For the full duration of our friendship, my friend Tanya has been begging me to read Diana Gabaldon’s novel, Outlander. She knew that I would fall in love with the time-traveling Claire, who romances a perfect male-specimen called Jamie in the eighteenth-century Scottish Highlands. Just four days and two decades later, I heeded her good counsel. Had Tanya told me that Outlander is basically Lord of the Rings with feminism and great sex, I would have stepped through the standing stone at Craigh na Dun long ago.

Tanya and I do not always share the same taste in pop culture. She craves the kind of melodrama found in Grey’s Anatomy where a character’s stunning beauty comes at the price of weekly agonies. I prefer light-hearted fare such as Castle, a show that I foolishly asked Tanya to watch with me. She saw one scene and laughed at its comforting simplicity. She once told me that “if a book does not make me cry it’s not worth my time.”

In one of the most revealing moments of our friendship she dragged me to a French film called, The Horseman on the Roof. This is perhaps the worst movie I have ever seen in my life. From what I recall, a hunky horseman gallops through nineteenth-century France, falls in love with a fair maiden, and then everyone dies of cholera. Tanya loved this film, and spoke rapturously about the touching, though doomed love between the horseman and his maiden, whereas I still have nightmares about their dead bodies covered in bugs and bodily fluids. Naturally, with this kind of track record, I was skeptical that Tanya’s Outlander would appeal to me.

In addition to my wariness of Tanya’s recommendation, I resisted Outlander for its time travel plot. As a historian, I have often thought about visiting other centuries. I start by wondering what it would be like to have tea with Abigail Adams or to converse with Thomas Jefferson. Could I pop in to the Continental Congress and advise the Founders on the parameters of presidential pardons? In the end, practicality always wins. Unless I carry Hermione’s bag filled with a lifetime supply of contact lenses and saline, time travel puts me at risk of becoming a nearly blind public charge bumping into horses on the muck-covered streets of Philadelphia circa 1776.

With renewed prodding from Tanya and summertime on my hands, I finally took the Outlander plunge. I devoured Season One of the STARZ adaptation twice, along with the series’ first novel, in four days. I knew I was in trouble when instead of fearing time travel I started giving serious consideration to Lasik and a flight to Inverness.

Parallels to The Lord of the Rings also drew me into the story. In Outlander, like LOTR, scraggly unshaven men speak Gaelic, drink ale, and sing songs of lost lassies while villainous orcs in Red Coats hasten an end to the Age of (Scots)men. Jamie (a red-haired Aragorn) and Claire (Arwen with agency) travel through Clan Mackenzie lands with power-hungry war chieftain Boromir Dougal, and a troop of dwarves led by Angus and Rupert.

Unlike LOTR, this story is told from a female perspective by Claire who tells off the dwarves, brandishes a dagger, and marches through the Black Gate to rescue Jamie from a sadistic Sauron. She resurrects nearly dead hobbits who see fit to eat poisonous plants and heals the sick with wizardry worthy of Gandalf. Imagine if Galadriel, rocking her white shift, could both foretell the future and yell “fuck” at the top of her lungs. That’s Claire. She embodies the height and beauty of an elf and commands not one, but two Rings of Power. Plus, she has lots of orgasms. There is simply no more a person could ask from a story.

In closing, the following confession is sure to provoke a much-deserved smug remark from Tanya: I experienced the full conversion from skeptic to fan this morning when I found myself evangelizing all things Claire and Jamie to my chiropractor of all people. Before she could arch her brow and say, “Well, maybe,” I was on my way out the door to hunt down Dragonfly in Amber and Season Two of Outlander.

The standing stones are calling me.