“Tolkien.” One word. But a word that has great power of enchantment. Seeing it, or hearing it spoken, brings to life strange and enchanting places: Valinor, Gondolin, Lothlorien, Rivendell, Isengard, and Mordor. And even places that are not so much strange as strangely familiar (the Shire, Hobbiton, the Green Dragon) in which we feel at home, even though we have never been there except in the imagination.…

Tolkien calls us to enchantment because it is in enchantment that we find ourselves. Without such enchantment we are lost. He tells us as much in The Silmarillion when he speaks of the Creation of the cosmos as God’s Great Music. God is the composer of the symphony of Creation and we are his instruments.…