Trotter wrote:

https://youtu.be/F5ko1TK0OAU

Loved this conversation and recommend listening to it. That said I don't think the title'why tolkien still matters when everything feels lost' makes sense at all. For 2 reasons:

1) the world was not brighter in the past decades than it is now. As a child of the 80's I can in fact remember a close past much more filled with fear and a sense of impending doom. As children we dreaded the evening news and the daily talk of the possibility of nuclear war.

2) The Lord of the Rings is to me the deepest meditation on the human struggle with mortality that world literature has produced. Why on earth would that suddenly become less relevant? This topic has been with us in all our myths for thousands of years - in fact it haunts the myths and poetry Tolkien studied and was inspired by.

northman wrote:

the world was not brighter in the past decades than it is now. As a child of the 80's I can in fact remember a close past much more filled with fear and a sense of impending doom. As children we dreaded the evening news and the daily talk of the possibility of nuclear war.

I agree. Titles or headlines do like to wave around sensation. As a boy growing up in Northern England we lived under the constant background of bomb scares. While these times are not perfect, I do not feel unsafe in the way I did from the late 80s through the mid-90s.

onthetrail wrote:

northman wrote:

the world was not brighter in the past decades than it is now.

While these times are not perfect, I do not feel unsafe in the way I did from the late 80s through the mid-90s.

Hear hear. And there is some excellent (and accessible) research on this, for example:

https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/hans ... actfulness/9781473637498/