We call our log home in the woods The Last Homely House which "was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, 'a perfect house, whether you like food, or sleep or work, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all'. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness." (The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1965, p. 237)
In late October and early November when I walk through the woods with my St. Bernards, I shuffle through piles of multi-colored leaves and I swear I see hobbits out of the corners of my eyes. I also get an eerie feeling my dogs are not only chasing rabbits.
Twenty to thirty years ago I read The Lord of the Rings seven times. I even tried to name my first daughter Galadriel (although her Mom nixed that idea). The story's been hard-wired into my soul. And only in the last few years when my daughters started reading the books and the first movie came out, did it all flood back
In preparation for the second film's release (The Two Towers), I read "The Hobbit Habit" by Anthony Lane (The New Yorker December 10, 2001)
The Lord of the Rings was, and remains, not a book that you happen to read, like any other, but a book that happens to you: a chunk bitten out of your life.
That one-volume slab was a challenge in itself. The thrill of it was pricking you before the story even began; you turned over the title page, and the next page was bare, except for an eight-line chant. One couplet went straight to your bones:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Even at the time, something cinematic stirred in those words. . . . Six lines into the book and the author had us exactly where he wanted us.
A thousand and seventy-seven pages: the number itself was like a spell. (Tolkien had typed the whole thing out with two fingers.)
. . .this book about a quest is itself a quest.
If you encounter it as a child, it will be the longest book that you have ever mastered, and, for many adults, it will retain that talismanic status. The tale grew in the telling, but, more significantly, the reader grows in the reading; such is the source of Tolkien's power, and it is weirder and more far-reaching than even he could have foretold.
The trek that interested Tolkien was not from one star to the next. His kind of trek was hard on the feet, short on humor, and knee-deep in mud; it may have been imaginary, but, within the boundaries of his busy imagination, it was all true.
To call The Lord of the Rings superior children's literature is not meant as denigration, because it seems ideally suited to superior children-not clever ones, that is, but those who stand on the crumbling brink of puberty and gaze both forward and back.
[Tolkien] fiercely denied all charges of allegory ("I dislike allegory whenever I smell it"); but he told his son
It is a book which bristles with bravado and yet to give into it betrays a certain nerdishness, a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly. That is why boys have traditionally been fonder of it than girls, who are less fazed and flummoxed at the prospect of growing up; women leave their girlhood behind with a glance, whereas men keep looking over their shoulders at the vanishing Shire and asking themselves if it might still be possible, or proper, to head back to their hole in the ground.
I've got too much to read to go through The Lord of the Rings for the eighth time. Instead, I watched The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD which was an excellent attempt to portray the book on film. While it is not entirely successful, it allows me to revisit the memories of my first reading in college. I began the trilogy during a three-week intensive botany class. I could do little else but read and attend class just squeaking by with a C. But I learned more about the world and about myself in those 1,215 pages about Middle-Earth.
