Dear Readers,
I wrote this piece at this time of the year in 2015. It has never had a lot of readers but I enjoyed a wonderful conversation in the Comments section with those who did read it. I think that it is worth reading for that alone but I offer it to you with my greetings at this Christmastide and if any of you would like to join in the conversation I would be delighted to read your thoughts.
If I were to keep to my usual practice and to reflect on a passage from The Lord of the Rings as I read through the story then I would have to end the year, and to keep Christmas, with Frodo and Sam in Shelob’s Lair. I could not do this. Tolkien himself used December 25th as a day of hope in his story, the day on which the Fellowship left Rivendell to begin their mission. The dereliction of Shelob’s Lair comes later when Sam believes Frodo to be dead and wrestles with the choice of whether to leave him and to carry on the mission alone. We will reach that point in 2016. I could not spend Christmas thinking about it.
As I thought about what to write I recalled a piece that I wrote in December 2012 when I first began to write my Lord of the Rings
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Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings 