Here’s a thing that a friend made.
yes.

The Story that Stayed With Me

My favorite movie has always been The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I say the entire trilogy, because it is really difficult for me to separate story that has influenced me so deeply as this. (I watch them all in one setting anyway.) This trilogy hit me at the right time, like the way nickelodeons sprouted and the way the medium of film came into being. I grew up with this trilogy from the time I was only seven years old. When I saw the first of the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, I was entranced not only by the imagery of the world, but with the ever-present theme of the smallest beings changing the tides of great battles and the goodness of a person triumphing over the greatest evils.

The movies really affected my views. They in a way gave me a view of civic responsibility and the power of the individual in the fight for equality and rights. The role of the hobbits as a small, seemingly insignificant creature as the one creature with enough good at heart to save everyone is something that really appealed to me as a child. Everyone who’s small can feel insignificant and unimportant to the whole scheme of the world that’s always spinning and often darkening from things such as prejudice, poverty, inequality, and war. It is easy to lose yourself to that darkness and become one of the droves that find comfort in normalcy and try your best to ignore the problems of the world. This is how these films really reflect reality, even though the setting is in this beautiful fantasy world that none of us have really seen. The themes that really stick with you are the ones you can apply to your on life as I have with mine. This story is able to take to darkness of the impossible situations that we live every day and make them conquerable. This story spoke to me as a child and it still speaks to me now as an new adult facing all sorts of day-to-day challenges that sometimes I do not feel I can face. The messages of Frodo, Sam, and the fellowship have brought me can help me face them. My father died when I was ten years old and I knew it was a dark time for my family and nothing was really right at that time, but I found solace in these films and their messages of hope and faith in not a higher being, but in the people that lived on the earth around me. Some might say that this choice makes me seem naïve or way too optimistic, but I like to think my favorite film has opened my world and encouraged me to fight against the evils of this world myself.

As Samwise Gamgee so aptly put in one of my very favorite scenes,

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. ‘And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end because how could the end be happy?How can the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it’s only a passing thing. A shadow even darkness must pass. A new day will come and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were to small to understand why.”

This is the story that stuck with me; this speech really embodies my feeling for these films. While I was young, I did not understand exactly why they meant as much as they did to me, but still they had a great impact on my outlook, my ethics, and my sensibilities in life. I would not be the same person I am today if I never had The Lord of the Rings films to encourage me to make my world a better place and not settle for what I am given.