My life took a slight but perceptible change in direction in my late teens from reading J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Trolls, elves, hobbits, wizards, dark forests, forest havens, caves, mountain strongholds, treachery, cowardice, courage, perseverance--what have these to do with being a teenager in California during the Vietnam War?

Nothing and everything. I found embodied in that fantasy what every teenager needs to find--especially one coming of age in the moral ambiguity of the late 1960s: that there is a difference between good and evil, that the distinction is usually clear enough to act on, that fighting for good is worthwhile even if one loses, that average, even unimpressive people, can do so, and, far-fetched as it may seem, that good eventually wins out in the end--though not without lingering wounds. 

Even though there is a strong "what happens next" element in The Lord of the Rings, I was drawn not so much into the plot of the adventure as to the characters having the adventure. Maybe it is better to say that the testing of their character was the adventure for me--as I later realized it was for Tolkien as well. I discovered that I did not so much forget myself while reading the story as I found myself going along on the journey, dealing like the nonheroic, comfort loving hobbits with weariness, fear, uncertainty, and agonizing choices. With them I felt terror when confronted with undisguised evil and enormous gratefulness for unexpected good. 

 Tolkien's story gave me the courage to say to myself what I already felt true from my own experience--that good and evil are real, that it matters a great deal which one wins out in the world, and that the outcome depends on me. The Lord of the Rings is filled with unexceptional people--that is, hobbits, elves, and the like--called on to do exceptional things if good is going to survive in the world. Reading the story (and its predecessor, The Hobbit), reinforced in me a tremendous desire that good should win in the world and evil be defeated, and to do what I could to help--not least because it helped me to see that evil was not only out there, but within me as well. I genuinely believe this story helped shape who I was and am. Its characters became my character.

Daniel Taylor, "In Praise of Stories"