{"id":37387,"date":"2019-01-17T01:00:44","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T06:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37387"},"modified":"2018-12-27T08:56:26","modified_gmt":"2018-12-27T13:56:26","slug":"qotd-frodos-sacrifice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/01\/17\/qotd-frodos-sacrifice\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Frodo&#8217;s sacrifice"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>I read a lot of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theimaginativeconservative.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Imaginative Conservative<\/a>. Their own description of themselves is as follows, \u201c<em>The Imaginative Conservative engages readers in a reflection on the great ideas, the great books and the great persons that make up our Western Tradition.<\/em>\u201d Dead white men \u2013 I suppose \u2013 as Berkeley know-nothings say. One of the frequent visitors to the page of the online journal is J.R.R. Tolkien. That British writer who gave the world fantasy \u2013 and thereby single-handedly made his indelible mark in the community of civilization. Tolkien\u2019s fantasy is beautiful, and it is profoundly conservative. At the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo and Sam return home to the Shire. The scene is called \u201cThe Scouring of the Shire\u201d, and they find Frodo\u2019s home, which he went to the fires of Mount Doom to save, defiled by Saruman. Frodo realizes, in shock and dismay, that even after defeating such a great evil as he has vanquished in Sauron, he must undertake one last fight to save his home which is being \u2018destroyed\u2019 by \u2018progressive progress*\u2019.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Tolkien was a true conservative \u2013 a romantic of the past \u2013 who understood that the value of our lives comes only if we understand the great ideas and epic struggles \u2013 those that the fires of time have purified \u2013 and learn from them, putting them to use in our own time, sprinkled with stardust product of nostalgia. But he was also of this world. The scene has always bothered me \u2013 the previous scene ends on such a high note that I\u2019ve always felt that the story should end there. But Tolkien had one last lesson for us. The \u201cScouring of the Shire\u201d it is said is taken from his experiences returning home from the Great War**; of how his Oxford countryside was changed forever by rapid industrialization, war-mobilization and a traumatized population. Of how things must change \u2013 and of how our fight to preserve that which is good in them is never-ending.<\/p>\n<p>That there are no safe spaces anymore.<\/p>\n<p>Joel D. Hirst, <a href=\"https:\/\/joelhirst.wordpress.com\/2017\/02\/23\/who-the-hell-is-milo\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Who the Hell is Milo?&#8221;, <em>Joel D. Hirst&#8217;s Blog<\/em><\/a>, 2017-02-23.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read a lot of The Imaginative Conservative. Their own description of themselves is as follows, \u201cThe Imaginative Conservative engages readers in a reflection on the great ideas, the great books and the great persons that make up our Western Tradition.\u201d Dead white men \u2013 I suppose \u2013 as Berkeley know-nothings say. One of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,41],"tags":[431,868,85],"class_list":["post-37387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-quotations","tag-conservatism","tag-jrrtolkien","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9J1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37388,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37387\/revisions\/37388"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}