103 This is precisely where Tolkien’s wisdom can be of service for leadership studies. Rather than simply focusing on the way leaders can use stories, Tolkien’s wisdom reveals how leaders need to be nourished by good stories. In a lengthy excerpt from a letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien describes it this way: I think most Christians, except the very simple and uneducated or those protected in other ways, have been rather bustled and hustled now for some generations by the self-styled scientists, and they’ve sort of tucked Genesis into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the house, don’t you know, when the bright clever young people called: I mean, of course, even the fideles who did not sell it secondhand or burn it as soon as modern taste began to sneer. In consequence they have indeed (myself as much as any), as you say, forgotten the beauty of the matter even ‘as a story’. Lewis recently wrote a most interesting essay showing of what great value the ‘storyvalue’ was, as mental nourishment—of the whole Christian story (NT especially). It was a defence of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith, but clings at least to the beauty of ‘the story’ as having some permanent value. His point was that they do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life: for the beauty of the story while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth.9 The first point of wisdom for leaders from Tolkien, then, is that leaders need to be nourished by good stories. Rather than first thinking about how they can become great storytellers, leaders would be wise to take stock of the kinds of stories that have shaped them and reflect on the kind of nourishment they have provided. In many cases it might be that they have been underfed, malnourished, or fed a constant diet of fastfood like stories. In Eugene Peterson’s aptly titled volume Eat This Book, he describes the reduction, or diminishment we experience when stories are thought of only in terms of their utility: We live today in a world impoverished of story; so it is not surprising that many of us have picked up the bad habit of extracting “truths” from the stories we read: we summarize “NOLO EPISCOPARI AND THE LEADERSHIP WISDOM OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN”
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