Long have we tended our beasts and our fields, built our houses, wrought our tools, or ridden away to help in the war of minas tirith. And that we called the life of men, the way of the world. We cared little for what lay beyond the borders of our land. Songs we have that tell of these things, but we are forgetting them, teaching them only to children, as a careless custom. And now the songs have come down among us out of strage places, and walk visible under the sun.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (1956)