My husband and his family have been rereading Tolkien's books every September for as long as he can remember, usually starting on September 22, which would of course be Bilbo's birthday. Last year we began the tradition in our own family and will continue it this year.
J.R.R. Tolkien remains one of the most important writers in the English language because he did not merely invent stories; he recovered a way of seeing the world. In an age that had grown suspicious of myth and impatient with beauty, he built a secondary world so complete that it feels older than the books that contain it. Middle-earth is not an escape from reality but a lens that makes reality more visible: courage, pity, loyalty, the cost of power, and the stubborn dignity of ordinary lives.
His importance begins with language. A philologist by vocation, Tolkien understood that words carry histories and that a people without a living myth is a people half-forgotten. He did not paste elves and dwarves onto a generic map; he grew them from the soil of Old English, Finnish, Welsh, and his own invented tongues. The result is a legendarium that feels discovered rather than manufactured. That scholarly seriousness is why The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit endure when so much later fantasy feels thin.
Influence is not the same as importance. What matters more is that his work touches the soul. Readers do not finish The Fellowship of the Ring merely informed; they finish it altered. The story works on the affections. It makes home precious again. It makes trees and rivers and the changing of seasons feel like gifts rather than scenery. It makes friendship look costly and therefore real.
At the heart of that power is what Tolkien called eucatastrophe:
"Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function."
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
Eucatastrophe is the sudden joyous turn that does not deny sorrow but transfigures it. The eagles arrive. The king returns. The small creature who has been broken by the Ring still plays a part in its unmaking. These moments do not cheapen suffering; they insist that suffering is not the last word. In a culture that often treats hope as naïve, that insistence is a kind of medicine.
The hobbits are the vessels of this medicine. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin are not demigods. They love second breakfasts, gossip, and their gardens. Their heroism is the heroism of keeping going when the road is dark and the burden is heavier than expected. Readers recognize themselves in that stubbornness. The great and the wise have their place in the tale, but the fate of the world turns on the fidelity of the small.
Friendship in these books is not sentiment. It is Sam carrying Frodo when Frodo can no longer walk. It is Merry and Pippin choosing the dangerous path rather than the safe one. It is the Fellowship itself: a temporary, imperfect company bound by a purpose larger than any one member. In an age of lonely screens and disposable connections, that picture of companionship still startles people into longing.
Tolkien's love of the created world is unmatched. The Shire is not a museum of rustic charm; it is a place worth defending because it is particular and loved. The scars of Isengard and Mordor are not only military; they are ecological and spiritual. Trees are felled, waters poisoned, and living things reduced to fuel for the machine. Readers who have watched landscapes flattened and communities hollowed out hear a warning that has only grown louder.
The books also speak to mortality without despair. Elves fade. Men die. Even the most beautiful things pass. Yet the passing is not treated as a cosmic insult. There is grief, and there is also the consolation that some things were worth grieving. That balance—neither denial nor bitterness—is rare, and it is why so many readers return to these pages in seasons of loss.
Today the need for such stories is great. The world is saturated with information and starved of meaning. Attention is fractured. Irony is cheap. Public language is often either shrill or empty. Tolkien offers a different register: grave, humorous, exact, and unafraid of the old words—honor, mercy, doom, grace.
Family reading is one of the last remaining ways to recover that register together. A parent reading The Hobbit aloud, or a household returning to The Lord of the Rings over successive winters, creates a shared inner landscape. Children learn that language can be beautiful. Teenagers discover that courage is not the absence of fear. Adults remember that they once believed the world contained more than the day's headlines.
Rereading matters because the books change as the reader changes. The first encounter is wonder and adventure. Later readings reveal the politics of power, the theology of providence, the quiet tragedy of Gollum, the cost paid by those who remain behind. A family that reads the same story at different ages is not repeating itself; it is deepening a conversation that can last for decades.
There is also a civic reason to keep these books in the house. They form a common inheritance. Quotations, names, and moral patterns from Tolkien still circulate in conversation, film, and even political speech. To know the source is to possess a richer share in that inheritance rather than a handful of secondhand references.
None of this requires treating Tolkien as a saint or Middle-earth as a substitute religion. He was a Catholic scholar who wrote fairy-stories, not a prophet issuing commandments. The work's authority comes from its truthfulness to human experience: we are small, the world is large, evil is real, and goodness is not finished.
In family homes across the world, the case for reading and rereading Tolkien is therefore simple. The stories enlarge the heart. They train the eye to notice what is worth loving. They give children and adults a language for hope that does not insult their intelligence. In a time that often feels thin, hurried, and unrooted, that is no small gift. The road goes ever on, and it is still worth walking together.
On a dark stair near the end of their road, Sam asks:
"I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers