The Lord of the Rings and Myth

(Found here)

Owen asked him if he had read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. He had not yet read it. . . .

“If you wish to understand our times, you should read it,” said Owen. “It is the greatest myth of our age. It tells of the war in the heavens come down to earth, and thus as the reader lives inside the story, he returns to our own war with fresh eyes and better understanding.”

“Our own war?” asked Ion, with a quizzical tilt of the head.

“The war that will last until the end of time.”

. . .

A true myth was not so much literal as it was an embodiment of unseen ideals or spiritual realities, of truths at the foundations of human consciousness. It was a kind of narrative in the mind, a story with symbolic elements. It functioned as a light or signpost, helping man understand his position in a confusing landscape or helping him come to right decisions.

But there were also false myths, and it seemed to Owen that in his times such myths were becoming the opiate of the masses, the citizens of demythologized Flatland, the captive minds. Deprived of true myth, they chased after any drugging myth in order to fill their inner void: You shall be as gods, you shall decide what is good and what is evil, you create your own reality, all authority is authoritarianism, unbridled sexuality is liberation, organized religion is the maximum oppressor.

But the mythological faculty in the mind was not wrong in itself. The question was what kind of myth one chose, and this question became more urgent in a time of confusion, when the false myths threatened to swamp the imagination, pushing the true story of man to the sidelines and, if worse came to worse, to near extinction. All the more reason, then, to make a stand, to live the good myth without letting oneself be overwhelmed with self-absorption.

~Michael O’Brien  (from The Sabbatical: A Novel)