{"id":240,"date":"2006-06-30T11:08:46","date_gmt":"2006-06-30T19:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/?p=240"},"modified":"2017-01-25T10:40:55","modified_gmt":"2017-01-25T18:40:55","slug":"tolkien-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/tolkien-and-me","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien and Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"J.R.R.<\/a>When I was in junior high (somewhere around 1979) an animated TV show caught my attention. It was the Rankin\/Bass production of The Hobbit<\/em>. I have never been the same.<\/p>\n

The next day I rode my bike through the streets of Billings, Montana to the tiny bookstore in West Park Plaza, the nearest thing we had to a mall. I can still see exactly where the Tolkien books rested on the shelves, very bottom, slightly left of center. Moments later, with money earned by delivering the Billings Gazette, I purchased my very first book. I rode home as if Gollum himself were after me, plopped sideways into my father’s favorite brown leather La-Z-Boy and did not move for four hours, except to turn pages. The next day I rode back to West Park Plaza and bought my second book, The Fellowship of the Ring<\/em>. Four days later, I had finished a four-volume work that in twenty five years has only been surpassed in my mind by one other book, Don Quixote<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Though The Hobbit<\/em> may not rank in my top ten favorite books anymore, that canary yellow paperback still occupies a prominent place on the bookshelves in my office, where it is now joined by two sets of The Lord of the Rings<\/em> paperbacks and two one-volume editions, as well as the extended cuts of all three Peter Jackson films, unabridged audio recordings of Tolkien’s works, and an entire shelf of Middle-earth reference books.<\/p>\n

Like many others, my life has been irrevocably altered by Tolkien’s works. Five years after reading The Lord of the Rings<\/em> for the first time, I set off for Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington to earn a medieval history degree so that I, too, could write epic fantasy novels. I graduated with the history degree, but I am still waiting for the epic novel to emerge from my subconscious. I’m not sure it ever will. In the meantime, I teach junior high literature in a Catholic school. Our first book of the year is always The Hobbit<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t going to make this first post about Tolkien, with all the oversaturation caused by Jackson’s movies, but I couldn’t honestly write about my love for literature without mentioning him. In fact, The Lord of the Rings<\/em> hit me so hard at the most impressionable time of my life, that I consider it divine providence. I have been a Catholic since birth, and I think my admiration and respect for Tolkien and his Catholicism prevented me from ever really having serious doubts about my faith. I believe, too, that Tolkien’s works had a great impact in reinforcing the formation of my conscience, and in teaching me about living a virtuous life.<\/p>\n

Neither of my parents went to college, or were especially academic. But their quiet faith and morality became a living, vibrant reality in The Lord of the Rings<\/em>, much in the same way that the invisible God became a living, vibrant reality in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

Tolkien is not the first or only one who has worked this miracle. Others before and after him have been able to capture a portion of Truth and Beauty in their words. Augustine, Dante, Cervantes, Dostoyevski, Undset, Chesterton, and many others have left the world a legacy of incarnated virtue and faith between the covers of their books.<\/p>\n

My intention in creating this blog is to provide a place where these authors and books can be held up like post-resurrection prophets, as witnesses to a Truth and Beauty that will point like a compass to true North and the heavenly bodies that reside there<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was in junior high (somewhere around 1979) an animated TV show caught my attention. It was the Rankin\/Bass production of The Hobbit. I have never been the same. The next day I rode my bike through the streets of Billings, Montana to the tiny bookstore in West Park Plaza, the nearest thing we had to a mall. I can still see exactly where the Tolkien books rested on the shelves, very bottom, slightly left of center. Moments later, with money earned by delivering the Billings Gazette,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[30,31,65,854],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-tolkien","tag-literature","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-the-hobbit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/06\/tolkien.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOucj-3S","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4096,"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions\/4096"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}