Having read numbers of classic books, my friends are often surprised to hear that I had never read J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
“You have to read it,” numerous individuals—many of them males—exhort.
This fall, several of my friends—also male—took the bull by the horns and gifted me a beautifully bound edition of the work as an encouragement to get going on reading it. And as I’m doing so, I’m beginning to realize why “The Lord of the Rings” is the book most often recommended by the men around me. The series is masculinity at its finest, describing the types of actions that cause men to thrive, increase in strength and valor, and rise to the occasion….