Finding Home in The Lord of the Rings
How journeying with Hobbits through Seven Homely Houses can Help us Find our Way Home.
(This is a rough draft of an introduction to a book I’m writing)
All of my life I have felt the longing to find my way back home.
Usually, the feeling is subtle. I’ll sense something just not quite right about my house, my relationships, or my life as a whole. But when I make subtle tweaks to move closer to this vision I must pause and ask, “Where did this vision come from? What picture am I comparing my life to that is serving as my guide to know what to move toward?”
Then there are those times when the desire is overwhelming. I feel utterly displaced. As if nothing exists in the whole reality of my limited experience that could possibly fulfill the desire arising from some deep place within.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger called this experience “thrownness” . Each of us has the experience of suddenly appearing in this reality wondering where we are, where we came from, and what in the world we are doing here. Is this why babies cry when entering this world? Do they know there’s something indescribably wrong about where they are? Is there any way to find our way back?
There are two great guides I’ve found in my search that have helped me to understand the reason for this experience.
The first guide is the Bible. If the biblical story is true one would fully expect to feel this experience. The story retells a time when our first parents were literally thrown out of a garden paradise. We all live east of Eden. Walking with God in the cool of the day in an ideal place of natural and curated beauty, a place of unbroken relationships and total intimacy is what we were designed to experience. But something terrible happened and we must find a way back to the tree of life. But we can’t return. Standing in our path is a flashing sword of the cherubim.
Countless authors have explored the biblical story and what it looks like to live a life formed by this narrative. Perhaps someday I’ll add my ideas alongside theirs. But I’d like to explore another story that maybe no one has used in quite this way.
This second guide is Book 1 of the Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is my opinion that Tolkien expressed more lucid and helpful ideas about home than any other writer in the history of the English language. He did this by sending a group of hobbits into exile. In his first published novel, The Hobbit, he describes the journey on the The Great East Road from The Shire to Rivendell or what he calls The Last Homely House.
But if Rivendell is The Last Homely House what other Homely Homes might exist along that same road?
We get the answer in The Fellowship of the Ring.
There are in fact seven.
Frodo and his companions in Book 1 of The Lord of the Rings have seven unique experiences of home. These seven homely houses give us a complete picture of Tolkien’s profound understanding of the nature of what home is and this book is my excuse to explore these seven homes with you and to attempt to mine the resources we can find in these narrative descriptions. Perhaps in this search, we might discover how to build homes in exile and understand the kind of home being prepared for us in a future garden city.
Tolkien loved to put maps at the beginning of his books to give his readers a chance to see where the journey is headed so here is your map for our journey.
The seven homely houses are:
Bag End
Gildor’s Haven
The House of Farmer Maggot
Crick Hollow
The House of Tom Bombadil
The Inn at the Prancing Pony
Rivendell the House of Elrond Half-Elven
We will peer together inside each home and ask questions like:
Why did Tolkien use this particular detail or description?
How does this reflect the ideal homes that we’ve lost?
How might we create a home today that might provide this experience?
What does this reveal about the ultimate home we were made to experience and that, by God’s grace, we will one day experience?
Before we embark on this journey let me issue one warning. Someone might rightfully ask if we’re living in exile and our future return is secured then isn’t the best path to simply learn to be content and not to make hopeless attempts at building a home East of Eden?
Learning contentment is crucial. Our family has practiced a festival called Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles for the past 10 years. This festival has as its theme the lessons we teach our children about rejoicing and being content in the midst of a life in exile.
God warned the Israelites that after moving into the Promised Land and living in houses they did not build and enjoying fields they did not plant that their hearts might rest so completely in his blessing that they would forget that the ultimate journey is ongoing. That even in the Promised Land we still must live by faith. His solution was to command the Israelites to move out of their homes for one week a year, build a temporary dwelling and point back to their house and declare to their children, “this is not our ultimate home, we are sojourners on the Earth and we must continue to walk by faith.”
Our favorite verse for cultivating the heart of a sojourner in our children is found in Hebrews
It was by faith that Abraham obeyed when God called him to leave home and go to another land that God would give him as his inheritance. He went without knowing where he was going. And even when he reached the land God promised him, he lived there by faith—for he was like a foreigner, living in tents. And so did Isaac and Jacob, who inherited the same promise. Abraham was confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God. Hebrews 11:8-10 NLT
Our goal in this book is never to deny the reality that we are all sojourners living in exile. We cannot build homes that can rival the home we are journeying toward.
The goal of this book is to so elevate our understanding of the nature of home that we, on one hand, realize we can never make a truly homely house on this Earth, but at the same time, we can build our homes as signposts pointing to our future home.
After all, God did give the Israelites homes and we must give the same to our children and future generations but in a way where every experience is like an inkling of the home being prepared for us who sojourn on this Earth by faith. Like hobbits, we’ll only ever catch glimpses as we contend with the evil of our day but these glimpses put steel in our spines to continue the journey no matter how dark the road.
Tolkien was fortunate to find companions who understood the depth of what he was attempting to articulate. His friend C.S. Lewis, while unable to express in myth these realities quite as clearly as Tolkien nevertheless surpassed his friend when writing prose in passages like this one,
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” -CS Lewis
With that said, are you ready to embark?
Because it’s time for our journey to begin by entering the Shire and walking up a hill through a narrow greenway where, in a hole in the ground, we’ll meet a hobbit.