Culture

Lord of the Rings Day

VM

25 Mar 2026 — 2 min read

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A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. This year I almost didn’t write this post because I don’t have anything to say about The Lord of the Rings itself.

Chiefly, I have tired of the antics of men. It’s not about some good men and some bad men. For instance we’ve got some really bad men, buffoons really, battling it out in West Asia and at the same time I work with some appreciably good men at my job who are doing their best to uphold values that we all admire. But it’s not that. It’s that toxic masculinity is enmeshed in so many of the ills that beset us today, from incessant war to daily life. I’ve had my fill of it but of course that doesn’t mean it’s suddenly going to stop or assume a different flavour. But I’ve had my fill of it. So much so that, I realised recently, I’ve become unable to read books by men. I’ve lost interest — temporarily I hope — in what masculine lives and masculine minds have to say.

So I turned to women, and found and read two excellent books: On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (translated by Padma Viswanathan) and The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken). Both were fever-dreams, On Earth like the inside of a pressure cooker and The Wax Child like an incantation. And both were about the cruelty of men, which I’ll admit was cathartic. I’m currently reading The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (translated by Ruth Martin).

The Lord of the Rings books are also by a man, and about many men and some women. But to his credit, J.R.R. Tolkien also crafted men that weren’t men because they were fighters but because they restrained themselves, cared for each other, were emotionally intimate with each other, and openly prized loyalty. In fact it had some men, Frodo and Samwise foremost among them, who were great because they were good friends until the end rather than because they were great warriors or brilliant scholars. Through characters like Faramir, Tolkien shows war to be an unheroic, even dishonourable thing and in its place extols the virtues of peace and healing. You don't often find such men in epic fantasy.

It seems, in the end, I did have something to say about The Lord of the Rings, and that’s why I keep returning to it every year on March 25.

Previous editions: 2025, 2024, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.

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