Tales from the Third Age

In 1971, I received a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings, a Christmas gift which I believe came from my mom’s parents. (I do recall we were there for that Christmas, but I can’t remember from whom the gift came — it doesn’t sound like something they would have gotten. I have a vague sense it might have been from one of my Nona’s employers. Weird.)

It was the Ballentine paperback edition, the “authorized” one (complete with the slightly irked message from JRR on the back referring to the “unauthorized” Ace edition that had come out earlier). These were the ones with the sort of surreal fantasy landscape, not the pretty white ones with the Tolkien illustratinos on the cover.

I started The Fellowship of the Ringfour, five, six times. I’d never read The Hobbit, so all the chit-chat about the Shire was … well, unbelievably dull. And cutesy. And silly. Yeah, there was some indication that Things Might Be Otherwise Elsewhere, but for every bit of meaningful frowning by Gandalf, there was a digression about what types of fireworks he’d been crafting, and how the kids all loved them.

Fantasy was an unfamiliar genre for me. I was hot and heavy into Sci-fi — Asimov and Heinlein and Norton and Nourse and Del Rey and Silverburg. I’d raked through the SF section of the local library. I’d also combed through the Mythology section, too. But Fantasy — aside from some L’Engle — was still missing from the shelves.

FotR became my perennial camp-out book, during my days in the Boy Scouts (about which miserable experience more some other time). It kept getting dropped into my pack, and then pulled out to read in my sleeping bag by flashlight. And I kept getting about as far as the Birthday Party. The book kept getting more and more ragged, and an unfortunate banana stain appeared on the front cover from a mis-packing.

Time passed. I got into high school. And my friends, Erick Melton and Jim Merino, suddenly started ranting and raving about those Lord of the Rings books. Greatest thing since sliced bread. They talked about Hobbits, and Elves, and Dwarves, and Orcs, and Balrogs, and the Rings, and battles and swords and cool stuff like that. They, and others, were way into it. They couldn’t talk about anything else.

It sounded great.

It still took me another two tries before I got past the Birthday Party, and then more chit-chat at Bag End, and then nattering about mushrooms, and then the Old Forest … and … then …

Oh. My. God.

I devoured the rest of the books in record time. Though conversation had moved on amongst my friends, I dragged it back to LotR. Triffic stuff. Positively triffic.

I was an inveterate collector of useless data in those days. (Today I am much the same, but since so much is already on the Internet, I just collect links to useless data.) I had (and still have, somewhere), charts and charts comparing different WWII tanks and planes. LotR was a natural, once I discovered that JRR had done his homework.

I mean, there was real language here. And in cool, foreign lettering. And, best of all, maps!!

Thus began a decade-long obsession with Tolkien stuff. I made up similar alternative calendars. I did some rudimentary language. I did blow-ups of the maps, long-hand. I practiced writing things in Tengwar, and in Runes.

I got a first-edition Silmarillion when it came out.

And then time passed, and there were Official Books out on Tolkien’s worlds. I found the Silmarillion dull. I found other authors and things to obsess about.

There were occasional flashes of resurgence. I kind of enjoyed the Rankin-Bass productions of The Hobbit, and, to a lesser extent, The Return of the King (both of which were best when they stuck to the story and the musical lyrics Tolkien had written). I got wildly enthusiastic again when Bakshi was going to do the movies in animation — and then was disappointed by the results.

And now, some thirty years after I got the books, the first movie is out.

Kids today. Don’t know how lucky they have it.

(Image via Isildur’s Lair)