I've been revisiting The Lord of The Rings lately, and something that sticks out to me is that I'm especially enjoying digging into the background lore. The rea

I've been revisiting The Lord of The Rings lately, and something that sticks out to me is that I'm especially enjoying digging into the background lore. The reason being it all fundamentally revolves around "one theme to rule them all": the nature of good and evil. To me, this thematic cohesion is what makes LotR a good story. By the same token, when we look at stories of famous historical figures (both those we consider ethical and those we don't), the stories tend to distill some sort of theme from a person's life. By all means, it's good to be altruistic. But I think this is a further distillation of what a good story is, and how it pertains to the stories we tell about our history.