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Re: Question for Lord of the Rings readers

Why do I reread LotR?

It's a different reason every time, and that is precisely why.  I first read
LotR at age I can't even remember (I remember reading it, but not how old I
was), but I can narrow it down a bit because I remember seeing the Ralph Bakshi
movie in the theaters, and I had already read it at that point, and that movie
was out in 1978, so I was 7 or 8.  So I usually say I was six when I first read
it.  At that time, I liked the hobbits, particularly Sam, and I tended to skip
book three and five completely, because all the stuff with armies and kings
bored me.  I came back to it in a later reading as a teenager, and the
complexity of the politics and sweeping scope of those sections of the book
enthralled me.  In college, it was the roots in mythology that fascinated me (I
had recently read T.A. Shippey's _The Road to Middle Earth_, which is the best
analysis of LotR I have yet read.).  In the year or two after college, I was
reading the History of Middle Earth series, volumes 6-9, which traced the
development of LotR by publishing all the rough drafts.  It was amazing to see
how his ideas changed as he went (Strider was originally, and for quite a long
time in the development of the story, a *hobbit* named Trotter, who wore wooden
shoes.), and it got me thinking a lot about creativity (I read Foucault's
Pendulum about the same time).  Another time through, I was enthralled by the
languages.  When I was in junior high, I kept my journal in the Feanorean
Elvish script (in English, though, just transliterated).

So, for me, I keep going back because the book is so rich in theme and in
character that every time in is a new experience, even though I've read it at
least fifteen times already.  As I grow, different aspects of it come to my
attention because my experience has enabled me to notice them.  When I read it
again last month after seeing the Peter Jackson movie, it was the locations and
the character development that really grabbed my attention.  Those wonderful
New Zealand landscapes really did a great job of evoking a sense of place.

Yeah, I'm a Tolkien freak.  I've got just about every book he ever wrote
(although not the heavy academic Beowulf stuff), as well as most of the major
books written about him and his work.  This kind of ties into that other
thread.  I do feel like I have way, way too much stuff, between the CDs, books,
DVDs, and A/V-computer equipment.  On the other hand, about 90% of it fits in
one room (a few boxes of extra stuff and my home theater are in the basement),
so it can't be *that* much, right?  :-)  Still, moving four full bookshelves (five
feet high) across the country is a *lot* of weight.  But how can I get rid of
*books*????  Books are my identity.  Every so often I try to purge, but it's
like huge icebergs breaking off the antartic shelf of my soul and drifting off
into the sea.  I haven't cracked open any of the books in my Arthurian collection
in years, but somehow to get rid of them would be like excising that period in
my life when I was steeped in those legends.  And besides, I might want to
read them again someday.  Someday I want to have my own house, and my dream is
to have books everywhere.  Particularly so that it can open up new worlds for
kids, the way my folks' books opened up new worlds for me.  We had a "book
closet" in the house I grew up in, and that was every bit as magical as Lucy's
wardrobe, because I would curl up in there, with the bare light bulb dangling
from the ceiling, and be transported *anywhere*.

Here I go...
-- 
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                          http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy."            - John Whorfin
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