The Lord of the Rings is a Love Story

Or: Kyle Finnegan's pitching makes me nervous | Vol. 3 Iss. 8

Jun 12, 2025

In The Princess Bride, William Goldman starts the book with a fictional account of his own history with the novel he’s abridging. (There is no book to abridge, he just didn’t want to write transitions.)

He lays out a picture of a kid who doesn’t yet love books, but whose dad reads him the “good parts” of The Princess Bride while he’s sick. And the reason his parents realized he was feverish and delusional was that he sat (again, this is all fake) furiously turning the dial on the radio to find a baseball game that wouldn’t air until the next day.

If I catch a bad flu, I don’t expect my feverish obsession will be finding the Nats broadcast on the radio. I don’t even think it will be hobbits and elves. But I’m still so grateful for the time I’ve spent with both this spring.

Spoiler warning: There might be spoilers for any of the Lord of the Rings books or movies in this blog, but I don’t know because I haven’t written it yet. Thank you for letting me experience these stories without spoilers. (I know some of you have very carefully not sent me memes until it was time.)

An Intentional Journey

Earlier this year, I set out to explore a world I’d never really delved into. I’d seen others around me and online express their love for Tolkien’s universe and its plucky heroes, and I was curious - not just about the lore of this particular story, but about the obsession it seemed to inspire. (I still haven’t figured out what a LotR wedding looks like, but I think it exemplifies that obsession well. People devote one of the most joyful days of their lives to this story because it brings them that much joy as a couple.)

What I found was both more exciting and more complicated than I expected.

I fell in love with the hobbits, especially in Fellowship. I saw an escape to a friendly, beautiful community. I saw the Shire brought into colorful life by the film. (The movies, for all my critiques, are gorgeous.)

Even though I knew where the story must eventually end, with the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, it turns out I knew very little of how it got there, or what it cost the characters to even get close to their goal. I felt like I was filling in gaps in a tale I’d been picking up pieces of my whole life.

And it was, after all, an exciting story, full of richly drawn characters and compelling relationships (Sam and Frodo forever).

It was also wonderful to see the roots of so many other great fantasy stories in this one. The first (well, only) time I watched Anchorman I suddenly understood that some guys I went to high school with weren’t actually that funny, they were just obsessed with Anchorman. And I do think the stories that have come after Lord of the Rings are original, but I had a similar feeling of seeing why things are the way they are.

Seeing those roots also let me see that something can be important for stories and important for its fans without being perfect.

I’ve spent a lot of column inches on the ways I think the structure of these books holds back the story, and I won’t belabour the point here. Some of the characters are more three dimensional than others (and certainly a few more lose their depth in the transition to the movies).

These are, in some ways, sort of messy stories, translated into sometimes messy films that fix some problems and create new ones of their own.

Why Can’t the Nats Get Above .500

Around the same time that I picked up Fellowship, Will and I bought a ten-game Nationals baseball ticket package.

We’ve been to games before; the stadium is an easy walk from our apartment. But our attendance has been sporadic. The tickets were cheap or the weather was great or people were coming to visit. (Sorry if you came to visit and the weather was decidedly not great.) But with these ten games (seven so far, three to go), we’ve committed to tracking the arc of the season.

Before spring training had even begun, I subscribed to the Nats Chat podcast, which in season releases a new episode the morning after every game. For nearly three months, I’ve started almost every day listening to Al and Mark rehash the trials of the day before as I take Roxie for a walk (read: look at squirrels).

It’s become a ritual, and it bridges the gaps between the games where we actually have tickets.

We don’t have a subscription to stream the games on TV and my draw to listen to them on the radio is less than Will’s. (About once a week he sits in our bedroom with a score book and I fall in love again.)

But through the podcast, and through Sunday afternoons spent with my feet kicked up on the back of a seat in the 400s, I’ve come to care about the ups and downs.

I look forward to the days when ace MacKensie Gore is on the mound. I bemoan the end of Keibert Ruiz’s hot streak at the plate. I hold onto something sturdy when Kyle Finnegan comes up to close a game and lets just one guy on base to make it interesting.

I care.

In some ways, I think my Nats project has been more effective because it feels immediate. The story is still in progress. These men I have never and will never meet could get it together and beat the Mets this afternoon and then go on a surge in the next homestand. By the time of our next home game tickets, the story could have changed.

Choosing to Love Something

I didn’t come to The Lord of the Rings as a school kid picking up a battered copy of The Hobbit, and I didn’t grow up sitting in the stands at Nationals park with a tiny baseball glove and a hat too big for my head.

There are moments when I wish I had.

I see the way Will talks about Alabama football. The stats come as easily to him as breathing. His love for the team has been handed down through generations. He was at a game before his first birthday.

I am left, instead, to choose to love these things.

I have attempted this spring to create my own fandom. I dove into these books and movies that inspire obsession. I bought a vintage Nats jersey on eBay. I spent hours reading and watching and writing, chasing the feeling of truly feeling like these stories are mine.

I think it’s a project that can work. I did not grow up with the Crimson Tide but through two years of playing louder, faster, higher with the marching band and nine more of watching games with Will, I’ve come to love my team.

And where I have been successful in my projects with LotR and the Nats, I think it’s been in finding community through those things.

As I was nearing the end of my LotR read/watch, Catherine (of the fantastic LitChat, like and subscribe!) gleefully tried to explain this video to me over brunch:

I did not understand the full madness of it until I finished the Return of the King movie and pulled up the video as a chaser. But I will now always associate it with Catherine’s explanation, giddy and so happy to share this meme that I somehow missed for my entire time on the internet.

Walking home from a Nats game a few weeks ago, someone on a bike saw our shirts and called out to ask if the team had won (they had not). In church, I look out from the choir to count the clear bags and bright red t-shirts, figuring who we might run into at the game later.

I am perhaps too late to find feverish radio-dial, bone deep obsession for either the Nats or the hobbits, but I hope to hold on for a long time to the people I can gain through both.

And I can also hold onto the things that I came to at the right moment to find that kind of fandom for. I can sing along to the 90s Guys and Dolls revival album and think of my mom putting the CD into the stereo in the living room. I can turn on Taylor Swift and think of middle school sleepovers spent watching the Picture to Burn music video on a giant desktop computer. I can crack open a P.G. Wodehouse novel I haven’t yet come across in a decade and a half of searching libraries and used bookstores, having run through all my dad’s paperbacks, and feel like I’m coming home.

Two final Lord of the Rings notes, before what will probably be a hiatus on that front into the fall. (The newsletter will be around, just probably back to assorted topics. It’s about to be wedding season…)

Apparently a bunch of tech dudes think they’re the hobbits of their story, and it’s hard to imagine being this wrong:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/books/tolkien-musk-thiel-silicon-valley.html

And, much more delightfully, my two fandom quests are connected! Several of the Nats players have started a Lord of the Rings book club. Including, in one case, just putting the books in a guy’s locker and he was like “okay, well I guess I’ll read that then.” There’s still good in the world.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/05/27/nationals-clubhouse-reading-trevor-williams/

Reading

I am only two chapters in, but am really enjoying the immersive world of Angela Hsieh’s brand new graphic novel Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology. Angela and I interned together at NPR years ago and she gave a delightful reading of the book’s prologue a couple months ago that scared Roxie because of the bird sounds. The art is gorgeous and I already feel so attached to little Lu and her adventure. This is definitely one that works even if you are older than the target middle grad audience!

Cooking

I guess this is a recipe recommendation but it’s also a disaster story. I have a little countertop herb garden and the only thing that’s been doing remotely well lately is the Thai basil, so I decided last weekend to make Pad Kee Mao. So far so good. I didn’t think any of the grocery stores by us would have the right kind of noodles, so I decided to make my own, steaming a rice flour/potato starch batter in a skillet. (I was following a recipe, this is not their fault.) And the end result was that the flavors, including the fresh basil, were fantastic. And the noodles were a big sticky mess that fell apart the minute they hit the sauce. In the future I will a) go to the very good Thai restaurant three blocks from our house and b) just buy a slightly different kind of noodle.

Watching

A couple weeks ago Will and Katy and I went to see a middle school production of The Wiz. It has closed, you can’t go see it, the magic of live theatre is that it exists in the moment. However! We had an absolutely fantastic time, including sitting behind the Tin Man’s uncles in the audience. The recommendation, then, is two-fold. One, go listen to the Wiz cast album and get these songs stuck in your head and two, go support local events! We’re getting a little late for school musicals/sports/art shows, but they’ll come around again. And they’re well worth the price of admission.