May it be a Light to you in Dark Places

A personal one today. I tell my students when we begin reading The Hobbit that I am sharing this story with them to really illustrate the power of literature and stories to impact our lives. This is usually the last novel we read in the year, and as a senior English teacher, this means it is going to be the last novel they read in high school. I usually begin by recounting the story I told in one of my first posts about how I came to read these books for the first time. I was also as a high school senior when I first encountered Tolkien.

Until this year, that was how my teaching of The Hobbit began. But this year, something happened that has now given me reason to expand the story, and I’d like to share it with you all today.

In early November of last year (2023), my wife gave birth to our first child, a little girl. But the birth was not an easy one. My wife was in labour for 30 hours, and the process included an emergency transfer from the birthing centre to the hospital across the street. When my daughter was born, it was clear within minutes that she was going to be taken to NICU (neonatal intensive care). She had swallowed a lot of meconium – some 60ml worth! To complete the trifecta of tragedy that day, my wife was lamed during the delivery and had to be carted around the hospital in a wheelchair.

I offer all that to say this: from day one of her life, I began reading Lord of the Rings to my daughter as she lay in the incubator in NICU. My wife would sit there and listen too, and when we were finally able to hold our baby girl, my wife would hold her as I read a whole chapter at a time.

I started with the prologue “Concerning Hobbits” because that’s just the kind of girl my daughter is – even as a one-day-old, she always reads the introductory material!

The NICU nurses would listen in as I read. It was a pretty small regional hospital with ten or so incubators and infant beds in the NICU room. It was pretty hard not to be aware of other parents sitting there with their little ones. I kept my voice low but still we would have eavesdroppers!

Now, I must admit that this is also partly due to my accent as much as anything. I am from South Africa, coming to the USA in my late teens, and I retain a pretty strong accent. It’s not English, but it is pretty proper all the same, and I’ve been told it is pleasant to listen to. My students love it when I read to them – even as jaded 17- and 18-year-olds!

Anyhow, back to the story. In Fellowship of the Ring, Galadriel presents each member of the company with a gift specially chosen to suit their needs, in many cases a need they did not even know they had when she gave them the gift.

To Frodo, she gave “the light of Eärendil’s star, set amid the waters of [her] fountain” contained in a little, crystal phial. Galadriel concludes with this blessing: May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.

The first thing to note about this gift is that it is not the actual light of the star but merely a reflection from the crystal clear waters of Galadriel’s mirror. That is, it is not the thing itself but a kind of shadow or hint of the thing seen. Even so, this light is enough to drive the creature Shelob away.

And what is Shelob? She is the child of Ungoliant – not directly/biologically but as a spiritual successor – who is a consumer of light. So, even a shadow or reflection of the heavenly light of Eärendil’s star is enough to drive back that which consumes light itself.

Now, I mention this because my daughter’s six-week stint in the NICU was probably the darkest period of my life, when I feared the most and all the lights seemed to go out. And the best I could do (and the place where I drew hope from) was to read The Lord of the Rings aloud daily in the hospital.

My family would probably be disappointed to know that I did not read her any passage from the Scriptures, and while my wife and I prayed beside my daughter in the NICU, we got no further than a handful of Hail, Marys, a prayer to a Mother from a worried mother.

But as I have already made clear in the ten or so posts on this new blog, I see in the works of Tolkien a reflection of the Christian gospel and message. This is not by accident, of course: though there are those who seek to deny it and remove the discussion of religion from Tolkien’s works, he was deeply Catholic in a way that few modern people are anymore. His works, though not explicit, are deeply, deeply Christian in their themes and symbolism.

But they remain a mere reflection. And yet, that reflection, like the phial that Frodo carried, was enough to drive away the darkness of those days for my wife and myself. Perhaps we did not read the Scriptures in the hospital because that light was too bright in those dark days; perhaps there were other reasons. But the reflected light in Tolkien’s novel was enough.

I said in my how I came to read Tolkien post that these books reoriented my life, and that I am a teacher today because I read them at the point in life that I did. The experience of reading to my daughter in hospital is an entirely different one.

It did not change my life but it was no less profound.

As I suggested above, the experience gives me scope to expand my introductory story for my students, to include not only that we read because it can change our lives, but that we read because stories can be a light for us when all other lights go out.