Thank you to all of you who have reading my weekly blog on J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings since December 2012 at http://www.stephenwinter.net/page6.htm I will continue to post it there as well as here for the time being but increasingly I have found that people have found difficulty using that site and especially leaving comments. I really want to develop the conversation that has begun with a few and so I have decided to start publishing it here at Word Press. I do look forward to a conversation with many of you.
When J.R.R Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings he saw it at first as a distraction from his great work which his son Christopher has been making available to us over many years. His publishers had written to him after the great success of The Hobbit, asking him for “more about hobbits”. Tolkien responded by asking “But what more can hobbits do?” Thankfully his publishers persisted and the great work that we know today painfully came into being.
I believe that The Lord of the Rings is an answer to Tolkien’s own question. It is not just that they prove more durable in tight situations than most consider them to be. It is that only hobbits, and one in particular, Frodo Baggins with his companion, Samwise Gamgee, are capable of doing the one thing that can save the the world from destruction and that is to take the One Ruling Ring to Mordor and to unmake it in the very fires in which Sauron first forged it. I see this, above all, as a spiritual capacity that they discover within themselves and which completely eludes the capacity of most of the great ones of their world to see. Only those who have begun to find the same capacity in themselves are able to do so.
As I invite you to read these short pieces that I will publish each week I want to say that I believe that is only by finding that same capacity, the capacity that the hobbits discover as do others in the story such as Gandalf, Galadriel, Aragorn, Faramir and Theoden can our world be saved from the destruction that we seem to be taking it into. As I write these posts each week I hope that I am beginning to understand and even to begin to find it in me. I invite you to seek to do the same.
Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings 
Well done Stephen. Congrats on the new site.
Can I make a suggestion. In the “Dashboard” section, click on “Appearances” then on “Widgets”. On the right hand are a number of “widgets”–little blocks that do things. In the centre column of your screen are all the choices. I’ve put “recent posts” and “most popular posts” on my right hand column of the front page by dragging the mover.
Can I recommend dragging the “follow my blog” button over? I can click “follow” on the top of your screen, but it goes to a reader that I don’t check that often. Clicking the follow button you put on the right column–the widget–allows it to go to my email box.
So just drag the “Follow My Blog” widget over to the right hand column and it should work.
Thanks for being the first to comment, Brenton! It was thanks to your recent interest in my blog & the encouragement of my good friend, Richard Goode (the main commenter on my website blog) that I decided to do this. Thanks for the advice as well. I shall certainly take it.
Cool!