Recently, my slight obsession with Lord of the Rings got a tiny bit worse and I dove into reading all the books from start to finish.
Right now, I’ve made my way through The Hobbit and half way through the first part of The Lord of the Rings “The Fellowship of the Ring”. Out of all tales that I have ever seen as a movie or read about in books, the Lord of the Rings seems to have one of the most majestic ones.
Especially the book (as opposed to the movie) is filled with hints and hints to dozens of other tales, stories and riddles, that flesh out the vastness of the plot even more. Those are the stories I like the most. They leave so many questions unanswered and pose even more ones you want to know and wonder about all the time.
The one thing that I noticed though was how few are really part of the tale: It is a handful of people that at the end of the day save the world. In the fellowship there are 9, then there are a few more people involved along the way, who shape events greatly, and that’s it.
After I realized this, I thought about any other story or event that had great meaning to lots of people. And really, I couldn’t find any where there were more than a handful of people involved that shaped everything. I pondered tales of all kinds from Star Wars, to the Bible, to the history of Google or the recent Mars Landing.
Of course, there are always tons and tons of side rolls and supporting characters. And even more people cheering on or greatly opposing of what’s happening. And even more people who simply happen to have lived at the time of the story happening. They are important too. It’s just, they aren’t really part of the tale.