Since I’m on a Lord of the Rings kick:

One thing I love is the contrast between (1) how enormously comprehensive Tolkien’s universe is and (2) how so many of us are first introduced to it. It makes me think of how things relate to each other in our own universe.

The events of the Lord of the Rings trilogy are just a small portion of the vast timeline of events in Tolkien’s universe. Even Middle-earth itself is only a part of that universe. It was just a few years ago that I tried reading The Silmarillion for the first time, which is essentially Tolkien’s Bible: it contains the creation story of his universe, followed by the stories of other significant events over the course of time, all in exalted language. Tolkien’s universe has an incredibly complex cosmology, which I didn’t even realize until I found the Wikipedia article in that link.

This is the way The Silmarillion begins:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought and they were with him before aught else was made.

Pretty heavy, abstract stuff.

And yet this is the way most of us are introduced to this vast universe of space and time:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

Instead of beginning at the beginning, with these vast cosmological beings at the creation of the universe, we enter Tolkien’s universe obliquely, sideways as it were. Out of all of Tolkien space-time, we zero in on a particular, totally accessible time and place — the comfy home of a hobbit, in a village in the Shire, in a year toward the end of the Third Age.

You enter Tolkien’s world through a simple adventure tale that a child can appreciate, and it slowly grows to encompass an entire cosmos — one you don’t even have to understand (and I sure as hell don’t), or even know about, in order to enjoy the tale. In fact, you can read the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy and not worry at all about the larger cosmological universe in which it all takes place.

I just find this idea very profound. It’s just like how in the vast universe (or multiverse) in which we live, an existence of stars and galaxies and supernovas and black holes, we can zoom in on a place called the Milky Way galaxy, and then in on the solar system, and then planet Earth, and then a city, and then in through a building via a sunny office window (sunny because it’s lit by an insignificant star), where we see an entity called a human being, sitting at a computer typing at a keyboard, worrying about various things that concern him in his life, utterly bound by the flesh of which he’s made and by the five senses that his body has given him. Earthy and crude and mundane and utterly insignificant in a span of several billion years, and yet on the other hand utterly important to himself and to the people in his life.

To a hobbit, elves are mysterious, exalted, wonderful beings — and yet the elves themselves are as but children of the universe.

The scale of Tolkien’s universe reflects the scale of our own, and I love that.