What Tolkien Can Teach Us about Love and Family
My parents did everything to create for us a word of love, from the schools they sent us to and the trips they took us on to see the world, from the art they inspired us to experience to the community of neighbors that became extended family, from the advice they gave me about dating nice girls to the books my father made us read. His favorite was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s masterpiece he and my mother saw all the things that generate love—beauty, friendship, family, place. What sustains Frodo on his journey to Mordor is love, his love of his home, the Shire, his love of his friends, and of his Uncle Bilbo.
At the end of The Lord of the Rings Frodo travels to the Grey Havens, a seaport, and sets sail for “the undying lands.” This has been interpreted as a journey to heaven. But Tolkien experts have noted that the undying lands are a place where Earth has not been touched by decay. It’s a place to go before death, a holy land where the deep scars Frodo has received in life can heal.
With her watery eyes and soliloquies about love, my mother has entered the undying lands. Her memory is not good, but her grasp on reality is fine. She’s like Van Morrison in “Madame George,” praying to “the love that loves to love, the loves that loves, the love that loves to love, the love that loves.”
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