Wow, it has been a long time since I read Lord of the Rings.  I own a shiny hardback box set of them, which I got on sale at Bongs & Noodles for $15, and which I now discover are the editions with fold-out maps in the back.  I want to snip the maps out with careful snips and hang them around my room – except I know my snips would not be tidy, and even if they were, the maps would get all Blue-Tac-y in the corners and need to be folded up and stored next time I move, and eventually I would wish the maps were back inside the books.  My cover looks like this:

My edition of Fellowship starts out with an introduction that explains that Tolkien made a lot of revisions.  A LOT.  He revised different texts, in different ways, so that different editions ended up with different information.  Including the well-known case of “Estella Bolger”, which the writer of this introduction seems to think everyone knows about.  This is very boring and several pages too long, and could have been condensed so it said this instead:

Dear Reader,

The edition of Lord of the Rings that you now hold in your hands is the best and most authoritative edition of all the editions that have ever been published.

Kisses,
A Bigger Tolkien Geek Than You

Now that I have written this letter, and been all snarky about the introduction guy, I’ve expanded my mental imagining of what it will be like when I meet Tolkien in heaven. The scene now includes the person who wrote this introduction, Douglas A. Anderson, who will have been talking to an interested and appreciative Professor Tolkien when I interrupt, and who will proceed to stand around looking smug until I realize who he is, remember this blog post, and retire in embarrassment.

I am like, ridiculously excited to be reading this again.  Gandalf mentioned Aragorn in passing to Frodo, and I was all Yes!  Aragorn!  Bring it, Tolkien! though in fact, when I am not being all screen-plagued (“gone Hollywood” did not win the word contest although I wanted it to) by Viggo Mortensen hotness, I actually really like Boromir better, in the books.  Because he is more interesting, and Aragorn is heroic but a bit dull.  I am looking forward to seeing Boromir again.

The post Beginning Fellowship appeared first on Reading the End.

Eva asks: Have you read The Hobbit before? If so tell us about that experience.

OH I WILL TELL YOU.  What happened was, my older sister Anna was in love with J.R.R. Tolkien.  This was back in the day when we were quite small and still shared a room; and she used to chant songs from Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as I was trying to fall asleep.  I would say “NNNNNNNNGGGGG,” and Anna would say, “It’s from Lord of the Rings!” like that should make me feel better.  Since I desperately admire Anna and yearn for her approval, I obediently went and fetched one of her copies of Fellowship and gave it a go, and I found it absolutely unbearable.  The age-old story of so many would-be Tolkien readers: I got to Tom Bombadil and found it impossible to continue.

And if I managed to push past Tom Bombadil by sheer force of will (remember I was only eight or nine and did not possess all that much force of will), I bogged down at the Council of Elrond.  I tried to blame it on being younger than Anna, but the bottom fell out of this excuse the next year, and eventually I concluded that Anna was just smarter than I was, and I would never love Tolkien.  Then she got her own room, and I shared with my younger sister, and instead of All that is gold does not glitter as I was trying to fall asleep, it was more Hey Jenny?  Hey Jenny?  Hey Jenny?  I had a Coke and now I can’t sleep.  BOUNCE BOUNCE BOUNCE.  I’m bouncing on my bed.  Hey Jenny?  I can’t sleep.  I’m bouncing on my bed.

Somewhere in the midst of my insomnia, I managed to read all of The Hobbit and hated it.  I hated how the dwarves came in and made a mess in Bilbo’s lovely house, and I contrarily didn’t like Bilbo for being unwelcoming.  There was just nothing about the book I enjoyed.  In a way it was a relief, because it meant positively that I didn’t enjoy J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing style, and it allowed me to stop worrying about Lord of the Rings.  I quickly contrived to forget everything about The Hobbit except the scene where Bilbo plays the riddle game with Gollum.  That scene has always stuck in my head quite vividly, or at least it seems vivid – I guess I’ll see how well my memory aligns with the actual scene when I reread.

Thus did it come to pass that I rejected Tolkien utterly until the first Peter Jackson film came out and I grew curious about what was going to happen next, and whether the film had been acceptably faithful to the books, and why everyone seemed to think that the eventual saving of Middle Earth was All About Sam, and who Faramir was anyway, and how badass Gandalf was going to be when he came back.  What I did was, I skipped Fellowship and that whole Tom Bombadil mess (figuring the movie would have given me the gist of the action), and went straight through into The Two Towers; and only when I had finished the second two books did I read the first one.  I never returned to The Hobbit.

Until now.

Cue dramatic music.

I have no idea what to expect, though I do feel confident I will still be annoyed at the dwarves’ intrusion into Bilbo’s home.  My understanding is that Hobbit is far more of a children’s book, without the grandstandy (and I say that with love and affection) die-for-what’s-right hero ideal that we get in Aragorn – well, in most of the characters really – in Lord of the Rings.  And there’s Smaug.  I know there is Smaug because other books talk about him, but I do not remember him from reading The Hobbit in elementary school.

I am eager, by the way, to congratulate J.R.R. Tolkien for his excellent job in retconning the changes he made in the Gollum-ring-riddles scene after writing Lord of the Rings.  But I do not expect much out of the conversation.  I expect it will be like this:

Jenny: Hi, Professor Tolkien!  I am Jenny!  I like your books!
Tolkien: *mumble mumble*
Jenny: I just wanted to tell you, when I first discovered that you had to change The Hobbit in order to make it fit with Lord of the Rings, I was sort of sneery.  Then I found out that you retconned the change by explaining that Bilbo originally lied about how it went with Gollum, and was eventually induced to confess the truth.  That is hella clever.  Well done you!
Tolkien: *mumble mumble*
Jenny: And you made up lots of languages, that was incredible, I really admire that.
Tolkien: *bewildering linguist babble*
Jenny: *wishes she had taken more linguistics classes*
Tolkien: I find you disappointing.
Jenny: Kthxbai.

Not sure why I am so bent on having this conversation when I imagine Tolkien to be so mumbly and mean (I imagine him this way not based on those of his letters which I have read, but on Diana Wynne Jones’s description of his lectures and my recollection that he didn’t like the Narnia books).  Maybe I will use that time to go chat with my hero Frederick Douglass and thank him for his tireless efforts on behalf of social justice.

The post Lord of the Rings Readalong appeared first on Reading the End.