The Hero Tales

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Last week I re-read The Hobbit. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember the story. I taught The Hobbit every semester for several years in the only high school Science Fiction/Fantasy class offered in Jordan School District. But I had purchased a new paper-back edition of The Lord of the Rings (which I had only read once), and I thought The Hobbit would be a gentle re-entry into the world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, so I read it again. Once I finished The Hobbit and began actually reading The Lord of the Rings, I chose first to plow through a foreword with dozens of pages of teeny tiny print which provided a detailed overview of the genealogy and geography Tolkien created to tell his legendary tale–some of it based on scholarship from Tolkien’s own ground-breaking translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf.

Since the printing press wasn’t invented until centuries after the story of Beowulf, it is representative of the oral tradition which preserved history via songs and epic poems for generations. Tolkien’s story has multiple references to imaginary heroes whose daring deeds were recited yearly at celebrations and banquets. Those stories were at least partly intended by the elders to inspire the following generations to pursue their own laudable choices—a practice which gave me pause.

Why don’t we do that in our society today? Events we hear about from the media are almost always stories which feature losses of honor or respect, selfishness, violence, greed, lies, and sometimes even genuine, undisguised evil. What happened to the heroes? Perhaps they are all around us, and we are simply not paying attention?

A couple of weeks ago Daughter #2 and I made a quick trip to Boise, Idaho, to attend a granddaughter’s missionary farewell. (In case you care, she’s going to Jamaica. With her red hair and blue eyes, I’m pretty sure she won’t have any trouble attracting attention!) Daughter #2’s eldest son was our driver. We were just rolling along the freeway when he casually mentioned that last summer on a trip to California with a cousin and a friend, his car hit some foreign object on I-15 and blew a tire. Two cars behind him also slammed into whatever it was before they could pull off onto the shoulder and warn people. This grandson is a college kid who has worked a couple of years in a Walmart auto shop to pay tuition, so he whipped out his jack and had his tire changed in no time.

“So, then you were on your way without any other problems?” Asked Daughter #2, who hadn’t heard this story before.

“Nah,” he said. “First I changed the tires for the other two cars. They needed a little help.”

And then there’s Son #4. In my larger neighborhood there is someone I don’t like very much. That in itself is an oddity. I’m pretty accepting of people; I haven’t disliked someone in years. But this person relishes complaining. For example, last I heard, he was unhappy when another neighbor backed his four-horse trailer into his own corral—apparently, the tires left a little mud from the rodeo grounds on the street. Our grouchy neighbor made it clear he was not pleased. At one time or another, this difficult fellow has offended virtually everyone within line of sight–reducing several of those folks to tears–or threats of fisticuffs!

Not too long ago this same neighbor contacted me and wanted to borrow some tool from the far-reaches of my husband’s garage. Turns out the tool was at Son #4’s house. I had a nice little argument with myself about ignoring my neighbor’s request because I didn’t want to get in the car, drive to Son #4’s house, track down the tool, load it into my car, and deliver it to the neighbor. My only excuse? The neighbor is so dang nasty. But I took a couple of deep breaths, and I did it.

When I get to Son #4’s house, I can’t resist some complaining of my own about having to go out of my way for a person who isn’t very nice to me or anybody else, for that matter. “I’m seriously begrudging doing this,” I say.

Son #4 shrugs his shoulders and laughs. “That’s not who we are, Mom,” he says. “That’s not who we are.” And he loads the tool into the back of my car.

I am speechless. And chagrin. I tell him he’s a better person than I am. He thinks I’m kidding. I’m not.

I tell the story to Daughter #1. She smiles. “You can be better if you want,” she says in her matter-of-fact therapy voice. “We all choose.”

I think about that for a while. Tolkien’s hero Frodo Baggins threw an evil ring into a volcano to save his friends and his home. His story became a legend. Maybe that long ago code of honor behooves all of us to be a bit more conscientious about telling the tales of the heroes that we know personally, so our children hear the stories. And become them.