Nostalgia & The Lord of the Rings

Ajouté : 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]I'm certain that the Lord of the Rings has been a fundamental part of many of our lives. Some of us may have stumbled upon it as adults. Some of us may have had it as part of our earliest memories.

[00:00:10]But I firmly believe that all of us look back at the Lord of the Rings with some sort of feelings of nostalgia. Nostalgia was first classified as a mental defect and is now considered an emotion, but it has always been incredibly potent.

[00:00:26]Nostalgia is technically a reminiscence of the past, but it can actually tell us much more about the present. The Lord of the Rings is saturated with this sense of nostalgia, both within the story itself and within our cultural perception of the novel. Tolken took this very human familiar sentiment and transformed it through the mirror of fantasy, proving that nostalgia can be an agent of consolation, caution, and change. The term nostalgia was first coined in the 17th century, but the concept has much older roots. It can be found in tales like Homer's 8th century BC poem, The Odyssey. The Odyssey tells of Odysius's 10-year voyage home from the Trojan War, where he's plagued by a constant sense of yearning and homesickness. The poem is considered a nostto, a song about coming home. There are quite a few stories that fit this nostto category. Everything from Beaolf to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it makes sense. Journeys are compelling in part because of where the characters are going. And what could be more compelling than all the myriad of emotions wrapped around the concept of home. Home is a changeable bittersweet thing, especially our memories of home.

[00:01:49]For someone like Odysius, coming home means returning to his wife, but also reckoning with the possibility that he may meet his end there. Or at the very least, he may have to confront how radically things have changed in his extended absence. Anostus is characterized by equal parts of yearning and trepidation when it comes to the journey homeward. Likewise, the concept of nostalgia has always been twined in with complex feelings. The term derives from the Greek nostos, which is homecoming, and algos, the word for pain. Nostalgia then is a painful return. The term was created in 1688 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hoofer. He noted that when people such as soldiers or domestic servants left home for extended periods of time, they often saw a decline in their mental and physical well-being. A number of symptoms were attributed to Hoofer's nostalgia, including weeping, fever, erratic heartbeat, and disordered eating. Hoffer described the condition as being the result of the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the fatherland still cling. It was alternatively proposed that nostalgia may have resulted from changes in altitude. The condition was first identified in the Swiss Alps. So perhaps a departure from home also meant a sudden change in altitude possibly for the first time in your life resulting in this nostalgic unwwellness. Later on it was suggested that nostalgia may be a result of the constant clanging of cowbells in the Swiss Alps causing lowgrade damage to the ears and brain.

[00:03:33]But whether it was animal spirits, altitude or cows, nostalgia turned out not to be a feeling exclusive to Switzerland. and cases of Hoffer's disease would begin to sprout up all across the world. And because nostalgia was in their perception a disease, cures were introduced. These included everything from burying a nostalgic soldier alive as a warning to others not to fall prey to the condition and treating sufferers of nostalgia with quote pain and terror. And let me just say, I am very grateful to have never come away from a doctor's appointment with a prescription for that. By the dawn of the 20th century, nostalgia was re-examined and recategorized as a psychiatric disorder akin to depression or shell shock. Symptoms were listed as anxiety, oppressive sadness, and insomnia, and were thought to be caused by things like grief or extreme loss.

[00:04:29]Nostalgia saw a major rebrand in 1979 with Fred Davis's yearning for Yesterday, a sociology of nostalgia, which reframed the disease as an emotion more than anything. This book established nostalgia as an emotion separate from homesickness. Homesickness involves missing your home when you are absent from it, but nostalgia is more specifically a yearning for things as they once were. Unlike homesickness, nostalgia requires no distance. You could feel nostalgic about the way your living room looked yesterday while your friends were hanging out with you. You have not left home spatially. You are exactly where you were and yet you yearn for something. You could even feel nostalgic about a moment as it is happening because you are aware of how fleeting and ephemeral that moment is.

[00:05:24]Nostalgia is also compared to homesickness much more universal.

[00:05:29]Homesickness tends to be very personal experience-based. It's based off of what your specific memories are. But nostalgia can be made up from a shared experience. It sees the places and time of the past not as it literally was, but through the hazy window of memory. And these notions of how things were tend to be shaped by the culture around us. It's been found that similar shared nostalgic sentiments arise across cultures, locations, languages, even appearing similarly in children and dementia patients. While individual experiences and memories play a part in nostalgia, the feeling is also very much made up of a communal act of remembrance and of rewriting our collective past. So, you couldn't really be homesick for a fictional world. It was never technically really your home, but it is certainly possible to be nostalgic for a fictional world. And many of us experience this in regards to JRR Tolken's Middle Earth. Tolken was the kind of man that Johannes Hoffer would have loved to study. Throughout his life, he yearned for an imagined past, a past built from scraps of old stories, fragments of languages, eagerly devoured fairy tales. He enjoyed history, but more than that, he enjoyed the stories of history like the pros eta, the Calavala, and the Mabanogian. Tales that augmented the realities of history with the glitter of fairy. He writes in his essay on fairy stories, "I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful at whatever cost of peril. Tolken was never under the illusion that these stories were real. In fact, he wouldn't have even wanted them to be real. But the imagination of these things, the nostalgia for them had a beautifying effect on the world. Tolken pours this desire for a magical mythic past into Middle Earth and gives us a vision of a pseudo medieval world, not as it was, but as it is useful and exciting to imagine it was. This was such a powerful guiding force in his writing that even the people of Middle Earth yearn for a more magical time. By the time of the Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth is a world in decline, scrabbling to recall what fragments it can from antiquity.

[00:08:18]The tales of the first age paint a vivid portrait of history with earthshaking victories, cataclysmic betrayals, and dramas so profound that they shatter the bounds between life and death. The past was a time when gods walked among men, when elves lived thousands of human lifetimes, and when wars would reshape the form of the earth. By the third age, the parameters of greatness in Middle Earth have changed radically. Aragorn is considered a great king, but he will never face dragons on the field of battle. Sauron is a terrible evil, but he works insidiously through trickery and magic rings, not through massive offensive attacks. While the victories and losses of the Third Age are powerful, they are nothing near as dramatic and large scope as those of the earlier ages. The last vestigages of Middle Earth's bygone magic are drifting away in the wind of time. Mankind is stumbling their way to dominance.

[00:09:22]Treebeard the ant notes that there is a change in the air and that his time has passed. As the light of Lothal Lauran waines, Galadriel explains to Frodo that his quest will end in one of two ways.

[00:09:35]He will fail and Sauron's power will snuff them out forever. Or he will succeed. She tells him, "Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Loth Laurian will fade, and the tides of time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West or dwindle to a rustic folk of Dell and Cave. Slowly to forget and to be forgotten. No matter the outcome of the War of the Ring, the time of the elves is over. The bonfire of the first age has burnt itself into coals and soon will be extinguished entirely. All that will remain is a ring of ash and a memory of the warmth that once was. This feeling of profound loss is likely one that's familiar to all of us. The world is changing before our very eyes. Tolken watched the arrival of electricity, of the car, of the industrial revolution tearing the old ways out of his grasp. We in turn have watched the rise of the internet, the smartphone, the jet engine, and the past seems ever more distant and ever more irretrievable. And yet, this is not a new feeling. The old English poem, The Wanderer, is at least as old as the 10th century. So, that would make it over a thousand years old. And it presents us with a man who was once a warrior and is now a wanderer. His only companion is his memory of the old days. an irretrievable past. A passage in the poem reads, Nales fen gold focal fen blood. He laments the loss of the old ways of his old friends and has found only cruel sorrow and exile in their absence. This is a poem that Tolken directly references in the Lord of the Rings having the Roherim sing a song that borrows the lines from later in the poem where now the horse and the rider where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hawk and the bright hair flowing? Tolkien knows that his yearning for a world long gone was not an original experience and he draws a direct link from our world into his created world. It makes for this timeless connection uniting us to humanity both in the real world and in his fiction through the bonds of nostalgia. This is especially true when it comes to the hobbits, the most human of all the characters in Middle Earth.

[00:12:18]It is through the hobbits that Tolken makes his expressions of nostalgia the clearest. Because reaching back to that old homesickness connection, they have probably the best defined sense of what home is. The Shire, for better and for worse, is the epitome of home. And a lot of this familiarity is evoked through the aesthetic. The aesthetic of the Shire is essentially that of the turn of the century English countryside as Tolken remembers it. He recalls a pastoral oasis, one with rivers and rolling hills and lush green growing trees, a place that was still quiet and reluctant to advance into modernity. He imagined somewhere trapped in the bubble of timelessness where people still respected and loved nature and where advancement was mindful and slow. The actual homes of the hobbits are also especially grounded and comfortable.

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[00:15:03]>> And if you're interested in owning a burrow of your own, follow Tamarlain Yurtz or Jess of the Shire for more news on that coming soon. Thank you so much to Tamarlain Yurts for sponsoring this video and thanks to all of you for checking out my sponsors. The vision of home that Tolken painted for the Shire is one that is almost universally recognized, especially to the Western world, although it's not always recognizable on a literal level. Most of us didn't have the pleasure of growing up in the exact place and time that Tolken did, but the Shire taps into a vision that decades of storytelling history have familiarized us with. The Shire is the quintessential story book home located in a place vague enough to feel close at a time just between the obsolete past and the overactive present. Tolken sketches the outline of this perfect home, but leaves room for your imagination to paint the picture in whatever colors are most nostalgic to you. Peter Jackson's Middleear movies have obviously had the heaviest hand in establishing what people see when they think of Middle Earth, but I think I have yet to see someone that did not gasp when they saw the Shire for the first time. Whether or not we've actually been in a place like this, it just looks like home. And because we're nostalgic for the Shire, that means that we feel the yearning for its memory just as much as the hobbits do. When the journey calls, they're excited on the one hand to play their part in the great stories, but they're also desperately apprehensive. As the hobbits depart for their quest, Tolken writes, "Sam had a strange feeling as the slow gurgling stream slipped by. His old life lay behind in the mists. Dark adventure lay in front. He scratched his head and for a moment had a passing wish that Mr. Froto could have gone on living quietly at bag end. Leaving the Shire is not simply leaving home, but leaving an entire life, an entire world behind. But it is their memories of this life that keep the hobbits grounded. As Froto and Sam travel further and further from home and safety, they seem to find comfort in the stories of the old days. They imagine themselves to be a part of that tradition and contextualize their troubles as part of a greater scheme.

[00:17:23]They enjoy the fact that their deeds are something that people of the future will become nostalgic about. It is the sense of purpose spelled out boisterously by Sam that allows Froto a moment of levity even as the two of them march into the land of shadows.

[00:17:40]Froto laughed a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle Earth. To Sam, suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them.

[00:17:57]He laughed again. Why, Sam? He said, to hear you somehow makes me as merry, as if the story were already written.

[00:18:05]Nostalgia isn't just remembrance. It is recreation. We are reforming our recollection of the past into something that can serve us in the present. We can imagine our troubles were worth it. We can redeem the worst things and we can reimagine the past into a pattern that gives us hope for the future. The 2025 film Train Dreams is an exercise in the complications that arise from a nostalgic disposition. Nostalgia can hold you back and can cause you to lose your place in the present, but it can also allow you to look back and see incomprehensible profoundity. The film opens with the line, "There were once passageways into the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You'd turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face to face with the great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it's been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it. That echo is important. It gives meaning to life, loss, and death. It is the buffer between ourselves and mortality. Because while we all may eventually become a part of the past, we know that our lives will never truly vanish from the echo of time. But nostalgia is not a purely good force. It is a tool and that means that it can be used for other purposes. After his adventures in the Hobbit, Bilbo learns the hard way that the past cannot be forgotten. In his account of his adventures, he ends the tale by saying that he would go on to live happily for the rest of his days. This attempt to write himself into a happy ending fails Bilbo. He does not, in fact, pass all of his days peacefully. He's absorbed by the ring. He watches his nephew fall into the same trap that he did and he is even more disappointed by this because the expectations that he himself set have been let down. Bilbo says to Frodo, "I am sorry. Sorry you have come in for this burden. Sorry about everything.

[00:20:13]Don't adventures ever have an end?" I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story. While Frodo and Sam took comfort from their place in the story, Tolken also leaves room for the fact that actually being in that story is rather difficult. The troubles of the past may eventually have seemed to redeem themselves, but that does not numb their sting. Tolken was someone whose life was shaped by trauma. He lost his father and mother quite young. He lost his home to industrialization. And he lost his closest friends to war. He was able to channel those traumas into art to rewrite them into bittersweet remembrance. But he does not claim that this transformation fixes the wrongness and the agony of these troubles.

[00:21:01]Sometimes your attempts to write yourself into the story will only result in pain. At its worst, nostalgia can become a blindfold, a way of rewriting the terrible past into something desirable. This is especially becoming a problem in the modern day because nostalgia is a collective experience rather than an individual one. It opens itself up to being commercialized or at the very least utilized for nefarious things. Think of all of the nostalgia marketing that has flooded our screens.

[00:21:35]The beer commercials with the dogs and the horses. The greeting cards that evoke a sentimental and better time. the influencers that sell you a down-to-earth lifestyle from their million-dollar smarthomes. By recreating a version of the past that we can all find appealing, we risk sanding off the rough edges of life, washing away the sticky and painful parts of history, and forgetting the fact that the good old days were not always so good. There's this idea that modern civilization is a plague and that only the old ways will save us and that it is only by going off the grid and returning to our roots that we will be able to foster community. The harm that can come of this idea is illustrated in works such as Harvest Home by Thomas Triion. In this folk horror novel, a man and his family seek to escape the rat race of New York and return to the old ways by returning to their roots. They move to an isolated village in Connecticut where the protagonist muses at first. I love the feel of the place, the tranquil, bucolic look, the sense of peace that spoke from every doorway, from each plot of well-tended grass, from every newly blooming garden. I love the solidity and agelessness of it, of the passers by themselves, simple country people with simple country faces. There was a sense of veneration for that which had gone before, a rigid, disciplined effort to preserve things as they were, even perhaps a reluctance to acknowledge things as they are. The protagonist is utterly blinded by nostalgia when it comes to his new old town. He imagines it as a place untouched by the terrible ravages of modernity. He imagines all of his neighbors to be generally simple and dumb in a very pure and lovable way.

[00:23:27]It's condescending. And he imagines that the veneration of the past is a good thing. And it turns out that he is for the most part wrong. You can skip ahead by about a minute to avoid spoilers for Harvest Home, but it turns out that the town has clung to all of the old ways, including being a highly rigid, exclusionary society that relies on human sacrifice for social control. They have clung on to the old ways at the expense of human life. And while the negative side of nostalgia doesn't often manifest so literally, it can be utilized to terrible ends. Many political parties have weaponized it, claiming that there was some austere, impeccable version of the past that we must get back to at any cost. We saw the terrible fallout of this kind of manipulation in the rise of the Nazi movement, and we can still see the fictionalization of a superior past in modern politics today. In Tolken's world, this aspect of nostalgia also proves poignant, especially in the case of the Shire. Tolken says explicitly that hobbits are smug, overly sure of themselves, and confident that they know all that there is to know about the world. He writes, "They like to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions. The hobbits are so lost in a nostalgia for the past that they have no desire or impetus to move forward. They've constructed a vision of how things should be based off of a homogeneous and repressive version of how they think that things were. Anyone who goes out on adventures is not respectable. Anyone with aspirations beyond their borders is pretentious, and anything beyond their limited eyesight cannot be real. Nostalgia then becomes a wait bearing a society down bogging down any and all of their progress. That is until someone institutes change. It is no small matter that the saviors of the Shire were Sam, Frodo, Mary, and Pippen.

[00:25:36]Hobbits who had gone out into the world and had the chance to become truly homesick. The distance of the journey gave them clarity and allowed a new vision of their home to emerge.

[00:25:46]Following the scouring of the Shire, where the hobbit's worldly knowledge allows them to save their home, the Shire undergoes rapid change. With Mary, Sam, and Pippen at the helm, the Shire becomes a small part of the world's politics. New strange plants flourish on their soil. While hobbits will never stop being hobbits, with one foot firmly set in the old ways, they've shaken off the idea of the past as a monolith. The past has always been a place of progress and change and their new Shire must be one as well. In his essay on the transformative trajectory of the Shire, MG Pritzo writes, "Nostalgia without an eye towards the future is unsustainable.

[00:26:28]The Shire cannot be replicated, only remade. And although with Sam's guidance, the Shire becomes prosperous again, it is not the old Shire, and no amount of wistfulness will make it so."

[00:26:40]This, it turns out, is advantageous, as the Shire that Sam remakes is preferable to the old one. Nostalgia isn't just about the past, nor does it simply highlight the needs of the present. It can also provide us with a model for the future, and it can teach us how to say our very difficult goodbyes. There's a number of reasons that Froto must leave Middle Earth, but one of the main ones is that he just can't move on. As a part of one of history's greatest stories, Frodo has become a relic of nostalgia.

[00:27:14]He belongs to it, and thus he must be left behind. There's such a bittersweet beauty to his passing. It's sad that he's gone, but it is so wonderful that he was there at all, that he got to live such a full life and is now permitted to pass peacefully. Quite a few people have called the Lord of the Rings nostalgic as an insult. They've said that Tolken's yearning for the past represents a rather stodgy and conservative view, one that would drag its feet looking back, stubbornly refusing to accept the present or consider the future. And I hope I've proven that that's not strictly true. We are long past the point of thinking of nostalgia as a disease. I hope. Thus, I think it's worth acknowledging that Tolken uses the tool of nostalgia to great effect, never shying away from its capacity for both good and bad. At its worst, nostalgia can turn us inward, rewriting history and twisting us away from each other.

[00:28:15]But at its best, it has the capacity to bond us together across time and space and reality. It gives us the room to reflect and the drive to move forward.

[00:28:28]It reminds us that although we exist in a state of constant neverending loss, it is because of that loss that we are able to gain. In the comments, let me know one of your favorite nostalgic memories.

[00:28:42]I find that scents trigger my memories especially. So, for me, it's the smell of caramelized onions. I love onions, but let me know what yours is in the comments. As always, my sources are linked down in the description if you want to read any more about this subject. The study of nostalgia is very, very interesting. And go ahead and give this video a like because that really helps me out. And consider subscribing if you want to tune in every week to hear me talk about the stuff that I like to talk about. Thank you so much for joining me this week. And I hope that you have a very happy hobby day.