Rebuilding the Shire: Loss, Legos, and The Lord of the Rings

Lego’s The Lord of the Rings: The Shire set accommodates 2,017 items.

On what I can solely assume was piece #302, someplace between inserting fireworks behind Gandalf’s cart and assembling a tiny hobbit fireside, I burst into tears.

This isn’t an unusual response for followers of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s works normally: Reddit posts are dedicated to tear-inducing moments within the books, and followers congregate on-line and in individual to have a good time probably the most cathartic, iconic scenes within the movies.

It’s much less widespread to weep over a Lego set, however maybe extra telling: a reminder that transferring ahead generally means strolling again, that the cultural lampposts God gives in our earliest days can gentle our approach, later, by valleys of appreciable darkness.

My mom sparked my early and lifelong Tolkien obsession. She’d by no means learn his works herself. However she knew her daughter had an countless urge for food for studying and favored fairytales and myths, and I had just lately come residence with a superb report card. To Borders we thusly went, and I emerged with an version of the trilogy now most well-known for being extremely ’80s.

I fell in love.

There’s no different option to describe that headlong, enchanted tumble into obsession that all of us, at one time or one other, expertise over a ebook or a film or a recreation. It’s what drives us to memorize the recite the Litany In opposition to Concern or attend sing-alongs, what strikes us to get The Princess Bride tattoos or commemorate Could 4.

For Christians, such an expertise might be doubly significant and formative once we uncover a cultural artifact that mirrors our religion again to us, or that enlivens—purposefully or not—the values, virtues, and truths we maintain pricey in new and imaginative methods.

So to say that The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s different works fashioned me spiritually in a approach solely eclipsed by Scripture itself provides a way of their significance to my creativeness and understanding. I’m happy to have good firm in that have. The textual content provides exemplars of salvific grace in quiet, seemingly negligible acts of friendship and mercy, the noble goodness of a real king, the triumph of humility in opposition to incomprehensible darkness.

The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy started the 12 months I began school. My mother and I attended the midnight exhibiting for all three motion pictures. It was her probability to expertise the magic she had granted me: in my thoughts’s eye, nonetheless, I can see her beaming from the middle of a clutch of cosplaying Ringwraiths and hobbits in our threadbare Cinema 8 foyer.

You would possibly discover I’m writing about her previously tense.

My mother handed away over two years in the past from most cancers, after eight months of struggling. It was a tough, horrible time. Maybe unsurprisingly, God and The Lord of the Rings obtained me by. I learn the trilogy and passages of Scripture on repeat to consolation myself after the medical doctors mentioned there was nothing extra they might do.

As soon as, on a cellphone name after she realized that the therapies weren’t serving to, Mother stirred. “Frodo needed to go on a protracted journey,” she advised me. “And so do I.”

I stood on the shore, like Sam on the Gray Havens, and I watched her go away.

Religion gives solutions and solace for the darkish sorrows of bereavement however doesn’t all the time leaven the sting of loss. To have a mom with Christis to not have a mom right here. We all know God will consolation us and be current with us within the valley of the shadow of demise, however it’s no much less a valley for all that. As C. S. Lewis writes in A Grief Noticed:

We have been promised sufferings. They have been a part of this system. We have been even advised, “Blessed are they that mourn,” and I settle for it. I’ve obtained nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. After all it’s totally different when the factor occurs to oneself, to not others, and in actuality, not creativeness.

Life went on after my mom died, as life is wont to do—which is all the time the worst and deepest minimize of grief. I discovered solace in my religion. I threw myself into my work. I believed that I used to be mending, whilst I grew unable to observe or learn The Lord of the Rings with out dissolving into tears. I advised myself I used to be advantageous.

After which, over two years later, Legos: a Shire of two,017 tiny plastic items that I snap collectively on a tiny folding desk in my workplace. I construct Gandalf’s cart of fireworks; I cry.  I place tiny sunflowers on Lego grass; I cry.  I hearken to the Howard Shore film soundtrack as I rebuild the Shire; I cry. And I heal.

The flicks and video games and books that transfer us might be straightforward to dismiss, notably in non secular circles, as ephemera, because the objects of passing and immature affection. Our return to these websites of cultural significance, the place we encountered in early years the vivid articulation of one thing deep inside ourselves, would possibly look on the floor like little greater than nostalgia.

And but what they encourage endures.

What we love—what has change into, over time and tide, beloved—can converse our identities again to us in instances of profound disintegration and ache, can present an area for us to take part within the holy transformation that comes within the wake of loss. Returning to the books and films and video games that marked us in our youthful years, we keep in mind that who we’re remains to be, ultimately, who we have been.

With out realizing it, after my mom died, I divided my life into two eras: life along with her and life with out her. However the small, meditative apply of snapping tiny Lego blocks into place to recreate a world the place good exists and hope is fulfilled jogs my memory in a visceral approach that the calculus shouldn’t be so easy.  

Rebuilding the Shire, I’m nonetheless the kid experiencing the magic of the grand new world my mom opened for me. I’m nonetheless {the teenager} who was by no means too cool to inform folks I used to be going to see the midnight exhibiting of The Fellowship of the Ring with my greatest pal who was additionally, by the way, my mother. I’m the lady who should maintain going with out her, and—as I flip my face ahead in religion—I’m the lady who is aware of that harm and loss and sorrow shall be redeemed.

“I’m rebuilding the Shire,” I steadily announce to my husband as I slip away to place Legos collectively. What we each know I imply is that I’m myself being rebuilt, renewed, and remodeled.

Rising older, we regularly revisit outdated favorites in new methods. Our favourite characters change and our sympathies shift. Character arcs we as soon as noticed as simplistic maintain extra nuance. A heroic act to a young person would possibly learn like false advantage to a skeptical grownup. Our popular culture loves can change into a mirror of types by which we see ourselves revealed, a Narnia-like portal the place we will go to all of who we’ve been, and are, and have gotten.

Maybe it’s no shock, then, that such a return might be profoundly therapeutic, too.

On the finish of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo—bearing the deep non secular wounds of his journey—acknowledges that he should go away the Shire. As a part of his preparations to depart, he writes up an account of their journey, leaving an unfinished chapter and several other clean pages. “I’ve fairly completed, Sam,” he says to his dearest and greatest companion. “The final pages are for you.” So, in the identical approach, are the tales and popular culture presents of our childhood “for us”: ended, maybe, by an creator or creator, however a perpetual work-in-progress for individuals who return to see themselves in picture, phrases, or script. In valleys of darkness, these formative works function lamplight alongside the trail, artifacts of better grace—a spot of encounter between what’s written and what has not but been advised, a web site the place we’d linger and, if we’re affected person, permit ourselves to be healed.