Almost the End

Our fall schedule – the beginning of school, increased work-load, and re-start of some ministry work – has been keeping me hopping. Although I’ve been silent here on the blog, to the point that I think I am 31 days behind in my attempt to post daily, we have not stopped reading!

In fact, it’s looking as though both Lord of the Rings and summer are going to reach their official end around the same time. We have only two chapters left in LOTR, though the Scouring of the Shire (which we begin tonight) will no doubt take us two evenings at least. Then comes The Grey Havens and a lot of tears. (At least on my part. No one else in the family cries over books, though S. is already lamenting having to leave Middle-earth.)

After that, S. is hopeful that we can tackle some of the Appendices. She’s not sure she wants to hear every detail or not (I told her the stuff on languages, while fascinating, can get quite detailed!) but she does want to hear at least some of them, which makes my heart happy. I told her that epilogue-ish type material ended up there, including information on what happens later to some of our most beloved characters. She’s always liked epilogues (me too) and she definitely wants to hear those parts and perhaps some of the earlier history too. We’ve already delved a bit into the timeline, at least the part of it pertaining to the narrative in LOTR.

As a side companion to our family reading, I’ve been reading Fleming Rutledge’s excellent book The Battle for Middle-earth, which I just finished a couple of days ago. It is a beautiful theological commentary on LOTR, perhaps my favorite secondary reading on the books ever. Reading her made me want to turn to Tolkien’s Letters, which I think I dipped into originally years ago, and I got those on the hold shelf at the library today.

I’m still hoping to do a few more posts here to wrap up our read-aloud project. If you’ve stayed with me all this time, bless you!