Elementary school spoiled fiction for me early on. In the thousand different children’s books I was fed about young boys roughing it on the frontier with their hound dogs and their shotguns (the result, perhaps, of growing up in a “pioneer” state) there was nothing I could relate to. I was a fast reader, a “good” reader (whatever that means), but reading brought no joy.
Maybe it was the years of reading to recall.
Reading for school inevitably emphasized memorization, as if learning was a thing that could only happen by a conscious and necessarily painful act of the will. There will be a test, they said. You will be asked questions. Which meant, I thought, that to read a story meant to make a record of it, word for word, in the mind. So when it came to reading for enjoyment, the act of imaginative visualization—giving the story life and allowing myself to sink into it without stress or worry—simply (and this is going to sound…odd) didn’t occur to me1.
Then, through a slow process shepherded by a healthy dose of X-men comics and story-rich SNES-era JRPGs—mediums that relied on the literal layering of text and image—as well as (probably) the chemical cascade that accompanies the onset of puberty and begins rewiring the brain, something woke up.
Part 1: The Prydain Chronicles
It was summer of 1994. My grandmother insisted on buying me a book titled The Book of Three, the first in a series called The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander (though she didn’t know that at the time). It was her latest attempt to instill in me the same love of reading that had followed her through life and had lead her to devour a book a day for most of her 65 years. She just “had a feeling” that that book was there for me, she said.
I scoffed.
It turned out she was right.
Intrigued by the colorful cover art—a simple (and comfortingly literal) illustration of the protagonists by Jody Lee—I gave in one day in early August, curled on my bed while my window air conditioner pumped out frigid air and that pungent coolant smell. I made a conscious effort to relax and simply enjoy the story.
I know how that sounds. The thing is…it worked.
Alexander’s prose isn’t flowery; his descriptions are concise and spare. The world these stories belong in exists only in necessary patches and as the plot dictates. This is writing for a younger audience (younger than I was at the time I read it), but the story and the characters were endearing, funny, and deeply relatable to me. Because of them, I experienced for the first time what it was to fully inhabit a fictional world. I came to know them as if they were real people—an experience made keener (and deadlier) by virtue of being a shy, lonely non-conformist who was isolated, homeschooled, struggling with anxiety, and utterly incapable of relating to most people her own age. Escaping into this other world was a wonder and delight…while it lasted.
I zoomed through each slender volume (I still remember that awful wait for books 3 and 4 to arrive, by special order, at our tiny local bookstore), desperate to know what came next. Before I knew it, I had reached the end.
When I turned over that last page and realized there were no more stories to read, it was as if that world and those characters simply winked out of existence. Their “fictionalness” became suddenly, coldly apparent. As a sheltered, fortunate, and privileged child of the First World, it was the closest I had come (at that point) to the death of someone I loved. I moped about for days, forlorn and lonely, and feeling for the first time those things I would later come to associate with major depressive disorder.
Part 2: Following Frodo
Rewind to November of ‘92. My aunt had given me her old paperback copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These were her first copies, the old Ballantine paperbacks2 from the mid 70s, which had used Tolkien’s own illustrations as the cover art.
Much like my grandmother, she had hoped they would spur me towards a love of fiction reading. But I hadn’t been ready. The magic wasn’t working yet, and my brief perusal of The Hobbit’s opening poem simply couldn’t yet inspire eleven year old me.
Now, I can’t say that I was entirely unfamiliar with Tolkien. I had seen and remembered enjoying the Rankin Bass animated Hobbit as a small child, and I even vaguely recalled seeing some portion of their truncated adaptation of The Return of the King (and really who can forget “where there’s a whip, there’s a way”?). But that was the extent of my Tolkien exposure—the opening pages of The Hobbit hadn’t (yet) captured my imagination. But in those days post-Prydain, as I found myself desperate and sad, my mind awake to the art of reading3 in a way it hadn’t been before, I grabbed The Hobbit off my shelf and carelessly dove in.
And there was Tolkien’s voice for the first time in my head. To my astonishment this world was clearer, more distinct, more alive than even Prydain had been; Tolkien’s voice was more pronounced, the whimsy of his words like music; this was story-telling of a kind I somehow recognized, though at the time I didn’t know from where. And as before I sped through, devouring the journey, again all too short.
Looking back it seems fitting that when it came time to read Tolkien, I came to it in the midst of loss—a naïve loss, but loss nonetheless. Even The Hobbit with its tra-la la-lally elves has melancholy and bittersweet undercurrents. But in that loss Tolkien gave me something…well, something precious: a new fictional world to love. A second fictional world to love, and that is deeply important because it suggested something profound to 13 year old me: that there could always be new fictional worlds to love.
As before The Hobbit flew by far too quickly, and I had sort of learned my lesson by the time I finished it. When I moved on to The Lord of the Rings I realized I had to be very careful. I counted the pages. Each volume in the “trilogy” would count as the longest book I had yet read, but it, too, would go by quickly—very quickly, I knew—and I could tell that I was embarking on something important, something with a gravity that deserved care in the reading.
I determined I would be stingy with it. I would pace myself. I would read each scene with care, taking steps to make sure I could see every detail with crystal clarity. That I absorbed every moment. That I didn’t waste a word. That I saw each moment In my mind as clearly as if I was standing there myself, and if it came to it, to stop and walk away for a while. Let it sit with me. Treasure it.
As luck would have it, it was now moving quickly into late September, and I found myself opening on the story on roughly the same day as dear old Bilbo. The unintentional synchronization of the seasons solidified the story, and as Frodo left Bag End, harried along the way by Black Riders, the changing leaves and smell of early Fall outside my window embedded me in Middle-earth and made The Lord of the Rings forever an autumn story—and then a winter story: it was Christmas by the time The Company left Rivendell, both for me and for them.
So, I followed Frodo, each step as clear as the room around me right now is. I have been in Bag End. I have been chased by Black Riders. I know what the trees of the Old Forest look like, the Prancing Pony, Rivendell, the ruins of Hollin, the halls of Moria. I have sat on the seat of Amon Hen, escaped the Dead Marshes and the little candle lights, traveled the road south down the western side of the Ephel Duath. I’ve crossed the plateau of Gorgoroth and stood at the Cracks of Doom. And some time in March, I sailed with Frodo into the West. I had passed through the dark of the year and come out the other side.
So in love was I with that world that I devoured every last drop about it that I could, first The Silmarillion and then Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, Carpenter’s biography, “Leaf by Niggle,” his Letters, and any number of other stories and any and all books relating to Tolkien that I could get my hands on.
That was 25 years ago. And yet… I’m still sitting here reading about, thinking about, and writing about Tolkien. Tolkien is lodged somewhere so deep that I’m not sure who “I” would be in a world where he didn’t exist. At times I have gone away, sometimes for years, immersed in other interests or the simple events of living and growing older, but I always come back eventually. And it was this time ‘round that I realized why Tolkien’s voice was so familiar.
Part 3: Stories Never-ending
Rewind to a time before time, or at least a time before I started counting it. When I was a small child my grandmother would make up stories on the fly, often late at night in her desperation to get me to sleep—something I didn’t do much of. Sometimes they were stories based on events in my life, with me as the main character but with fantastical elements added. Sometimes they were entirely her own creation, made up on the spot. But they all had a Wind in the Willows quality. A Hobbit quality.
About three years ago I came across the quote about Christopher Tolkien correcting his father when the details of The Hobbit would change with each oral telling—the color of Bilbo’s front door or the tassel on Thorin’s hood. You know, the one that memorializes Tolkien’s exasperated response as he dashes off to start writing this stuff down: “Damn the boy!” (4)
And I laughed. And then I cried. Because that was me with my grandmother, correcting her if a favorite story was not precisely the same each time (and her response sometimes included a bit of swearing of her own).
I knew Tolkien’s voice because it was so like hers.
Within the last couple of years, as she reached 90 years old, my grandmother fell into the later stages of dementia. One of the most frightening things I have ever experienced (and as someone with panic attack disorder that’s saying something) was the first time I saw in her eyes the question: who are you? It only lasted a split second then, but that was when I knew that there was going to come a point when she would still be here but, for her, I would not be. I would give so much to hear one of those stories again.
Today, three days after her 92nd birthday, my grandmother died.
And it seems fitting, at such a time, when loss is no longer so naive, to once again go back to Tolkien, to go back to stories, and take the solace I can find there. That I have always found there. I have my grandmother and her perseverance to thank for that.
There will always be stories for me because of her, places to escape to when needed.
Stories never-ending.
Notes
- It’s not that I had aphantasia—I had (and have) a very vivid and visual imagination. It just didn’t “work” when applied to written fiction for some reason.
- If you’re interested in learning more about the Ballantines and especially Betty Ballantine and her influence on the popularity of the sci-fi/fantasy genres in general (and Tolkien in particular) in the US, check out this piece from TheOneRing.net as well as this piece from SmithsonianMag.com written after her death in Feb 2019.
- I’m still not sure if this is something other people typically feel they have to learn or if that was just me.
- ‘In the introduction to the 50th anniversary printing of The Hobbit, Christopher wrote: “He also remembered that I (then between four and five years old) was greatly concerned with petty consistency as the story unfolded, and that on one occasion I interrupted: ‘Last time, you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a gold tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver’; at which point my father muttered ‘Damn the boy,’ and then ‘strode across the room’ to his desk to make a note.” (https://aleteia.org/2017/11/13/how-a-5-year-old-boy-inspired-j-r-r-tolkiens-lord-of-the-rings/)
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