Malcolm Guite on LOTR and The Ring: “Tolkien knows almost all the great quest stories, from Jason and the Argonauts onward, are quests to acquire a treasure — to acquire the Golden Fleece, to sail off to the Garden of the Hesperides and obtain the golden apples, or, like Prometheus, to bring fire down from the heavens. They’re all about getting something valuable, bringing it back, and achieving power in kingdom by acquiring the valuable. Then Tolkien comes along. What does he give us? He gives us an epic of letting go — of renunciation. Was there ever an age that needed that message? We are, as that old book said, consuming ourselves to death. The sickness of our soul is precisely a sickness of perpetual acquisition, of pouring things into a hole that will never be filled. And the way out of that is the way of renunciation. It’s the way of letting go.”