“I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien
In the late 1940s, a literature professor named Joseph Campbell working in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion took a look at the world’s collective myths and identified some common narrative threads. He codified his observations in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a work positing that every myth across the planet’s varied cultures is linked to deeply held human impulses, explaining why they are all so similar. According to Campbell, most of the stories you’ve read—going back to Gilgamesh and beyond into the unlettered mists of the past—follow this ingrained human pattern. Campbell called it the monomyth. And because you can’t study mythology for a living and keep a name as dry as that, he also called it the Hero’s Journey.
The book made a big splash, especially with storyteller types. And so whether you know it or not (or even if you agree with it or not; not everyone does) most of the entertainment you’ve consumed since 1949—books, movies, TV, podcasts, etc—is built on Campbell’s mythological common ground.
The Lord of the Rings is a Hero’s Journey in perhaps the purist pop-culture rendering (Star Wars is famously a close second). LOTR was written before The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but all the same mythological story beats and structure are there. Indeed Tolkien—a professor of medieval literature and a translator of both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf—very much meant the story to read as mythology, or at least proto-mythology. Ever wonder why LOTR is hard to scan sometimes? That’s why. It’s supposed to be a little dry and weighty. This knowledge is cold comfort when you are struggling through page ten of The Silmarillion, but now at least you can turn to people at cocktail parties and say, “Hey, did you know that the Lord of the Rings stuff is supposed to be kinda boring*?”
What is an outdoor adventure if not a Campbellian journey, a leaving of hearth and home, an enduring of the elements, a goal striven for? Thus the inescapable reality that any group of hikers of a sufficiently nerdy mindset will find themselves choosing a Fellowship character that best defines them. I wish I was an Aragorn, but the sad reality is I’m a perpetual Gimli †. In any case, I dare you to take a walk on the Appalachian Trail without bumping into someone calling themselves Proudfoot (Proudfeet!).
But for all the Tolkien obsession in the outdoor community, very little attention is paid to the final third of Campbell’s monomyth—or Tolkien’s saga—the return.
Ah, the return—the crossing of the threshold from the wild and back to the hearth. The leaving behind of trees and mountains and the re-embracing of regular life with all the not-very-great things contained therein. Roads and strip malls. $60 brunches. Having to choose between more than one shirt. Not being able to pee whenever the mood strikes you. The inescapable reality that Law and Order SVU has been on the air for 23 seasons. Everything on TikTok, with the extremely notable exception of cat collaboration videos ‡. Those are, in fact, very great and they make the world a better place.
Strong reasons why adventurers have a hard time adjusting to home. Strong reasons to wish a dragon invasion upon the Shire—all those silly hobbits with no trail dust on their fuzzy feet. All those silly humans shit-posting on Nextdoor and chasing Instagram likes and obsessing over digital watches. It’s enough to give anyone taking the finishing steps of an adventure the creeping heebies.
I call it return anxiety because having a fancy name for it makes me feel like a smarty pants.
Many observers have concluded that return anxiety happens because our technology and the pace of our culture have outraced our evolution. In the wild, life is hard but simple. In the world, living is easy but complex. To put it another way, we have ice-age brains and ice-age bodies living in a society that, for our sins, contains the extremely un-ice-age Mark Zuckerberg.
I think this take is absolutely true and also incomplete because return anxiety shows up in mythology all the time and the ancient sources are pretty clear on the general lack of smartphones§ .
Consider this passage from Campbell’s book:
“The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities, and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes.”
Yes, our first-world society is an emotionally and spiritually—if not physically—difficult place to live, and our brains turn into cottage cheese trying to cope with it. But adventurers have been dealing with this since there were adventures to be had. If we lived in a world perfectly attuned to our needs—a society where everyone was valued, where bigotry and intolerance didn’t exist, where computer printers just worked like they were supposed to, where root beer floats were free and everybody who wanted abs could have abs and nobody’s tattoos had spelling errors—I believe that adventurers would still face return anxiety.
I believe this because any adventure worthy of the name has fundamentally changed the adventurer—and with change comes work—both in understanding and embracing that change and in determining how the changed self now fits back into society.
Nobody wants to do it, least of all many of the mythological figures. It’s hard and messy work, being a human in society on this planet. And it’s no wonder that upon reaching the end of a long adventure many choose to simply keep going, be it by embracing #vanlife or turning around and walking in the direction from which they just came.
This impulse is understandable but, I fear, ultimately flawed. The monomyth is quite clear: the changed adventurer has a debt to society. The debt springs from a boon gifted to the adventurer. Sometimes the boon is the change wrought on the adventurer herself, sometimes it is an actual gift that also functions as a metaphor. Either way, the adventurer has a responsibility to share the boon with her home. This responsibility is tied either to human nature or a storytelling trope so deeply embedded within us that there’s no real difference between the two. We ignore such powerful impulses—such ubiquitous mythological conventions—at our own peril. The return is not just about oneself. It is, at least in part, about what you owe the people around you.
What exactly is owed by the returning adventurer is devilishly hard to pin down, and of course, depends upon the adventurer, the nature of the change, the nature of the boon, and the nature of home. Making the determination is part of the adventurer’s work. Merry and Pippin utilized their newfound bravery and warrior skills to cleanse the Shire of Saruman’s brigands. Samwise uses the gifts he received from Galadriel to heal the Shire once the final battle was won‖. Frodo mines his trauma to become a writer, in the fine tradition of writers everywhere. But the book he finishes is for Bilbo and Sam, not for himself.
I don’t know what boons you receive on your adventures. But I wonder if thinking of how to share your boon, rather than existing in a perpetual state of mourning for your finished adventure, might not be a better way to approach return anxiety. What I receive from my time in the woods, and I don’t think I’m alone here, is often a sense of relief—like a spring released, a knot untied. My adventures bring me Wendell Berry’s Peace of Wild Things. Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese.
And so I have begun to think of my returns from the wild as opportunities to carry the sense of peace I find there forward into the so-called real world for as long as possible. This is what I feel I owe. Not to grasp at serenity with a clawed fist and so to watch it stream through my fingers, but to extend it open-handed to those around me. I try to hold the peace of wild things not as a balm for my all-too-often irritated psyche but as a way to better the lives of anyone who comes into contact with me.
I’m not very good at it. Possibly I never will be. But as in meditation, the point is not to be good at it. The point is to try. To try to remember that as I return from an adventure, it isn’t just about me and how I feel, but what has been given to me, and what I can give in return. That owing implies society, and society means we are not alone. To remember that each step in the woods changes me, that the change is the point and not a byproduct of an escape that should not—cannot—will not—continue indefinitely.
All adventures end. This is what allows new ones to begin.
FOOTNOTES
*I’m a lot of fun at cocktail parties.
†Perpetual Gimli. Not the name of a designer watch, but probably should be.
‡You’re welcome.
§“What’s up ya’ll? Just rolled back into Ithaca, took a little longer to get home than I thought, LOL. Here are some pics from my trip! **Shots of Odysseus blinding the cyclops set to “Can we skip to the good part? Whooooooaaaaaaaooaaaoaoaaaaaa”**
‖ Don’t know what I’m talking about? Hello, you’ve only watched the movies! Again, I’m a lot of fun at cocktail parties. In this series of sub-footnotes, I will elucidate the differences between the book and film versions of Lord of the Rings and discuss the relative merits of each. To start with, hobbits are…(1/796)
