Joel Tom Tate, author of Pass-Fail 101 in the June 2004 Touchstone, wrote asking for advice:
Yesterday [January 4] was the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien and so, when I got home from work, I used a recipe I’d found on the Internet for lembas and my daughters and I made a batch. As we baked I explained to them as carefully as I could who Tolkien was and what a hobbit is. They are six, four and just turned two, so none of them have seen the Lord of the Rings movies yet, of course.
After dinner we assembled upstairs in one of the bedrooms and made a journey through a house lit only by a Christmas tree and a few lamps. My two oldest girls carried the flashlights, and I carried the lembas and a container of honey. One bedroom was Mirkwood, the living room was the plains of Rohan and so on. We ended up setting up camp in the den downstairs where, by the light of our electric torches, we ate our lembas and I read Tolkien’s wonderful poem about the road that starts at our door. We talked about adventures and their eyes were wide with wonder. My wife and I had a great time and the lembas was delicious (probably too much so for authenticity’s sake). And I suspect that the girls had instilled in them again that appetite for adventure that marks the spiritually healthy soul.
But I worry a little bit about events like this which are faintly liturgical without being explicitly Christian. Should I worry? And how old should a child be before she’s ready for The Hobbit?
We asked Thomas Howard to reply:
I myself don’t think there’s any harm in this sort of thing. A woman wrote to Lewis once, worrying that her child loved Aslan more than Jesus. Lewis reassured her that, having loved Aslan, the child would, when she encountered Jesus, recognize the very virtues and glories that had attracted her to Aslan.
Of course the business of “playing Middle Earth” can go awry if it’s taken too solemnly. I once had to speak to a bizarre conclave in California, and on the Sunday morning they all dressed up as hobbits, ents, wizards, etc., but—the whole thing was done with such utterly humorless gravity that it gave me the willies. They had gone deeply into a frame of mind appropriate only to the liturgy itself. I don’t think Mr. Tate took his children that far. It sounded o.k. to me. Where’d he get the recipe, though? I thought elves had to bake lembas!
Joel Tom Tate had this response:
Here’s a link to one of the many, many websites featuring one of a couple of different recipes for lembas. The only thing I added to it was some orange zest and was pleased to find that it came out kind of like a little scone. Still, pleasant or not, I’m afraid the product of this recipe is to real lembas what Tickle-Me-Elmo is to real mirth. But I appreciate Tom Howard’s wisdom on the subject and take encouragement from it.
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