The Lord of the Rings is aging me.

I mean the movies, you sadist, not the novels. I am an elder millennial, but not that old.

But that was a weird thought I recently had, and since this is my blog, I can also write about weird, hobby-adjacent thoughts and there is nothing you can do about it, except ignore this post. I have a hunch that my feeling is a shared experience across the nerd kingdom.

It occurred to me when I saw a group photo of a recent meet-up of the four hobbit actors. Mind you, Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan have met up regularly over the years – this time at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Astin posted the photo with the caption “The band’s all here”, Monaghan as “Four Halflings. Three cocktails. Two desserts. ONE great night of conversation.” . It is neither the first nor the last time they do this. But this time it kinda hit me: how long ago the trilogy graced cinema screens for the first time. And it is not because I necessarily notice the age of those actors, but because the viral posts and articles around their group photo mentioned it: this December, the premiere of The Fellowship will be 25 (I spell it out: twenty-five!) years ago.

A quarter of a century.

Holy fucking shit.

And when I put on the trilogy for the eleventy-first time, I am still transported back in the blink of an eye to the moment I saw Fellowship of the Ring for the first time in cinemas. Or to my parents’ living room, where I would watch the Special Extended Edition DVDs over and over, with all the making-of documentaries. How, at some point, I could recite the first movie from memory, since I used it as the basis for my high-school graduation thesis about the faithfulness of Peter Jackson’s adaptation to Tolkien’s source material. How, to a not so small degree, my fluency in English as a non-native speaker was shaped by watching these movies without the German dub, for as long as I can remember. Or how I made my first “internet friends” hanging out in German Lord of the Rings internet forums (yes, forums, Pepperidge Farm remembers). How – speaking of the internet – any online activity was still bound to my home, as smartphones didn’t exist yet.

I was a nerdy kid long before all of that, and the very first “proper” book I read once I was able to was in fact The Hobbit, and years later in my teens I read The Lord of the Rings. So I did not discover fantasy or fantasy literature with those movies, but the movies still stand out, as if they separated episodes in my life. As if right after them came a hard cut.

To be fair, that cut was not imagined. We forget sometimes that the towers fell just three months before the world premiere of The Fellowship of the Ring. And that it led to some massive, massive shifts for the worse, to which my adolescent (and very privileged) brain was naively oblivious at that time. A year and a bit later we were protesting on the street against the Iraq war, in the same year we were waiting for the Return of the King premiere.

But the bottom line of all of this is: looking back 25 years now, it feels like I have suddenly woken up in a very, very different world. There is a lifetime between then and now: university, jobs, careers, moving to different places, travel (of course, also to New Zealand…), partners, marriage, kids, a chain of never-ending and ever-increasing global crises. For me personally, the movies stand at the end of my teenage years, and what followed after them was basically all of my adult life up until now.

And then you see those aging hobbits on a photo, and are transported back in an instant.

It is fascinating how this movie trilogy has remained a lighthouse in the ocean of time, reminding me of the more innocent times while making it painfully obvious how fast time flies.

To stay with the LotR quotes: the world is changed.

And it’s changing faster than ever before, in ways that invite plenty of comparisons to Tolkien to describe the corrupting influence it has – “it” being AI, our modern Ring of Power. Or how splintered humanity is, not unlike the peoples of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age. Or all the metaphors for climate change and the corruption of nature, with which the movies and Tolkien’s books are filled to the brim.

Tolkien wasn’t prophetic, and he disliked allegory. What he offered instead was applicability: meaning that resides with the reader, not in the intent of the author. That’s why his themes and those movies remain timeless.

And being timeless, they have no issue surviving a changing world. Which is why a mere image of actors whose faces have become synonymous with Tolkien’s characters can transport you back to a time of naive escapism – and remind you of the best line in all of the movies: that “there’s some good in this world. And it’s worth fighting for.”

Onwards to the next quarter century.

(We return to the regular miniature hobby schedule next week, after this sentimental detour)