

Well yes—and no. Now it comes to it, I don’t like parting with it at all, I may say. And I don’t really see why I should. Why do you want me to? 

I get so excited, and then I get lost. A fog rolls in and the task seems too big. Vanquished! My small sword and phial of light aren’t there in my hands where I’d just had them. I make a fifth piece of toast. When I ask myself what it is exactly that’s standing in the way of taking my first step of this adventure that I really want to be having, I bore myself immediately. 

The rings I’m struggling to leave behind come in so many boring colors and sizes: I can’t start until I get a proper working station set up; until I have a landing page; until an authority figure with an impressive degree and title tells me it’s a good use of my time.  Do I go chapter by chapter? Should I make it a read-along? Is it a one-woman show with the stage lights on bright, or more like a leaked confessional tape? Do I fundamentally lack the discipline to commit to a project that’s all my own? How much detail about Middle-earth’s cosmology/geography/history do I need to give for you to catch my drift?  And sometimes the ring is just will my husband stop being attracted to me if I don’t shut the fuck up about Hobbits.

I’ve been standing in my doorway with these rings in my hand for a long ass time and they’re only getting heavier.  Sound the horn Gandalf and for Aragorn—there’s courage to be mustered and action to be taken!

Bilbo took out the envelope, but just as he was about to set it by the clock, his hand jerked back, and the packet fell on the floor.  Before he could pick it up, the wizard stooped and seized it and set it in its place. A spasm of anger passed swiftly over the hobbit’s face again. Suddenly it gave way to a look of relief and a laugh.

Thud/thonk. 

Here’s what I’m imagining:

• I’m going to send a newsletter each week; let’s try every Friday morning.

• The newsletter is going to be about J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, The Lord of the Rings

• It might also be about the holiness of children, kismet encounters with forest creatures, long-term partner romance, mistake-making, sense-making, world-building, mountain biking, altered states of consciousness, God stuff, queerness, imagination, having a body, girlhood, among other things.

• I’ll move generally chronologically, chapter by chapter

• You don’t have to be an LoTR fan to read this newsletter

• I’m going to do my best to not get pulled into a back-and-forth dialogue about what I’m putting out there. For now, it’s gonna be a one-way street. I care very much about how/if what I say lands for you. I care maybe too much and so I worry that if I open the door for dialogue I run a high risk of really getting stuck there forever. Right now my goal for this project is to share pieces of this ongoing conversation between myself and Tolkien’s sub-creation.

I have exhibitionist desires that I don't have a feel-good outlet for, and I’m hoping it might be fun for me to invite you to peer into this journey of mine, and maybe over time it’ll spark a conversation between yourself and a new horizon. 

If you want to read along with me I’ll count this as a preview to the journey and give you a week to pick up a copy of The Fellowship of The Ring. They’re easy to find. Next week we’ll get acquainted with Hobbit folk in the Prologue and maybe talk about what to make of the book being named after the closest-to-pure-evil creature in Middle-earth’s Second & Third Ages.

Well, that’s that. I’m not sure yet if I feel any sense of a load getting lighter. Maybe after I hit send.

1. Middle-earth is the inhabited continent on a planet in a larger star system called Arda, contained in a universe known as Eä

2. That is Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, Boromir, and Legolas—four hobbits, one wizard, two men, one dwarf, and one elf chosen at the Council of Elrond to help Frodo on his quest to destroy the One Ring, forged by Sauron, by throwing it into the fires of Mount Doom, where it was forged. Though I don’t think I’ve ever summoned Legolas.

3. It’s important to me that you know that I know how embarrassing I sound when I get this earnest.

4.  There’s Dwarf stuff in there, too, but I haven’t played around with it so much yet.