LOTR N BOM

I was just thinking about a song by Janice Kapp Perry and started singing " ...a book that gave a nation life". In the book of Mormon a prophet Enos recalls the words of his father while he was out hunting, well, I wasn't hunting, but in a similar way, the words came from a place within me and I started thinking about how a book could give a nation light and so, isn't that what Tolkein was doing for England with the Lord of the Rings? He was trying to create a sudden history or myth for England, but even my kids were having fun trying to assess factions like dwarves and Elves concluding that it ended up being a mock history of all of Europe. 

But, it doesn't end there, what about "The Odessey". Literature has always used story telling to convey wisdom and truth. I just watched a video yesterday where a group was quite upset about white/Europeans appropriating The Bible/Christianity, anyhow, my original thought, let me jump back, was how we will study the Oddessy and LOTR forever as great literature but, not the Bible or the BOM (Book of Mormon) and I had many friends and rolemodels leave the church decrying it as pure fiction.

The Book of Mormon is proven false in their eyes because the native Americans are not genetically Middle Eastern. But, honestly, the book ends with most of the people being killed off, so the native Americans are not necessarily the BOM people, much as very few even believe that a race of Elves exist, or minotaur for that matter, still something can be gained from studying records of them. I guess my gripe this morning is that if a book gave a nation light, wouldn't it be worth reading and studying? They made the book of Mormon into videos to watch and I think it should be as exciting and popular as the Hobbit, and seen as such : someone's idea of how things were, so go back and read what actually was written.

Lastly, I do not recall where, but I heard that originally Homer's Odyssey was used much as our Bible is today, and ideals and morals of those stories were taught. Generations were raised learning to be like so and so, many things change, but truth never does.