Midsummer’s Eve, as I recall it, was a major holiday in the Shire — where the Hobbits lived in The Lord of the Rings, the closest thing to a bible in my family. That celebration of the summer solstice by another name, I realize now, is a tie-in to the Celtic and British pagan mythologies that Tolkein drew on to build that world that was so alive to me then and is still, truth be told. There’s no Stonehenge in Middle Earth, but it’s easy to picture the hobbits, dwarves, wizards (druids, after all) and elves of that world dancing around it in celebration of Midsummer’s Eve. This year Midsummer’s Eve is also Father’s Day. My dad and mom both revered The Lord of the Rings when I was a kid, and in fact Middle Earth was a sort of bridge world for me between them after they divorced when I was around eight— about the same time that my mom began reading The Hobbit to me for the first time. June 21st, as I write this, Midusmmer’s Eve, the summer solstice, is also and always has been my mom’s birthday–this year, the fourth of her ageless birthdays since she died in April 2006 from pancreatic cancer. Both of my parents were pretty thoroughly English in lineage, so somehow Middle Earth as an updating of British Isles and European mythologies probably appealed to all of us in a primal, almost cellular way. But because it falls on Father’s Day this year I find myself thinking specifically of my dad’s thesis on Tom Bombadil—how his power was greater than that of the wizards, the elves, the Dark Lord. Bombadil was a silly old hermit who lived in the woods with his fair lady. He sang and...