“Not all those who wander are lost.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has fascinated the reading public since it was first published in the mid-20th century. From 10-year-olds reading wide-eyed under their bed covers, to college-aged hippies of the 1960's, to fantasy buffs of every age today, to merely casual viewers of Peter Jackson's award winning movie adaptation of the trilogy -- each of us, for reasons personal to his own nature, is enthralled by Tolkien's world of elves and men, dwarves and wizards, orcs and balrogs. And, of course, hobbits.

Tuesday, I will attend the third in a series of five lectures at the University of Washington by Robin Chapman Stacey, a UW professor of history. In her first two lectures, Professor Stacey has emphasized a fact well known to Tolkien devotees, but perhaps not to the general public: Tolkien was first and foremost an accomplished student of philology and languages. He also was something of an English eccentric, the sort of guy some of us would love to have known, a man of great curiosity who simply loved messing around with words, grammar, syntax -- inventing his own vocabularies and etymologies -- a curious form of recreation that dated back to his earliest childhood.

Tolkien's specialty, his real love, was the Scandinavian, Germanic and Celtic languages of northern Europe, hardly a surprise to any reader of LOTR who possesses even a casual acquaintance with those languages. While Tolkien "should" have been concentrating on his research as a Professor of Philology and Linguistics at Oxford, he spent much of his spare time making up pretend languages and figuring out the rules by which they were derived from earlier, more ancient (and equally fabricated) lost languages. Eventually, he felt he needed an historical and mythical context in which to flesh out and explain the world from which such languages evolved. Hence, his writing of LOTR, and of his earlier novel The Hobbit.

To anyone for whom wasting time pleasurably includes reading medieval history and sci-fi/fantasy, and thumbing through dictionaries seeking word meanings and derivations -- this writer cheerfully pleads guilty -- these lectures have been a joy to attend. The titles of the five weekly lectures in the series are:

l. "He has been inside language" (Tolkien's love of creating "nonsense languages")

2. "A mythology for England" (The Silmarillion as the back-story for LOTR)

3. "The war to end all wars" (impact of World War I on Tolkien's writing)

4. "A fundamentally religious work" (impact of Tolkien's Catholicism on his work)

5. "Allegory and farewell" (later adaptations and criticisms of his work)

Professor Stacey has pointed out that many of Tolkien's Oxford colleagues considered his fantasy writings an enormous waste of Tolkien's time. They were disappointed that a scholar with such impressive potential for linguistic research should have allowed his focus to be diverted by such childish pursuits.

J.R.R. Tolkien's writings have awakened interest, for untold numbers of readers, in the medieval world, in Nordic mythology, and in the way language develops and affects our lives. He has brought bittersweet joy to children and adults alike. (I once read of a sixth grade boy who cried for days -- heartbroken -- after he finished the last chapter of The Return of the King.) God had created our own world for our enjoyment, Tolkien believed. Therefore, true worship of God and gratitude for that creation required that he himself wield his pen to "sub-create" new worlds for us to inhabit and enjoy.

Like Philip Pullman, who apparently hated the works of both Tolkien and Tolkien's friend and Oxford colleague C.S. Lewis, Tolkien created an alternative world to our own crowded, increasingly homogeneous, modern Earth, a world of primitive beauty and terror that has the power to lift our hearts and minds to a higher plane, and then to return us to our own world as more sensitive and creative human beings.

Not a bad way to have your life remembered. Hardly a "waste of time," eh?