While Tolkien certainly had a category for complex moral problems and possessed a deep understanding of the need for wisdom in approaching moral difficulties, he had no category whatever for engaging in evil to secure good ends. One’s moment in history did not let one off the hook of acting with honour.

Man, Jack Meader’s essay on Tolkien’s “long defeat” was the perfect closing to the fall issue of Comment. Some essays carry the weight of a book that you want to have proudly displayed on the shelf so you can reference them for years to come. Another reason why it’s worth subscribing in print!

I love this take on Tolkien’s Shire:

In a letter written later in life, Tolkien remarked that “by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” In 1918 Tolkien was only twenty-six years old. World War I not only robbed Tolkien of his friends; it also deprived virtually all its European combatants of unfathomably large numbers of young men—permanently changing Europe’s demographics, culture, and ways of life. The world Tolkien had known as a young man really was conclusively overthrown and destroyed by the Great War. *Indeed, it is not altogether wrong to regard his creation of the Shire and even the fellowship of wandering men as a kind of love letter to that lost world, an attempt to show others who would never know it themselves what had once been.

What if we all challenged ourselves to write such a love letter — to act as though we were writing a love letter to the world?