Lord of the Rings fans have a lot of reading to do. Another of the many books coming out these days about Tolkien is reviewed on the Books & Culture website; the review entitled “The Doom of Choice: Fate, free will, and moral responsibility in Tolkien” by David O’Hara.
It’s a review of the book Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings by Matthew Dickerson.
(I’m partly mentioning this to draw attention to the incredible Books & Culture: A Christian Review -- one of the best intellectual “book review” publications around, and worth subscribing to. I spend hours with each issue.)
What stuck me most about the film trilogy Lord of the Rings was the emphasis on the relation between the difficulty of responsibility and the freedom of choice.
O’Hara’s review takes this subject on: “Following Gandalf is a timely and relevant exploration of how military conflict illustrates the profound inner conflict of moral responsibility. Its basic argument is that Tolkien's restraint in describing battles exalts heroism, not violence; and that heroism is an image of the universal human need to strive for moral victory, which is made possible by real freedom.”