Spirituality and fan culture around the 'Lord of the Rings' film trilogy

This study explores spiritual readings of the hugely successful Lord of the Rings film trilogy based on Tolkien's books. 22.2% of fans in a worldwide dataset, and 12.7% of Dutch viewers experience the trilogy as a spiritual story. Repertoire analysis of the qualitative survey and interview data in the Netherlands resulted in five repertoires that were important to the 'spiritual' fans. First, fans often discuss the trilogy in moral terms. The second repertoire focused on friendship and the importance of unconditional love and loyalty. This fits with the reading of the film as a personalized story: it highlights individual development, human relations and moral choices individuals have to face. A third repertoire emerging from the survey and the interviews is the longing for another world and the alienation from the present 'real' one. Fourth, these respondents tended to speak of Middle-Earth in spiritual and religious terms. The story, in the fifth repertoire, also offers ample symbolic materials to link it to the spiritual self. Personal growth, perseverance and a desire for purity are all elements fans appropriate from the trilogy. Thus, this study shows how contemporary highly technologized popular culture - with Hollywood as the ultimate dream factory - provides a vehicle for spiritual and religious experiences.