March 27, 2015
To All Those Who Wander
By Sarah Madsen
English Instructor/Rhetoric Instructor
My father’s copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy are well-worn and their pages are slowly fading to the
color of the coffee stains. These books, when brand new, had been his fireside reading while on a postcollege cross country road trip. Years later, it was from these copies that he read the same tale of Frodo, the
Fellowship, and the One Ring to his four children. During one particularly vivid evening story time, my
siblings and I sat, captive listeners, on the wood floor of our hallway, as my father stood reading to us about
the mysterious Strider who watched from his shadowed corner of The Prancing Pony. Now, it is young
Aubrey Clark who I listen to in the hallway, as she stops to recite for me a passage from The Lord of the
Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring or to tell me what scene her father has just recently read at bed time.
I have always loved stories—especially these tales of J.R.R. Tolkien—and perhaps it is because they awaken
in me a recognition of something deep within my soul; although I am not always quick to acknowledge it. In
the words of Helen M. Luke, “[It] is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a long and painful return to that
which has always been.”1 Life, like all great adventure stories, is a hero’s journey—one fraught with goblins,
dragons, and orcs. Through myth we often awaken to the metaphor—symbolic and gnomic truths; it is for
this reason that fairytales must be taught.
As the hobbits flee from the danger of the nine Ring Wraiths, they find themselves thrown into the path of
Strider, a Ranger from the North. It was of him that Gandalf sent word to the hobbits:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.2
This lone traveler is revealed by his true identity as Aragorn, Heir of Elendil, and rightful king of Gondor.
Yet until the completion of the quest, he is an exile, cut off from his homeland.
It is this same word—exile—which I came across with my students while reading The Nibelungnelied; it was
employed to describe a homesick queen. An endnote in the text indicated the original word used was the
Middle High German ellende. In translation, it means “miserable, wretched, homeless.” Tolkien would have
recognized this theme repeatedly in his study of Anglo-Saxon poetry such as “The Wanderer;” in this elegy,
a warrior bereft of his king and comitatus3, laments:
1
Luke, Helen M. Dark Wood to White Rose; Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy (New York:
Parabola Books, 1993) 5.
2
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) 167.
3
Comitatus is the name for the Anglo-Saxon kinship group; a warband or “band of brothers.”
All is toilsome in the earthly kingdom,
the working of wyrd4 changes the world under heaven.
Here wealth is fleeting, here friends are fleeting,
here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting,
all the framework of this earth will stand empty.
Though I am not pursued by villains of Middle Earth—nor am I removed from country or kin—from time to
time I feel weary and as if all joy is fleeting. Daily life becomes monotonous, chores and responsibilities are
drudgery, friends live far away, and isolation is the most overwhelming emotion. Have you ever felt like you
are alone in your struggles? Do you too experience ellende?
Yet it is precisely this feeling of ellende that should comfort us. Whatever wretchedness and misery we feel
is a reminder that we have not reached home. To quote C.S. Lewis: “If I find in myself a desire which no
experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”5 So
we must all travel on, however long and difficult the road, however far from the safety and comfort of shires.
It is here at the midpoint of their journey that Samwise Gamgee reflects:
We shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose
it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I
used to call them. 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, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really
mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them,
usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it.6
We are in the same tale. This is where our path has been set, and while there is great peril, there is still much
this side of eternity that is beautiful and fair.7
In his play on the life of C.S. Lewis, Shadowlands, author William Nicholson writes, “We read to know we
are not alone.” So I read—letters, Scripture, songs—fairytales. And as I walk the halls of The Geneva
School, Jarrett Brodrecht stops to talk about his favorite characters in The Fellowship, Jack Calo asks where
orcs and dwarves came from, and my ninth grade students discuss with me their favorite passages about
Gollum and Gandalf. I am reminded that the same Strider I first heard of as a child, who sits in the shadows
at The Prancing Pony, is the crownless who again shall be king. My own wanderings begin to feel a little less
like exile.
For those whose hearts are attuned to eternity—for those whom the Father has called—this mortal life is the
limit of the miserable, wretched homelessness we will feel. Whatever dragons we might face, we must
remember that they will be beaten. Quests are accomplished, and return journeys bring exhausted travelers
home. It is in stories such as these that I find comfort. There is a line from a friend’s song that, as I listen to
it, reassures me that despite all my wanderings I have been claimed by Christ, and my home is with him:
To all who wander in the desert lands—
all who have no place to call home—
Christ is reaching out his nail-pierced hands
to bind up the broken and call them his own.”8
So may you read and be reminded: We are returning. We are exiles towards something. Not all who wander
are lost.
4
Wyrd is the Anglo-Saxon word for fate
Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity (New York: Harper Collins, 2001) 136-137.
6
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) 696.
7
This line is spoken in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, by the Elf Haldir to the Fellowship: “The world is
indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is
now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
8
This verse comes from the song “We Have Been Washed,” written and performed by Frankie Leo on his album
Moving to Good News.
5