Middle-earth is marred by civilizational decline, the loss of hope among men, and a profound sense that the beauty of the past is doomed to decay. This slow fading was the author’s attempt to express something he had felt all his life, which he once described as a “heart-racking sense of the vanished past.”

When hope is gone, you must live with trust instead. And to live with trust in the good is to recognize that the small (but good) things around you matter: tending to a symbolic flame, honoring a funeral ritual when it slows you down, or helping someone with no ability to repay you.

A good world is brought into being by small acts of courage and... See more

The Lord of the Rings is a “eucatastrophic” story, to borrow Tolkien’s phrase. His characters are guided by a sense that a great reversal or turn in fortune — a “eucatastrophe” — is always just around the corner.

When Frodo breaks away from the Company, it seems Aragorn is pushed out of the central quest altogether. He comes to terms with the fact that he cannot control Frodo’s fate, yet this only sharpens his focus on what he can control. Saving Merry and Pippin may not play a part in the arc of history, but it is in service of the good, and so worthy of... See more

“That is one thing that Men call ‘hope’,” said Finrod. “Amdir we call it, ‘looking up’. But there is another which is founded deeper. Estel we call it, that is ‘trust’. It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience, but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He

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