‘What will we do with the time that is given us?’ Reading Tolkien in a pandemic.

With each new day of uncertainty, losses big and small, and sheer exhaustion, people are experiencing a greater need to turn to sources of comfort – whether streaming the latest offering on Netflix, reconnecting (over the phone) with old friends, or simply baking something. When strength and courage run low, rereading a favorite book can be another source of comfort. And with over 150 million copies sold since its publication in 1955, a work many people reach for is “The Lord of the Rings.”

One reason the thousand-page epic has much to offer during times like these is Tolkien’s own experience. Having fought in the first World War and lived during the bombings and blackouts of the second, Tolkien was well acquainted with the trauma that accompanies an international crisis. In the preface to the second edition he reports, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”

In that same preface, Tolkien explains that while “The Lord of the Rings” was not intended to be an allegory for either war, it was meant to have “applicability” to the circumstances we face in our own world.

Early in the story, Frodo – a character who, like most readers, is not exceptionally wise, valiant, or powerful – finds a crisis literally thrust on him in the form of a great ring that must be taken to Mordor and cast into the fires of Mount Doom. Faced with the huge disruption this crisis brings to the peaceful life he has been living, Frodo protests to Gandalf, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

In Gandalf’s reply we find the most famous words Tolkien ever wrote.

“So do I,” answers the wizard, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Tolkien first reminds us there is nothing wrong with having feelings like Frodo’s. All who live to see such times, including Gandalf himself, wish that life could have gone on as before, with only the ordinary, day-to-day kind of demands. But this decision is not ours to make.

Gandalf does not stop there, leaving Frodo a helpless victim to fate. Frodo has an important decision to make, and, Tolkien implies, so do we. What will we do with the time that is given us?

Will we be concerned for others beyond our own circle of family and friends? Will we give way to frustration, fear, and anger in ways we later regret? Will we allow the way that we respond to the suffering and death we are witnessing become just one more thing that divides us?

Many chapters later, as Frodo and his faithful companion Sam pause for a last meal on the stairs of the enemy tower that holds the only way into Mordor, Sam comments on the adventures he has loved in the old tales.

“I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull,” Sam states.

“But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered,” he goes on to say. “Folks seemed to have been just landed in them.”

In stories written about the Covid-19 pandemic years from now when it has become an old tale, what will be said about the adventure we have landed in and what we did with the time that was given us?

Devin Brown is a professor of English at Asbury University and the author of “Tolkien: How an Obscure Oxford Professor Wrote The Hobbit and Became the Most Beloved Author of the Century.”