Ivy Leaves Journal of Literature & Art — Vol. 86

N O N F I C T I O N 123 interactions, of gods and heroes and monsters. Scandinavia has Beowulf.

Greece has The Odyssey. India has the Ramayana. The Arabic regions have One Thousand and One Nights.

Gilgamesh, history’s first written epic, poses a question that has emerged in culture after culture over the millennia: What are we are searching for? As Gilgamesh wanders through desolate regions searching for immortality, he meets a woman named Siduri, who says to him, “Why do you come here wandering over the pastures in search of the wind?”

Most of us have not wandered the wilds of Mesopotamia or searched the ends of the earth for immortality, yet we are all wanderers. We are all searching for something, and many across the edges and expanses of time have turned to myth, have gone wandering through the words of fantasy.

Why? What comfort, what courage, what enlightenment do we seek in the supernatural fictions of mythology?

The Lord of the Rings was not my first encounter with myth and fantasy.

I grew up with C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and with the original Star Wars trilogy. A year or two before I encountered Tolkien, I read Madeleine L’Engle’s science fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time. All of these enthralled me with their excitement and adventure. In fact, it was probably childhood myths like these that inspired me to invent my own world, the world I made for my Barbies and drew in detail on computer paper. But The Lord of the Rings greeted me with something more than my past encounters with fantasy. It delivered that twinge Lewis spoke of, that longing so exquisite it almost hurt.

Perhaps timing made the difference. Tolkien visited me during a vulnerable time, a time I might almost name an identity crisis. I felt the pressure to put away my childhood, yet I was not ready. I was afraid of taking my own journey into the gray mist and the rocky terrain of adulthood.

That’s when myth took my hand. For all of us who feel lost, myth is a guide, a friend who shows us who we are and who we might become.

Western culture returned to myth, as I did, in response to an identity crisis. In the mid-twentieth century, the West grappled with its past and its future. The World Wars had shattered lives, redesigned national borders, and rattled the confidence of the last few hundred years. Gone was the faith in progress that had spurred the industrial revolution and the spread of democracy. By the mid-sixties, the tumult included the Cold War, the Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s rights, and youth rebellion. Four prominent figures, icons of hope for many, had been assassinated: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy.

Enter myth.

Though The Lord of the Rings was actually first published in 1954-1955, it was not until 1966 that its fame bourgeoned when a pirated edition was printed in the U.S. Soon, Tolkien’s fantasy had a cult following among college students, who liked the earthy, genuine hobbits and the pro-environment undertones of the trilogy. Jane Chance’s The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power describes a graffiti battle that began between the disgruntlement of modernist philosophy and the hope of modern myth. On walls, Nietzsche’s maxim “God is dead” was combated with “Frodo lives.” In his essay “He Gave Us Back Myth and with It, Truth,” Chris Armstrong commented that