Why Not Middle Earth?
by Natalie Keller Reinhart

At thirteen, I read Katherine Paterson's classic The Great Gilly Hopkins, about a punky little pre-teen who preferred "Gilly" to her real name. In the book, she found out that her given name, Galadriel, came from a beautiful queen in a book she'd never read: The Lord of the Rings. One day, I picked up one of a legion of books on Wicca; this particular one pointed out the many different traditions of Wicca, even, it said, people who drew their spirituality from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Good grief, I thought; are we just like that Dungeons and Dragons crowd?

Five years later, a lapsed and somewhat discouraged Pagan, I saw Peter Jackson's movies based on The Lord of the Ring. I'd always thought of elves as fluffy-bunny pixies-in-the-garden. But Middle-earth's elves were different: stern Elrond, gentle-fierce Arwen, fearless and loyal Legolas, and, yes, Galadriel - the Highest of all High Priestesses. I found the books and devoured them. Somewhere between Rivendell and Lothlorien, I found the path I was meant to walk.

One problem immediately occurred to me: The Lord of the Rings was a work of fiction. I was seriously considering basing my spiritual tradition on a series of fantasy novels? My irritating inner voice chided me, "You know that all this just came out of some old man's head. You know it isn't real."

"Yes," I replied silently, "but nothing else has ever seemed so real. All these years, I've been calling myself a Pagan and doing nothing about it. Look, now," I told my inner critic sternly, "I recognize these people. I know them. Now, through the Elves of Middle-earth, who love their stars and their ancestors and their trees, I can see a clear road to follow."

"Tolkien was Catholic," my critic replied, with the air of having driven the final nail into the coffin. And then: "Don't you get it? It was a novel."

Pondering this question, I found another: Where does art actually come from? I found my answer in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. The tenth and last grounding principle of the book reads: "Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source." All creative dreams and yearnings; my dreams, your dreams, even Tolkien's dreams share the same wellspring, the same God, Goddess, Divine.

I began to understand that Middle-earth's story needed to be told, and so someone was chosen to tell it. As Peter S. Beagle said in the forward to my father's battered 1973 edition of The Lord of the Rings, "The world that [Tolkien] charts was there long before him… He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams, and twilight fancies, but he never invented them, either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world."

I had forgotten that science and myth are not sure bedfellows: there is no more scientific proof for the existence of Ceridwen and Her Cauldron than for the Pool of Galadriel. The question of a myth's genesis is moot: for me, Middle-earth is a place so recognizable that the books are not anything less than a gift of the Divine. Maybe I'll name my daughter Galadriel after all.