Started January 5,2002
WARNING: BAD GRAMMAR AHEAD IN A FEW PLACES …
Update - January 6, 2004: This write up was done in the immediate aftermath of the release of The Fellowship of the Ring in December 2001. The writing regarding the film review is dated since it is mostly of first impressions. These writings are mostly a bunch of babbling and off the cuff rantings on my part, and quite frankly it reads like a rant. Since I've been getting a lot of visits to this page, I've split this write up into several pages to make downloading go faster.
If you want a much more controversial opinion that touches briefly on Tolkien, you may want to visit my first book review, "The Closing of the Western Mind," written by author Charles Freeman.
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Topic (s): (1) J.R.R. Tolkien in My World and (2) My Movie review for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring.
I was first introduced to The Hobbit by my eldest sister’s first husband when I was 10 years old. I was most fortunate in this matter, since he was partly of Scottish descent and his mother had remarried an Englishman. Therefore, I was exposed to some things of a more “foreign culture” than I would have otherwise in my oh so sheltered and provided for 1970’s American suburb. I think that he just gave me a copy of the book one day and told me to read it. The book wasn’t given for any special reason such as for a birthday gift.
Like millions of other readers of Tolkien’s work, I was immediately swept off my feet the same way Bilbo was swept out of Bag End and taken away to Middle Earth. I finished the book, I think, in about two days. There were countless times growing up when I wished there really was a Middle Earth. Nowadays, I don’t know how many times I’ve been glad that there really is one.
So what was it that made The Hobbit (and later Lord of the Rings) so cool? Some of it had to do with the names of the characters in the book. Like, how cool is the name Elrond? Now Elrond is a cool name for a fantasy character – no doubt about it! Elrond sounds like the name of someone who is learned and wise. Or what about Thorin Oakenshield? Now that is a proud Dwarf name if I’ve ever heard of one. And everyone knows that Gandalf simply has to be the name of a Great and Powerful Wizard! Did it matter that my pre - teenaged mind did not realize that our favorite Oxford Don had plundered history and legends from time gone by to get many of these names? Of course not. That’s part of the fun of it. It seemed like these names belonged to real people, and indeed they may have. Now, of course, I can go back as an Adult and look at Tolkien’s sources and wonder ever the more about the worlds he saw.
One of the things that was (and still is!) printed on the final page of my Ballantine Edition of The Hobbit was a statement saying:
If you are interested in Hobbits you will learn a lot more about them in The Lord of the Rings:
1. The Fellowship of the Ring
2. The Two Towers
3. The Return of the King
A boxed set of the three books was available for $5.00 at a nearby bookstore. I could also get a set from Ballantine Books, but it would cost a lot more. I decided that since my budget was rather thin, I would go the cheaper route and look around the neighborhood for the books whenever I had the chance.
The hunt was on!!!
Since I lived in suburban America, and I was only 10-11 years old, information on how to find certain books was hard to come by. The Internet was not around, and it wasn’t like my parents were the type to be able to notice what it was that really captured their children’s imagination. My parents, oh so proud of their child, athletics star and scholar par excellence, did not realize that their youngest son had secretly been swept off to another world.
Fortune smiled my way one day when I went to a nearby K-Mart store with my family one day. I had gotten into the desperate habit of looking in K-Mart’s somewhat paltry book section – well overstocked with cheap romance novels - to see if they had any of Tolkien’s books for sale. On that day, I noticed that a copy of The Two Towers was available. The problem that day was that I had no money, and my parents said no to my pleas to buy the book. I would have to wait to mow some lawns.
The following Spring brought new chances and I duly scraped together the $1.25 plus tax to buy The Two Towers. I bought it just in time since the family was scheduled to take a car trip to Florida. My eldest sister, now married to the man who had first turned me on to The Hobbit, had moved there since he was in the United States Navy and stationed in Orlando. I decided to read the book while we took the long car ride to the Panhandle State.
My first experience with reading The Two Towers was rather strange to say the least. The book had something called a synopsis in its beginning which seemed to tell of some things that happened before this book first started. The storytelling seemed dry and serious when compared with the childlike excitement that ran through The Hobbit. What was a Nazgul and why was their Lord leading such a huge army against this realm called Gondor? Where did Aragorn come from? What was Numenor? I could not understand why Gandalf was shown as coming back from death and what the hell was a Balrog anyway?
Undaunted by my lack of knowledge, I soldiered through The Two Towers anyway. I came away wondering about what was going to happen next in this strange but huge story. I had not learned too much more about Hobbits as Ballantine Books had promised, other than the fact that two Hobbits, Mery and Pippin, were now very large Hobbits. Nonetheless, I found something strangely compelling about this book. What was all the fuss about? I decided that the only way to solve all of these problems was to find the other two books and read them all of the way through.
I was rewarded for my efforts when the following Christmas, my brother – in – law came through for me again when he bought me the compleat story. In hindsight, he clearly saw through the mental trauma that his 11 year old brother – in – law was going through and decided that the issue must be settled once and for all. It helped that he knew of a new game that we suburban kids had started playing called Dungeons and Dragons and that I helped him with some concepts of the new game that he had had some problems with – such as what did it mean that a monster could take 1 + 1 hit dice of damage rather than 2 hit dice of damage?
But I digress. Newly armed with the compleat story, I plowed through The Lord of the Rings (henceforth LOTR) with full gusto. This time I was floored. Although at times the writing seemed to be a drag to get through, when I finally got through the entire story, I simply could not believe that anyone could have ever dreamed up something like this. It seemed like the Middle Earth that I had visited in The Hobbit had been fleshed out to an incredible degree. There were languages that various races spoke, history of realms, stunning magic items (many things I can command the Mirror to reveal), politics, moving Trees that talked, and - you guessed it – far more characters with names that were just way too cool! I found myself eagerly reading and re – reading the appendices at the end of The Return of the King, eager for ever more lore about this world called Middle Earth ! How many more books did Tolkien write about Middle Earth?I simply had to know!
Not content with having read LOTR once, I found myself reading and re – reading the books every 6 - 12 months. Simply put, there was no other literature (blanch at that all of you intelligentsia out there!) that captured my imagination the way that this story did. The inspiration was such that as I moved into my teens, I started to look for other authors of “Swords and Sorcery” to read. It was hard, but I did find some authors that caught my eye: Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone series was unique, with his brooding anti hero who eventually destroys his own home and then his own world; I also enjoyed Lyon Sprague de Camp’s Goblin Tower series telling us some thrilling tales (in a very Dungeons and Dragons type style) of his humorously deposed King Jorian and his wizard friend Karadur. Some friends turned me on to Robert Asprin’s wildly hilarious Myth Adventures series concerning the doings of the demon Aahz and his apprentice Skeeve – in fact we met Asprin in 1984 at a Dragon Con in Dallas Texas. All are enjoyable.
However, perhaps the most interesting book of Fantasy to me was not in fact a Fantasy book at all. The book I am referring to was Paul H. Kocher’s The Master of Middle Earth, which was published in 1972 and which I acquired circa 1980 or so. The book was fascinating to me at that time because it was an analysis of Tolkien’s writings rather than Fantasy itself. As such, Kocher’s (still) fine and respectful writings opened up interesting perspectives about the story which my teenaged mind had never fully absorbed before. Kocher’s writings were my first encounters with what is known as literary analysis or literary criticism. Kocher’s writings may now seem a bit quaint to serious modern readers of Tolkien, but they were gratefully received by fans like me at that time.
The only thing I can say is that to my teenaged mind, it often seemed that Middle Earth seemed even more real than the world that I lived in. Call it escapism if you want, but visiting Middle Earth sure beat the hell out of growing up in sheltered, provided for, boring ass Suburban America. Sheltered, provided for, boring ass Suburban America meant being raised by parents who were oh so proud proud proud proud proud proud proud of their children. It meant being forced (by law) to go to schools where you were forced to take subjects and sit through classes that often didn’t interest you. It meant that between the ages of 12 – 18, you had to sit in classes everyday with awesome looking girls who tortured you with their sheer beauty while society is telling you that you can’t sexually gratify yourself until you get a good job with good pay. It meant that you had to put up with the Journey fans, the football players, and a vast crowd of morons who didn’t read the newspaper. Was this what Life amounted to?
To my teenaged mind, Middle Earth was a place where heroes were heroes and villains were villains. Minas Tirith seemed far more real than New York, London, Paris, Rio de Janiero, or Beijing because all I had to do was pick up my books and Minas Tirith was right there, while the whole wide world out there was far far away from Sheltered, provided for, boring ass Suburban America. All I had to do was pick up the books and I could see Gandalf bar the Lord of the Nazgul from the Gates of an overthrown Minas Tirith. At the same time, it was incredibly hard to sympathize with most of the problems of the Adult Real World that is dealt with in the literature which is analyzed and praised by the literari. Simply put, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is a compelling story about the horrors of what happened to native Africans when the Europeans took over things in Africa during the late 19th century. The problem I had with the story was that eventually the Europeans left, leaving Africans to deal with their own problems. And how have they dealt with their problems? For many people, the problems of the world that are written about in The New York Times are about things that matter, but they are not about things that can truly inspire them. For many people, the problems of the world are "out of sight, out of mind."
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