Reply To: To have them read Tolkien or not…

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#1681556
Avram in MD
Participant

If you are fine with your son reading non-Jewish fiction, then The Hobbit is an excellent novel. It is funny, witty, completely clean, and packed with adventure. The Lord of the Rings is more suitable for teenagers or adults due to darker and scarier content and a much more complex plot, but it is also clean. I personally would not recommend The Silmarillion or other posthumously published works of Tolkein that deals with the “First Age” Legendarium, because he does create a fictional theology there. That religious part of the Legendarium is almost completely absent in The Hobbit (the first edition of the book was a standalone world, and he only later folded it into his larger world of Middle Earth), and primarily appears in The Lord of the Rings as textual ruins, so they are fairly easy to miss or ignore. Disclaimer: I am a big fan of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.