Into Middle Earth

When it comes to a story that is so epic in scope and creation, there really isn't much, in my opinion, that seems to compare to Tolkien's masterpiece of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings. It's odd for me to even acknowledge this as I am someone who only dabbles marginally on the fringe (or so I only admit) of the SF and Fantasy genres. Growing up, I was more of a Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie girl, but as I grew, so did my taste in literature. I had read some of The Chronicles of Narnia and the odd "weird" book here and there, but it wasn't until the Harry Potter series came out when I was in college that I got into Fantasy and even took an SF class that truly changed the way I looked at the genre. Tolkien still lay beyond my grasp, however, as someone so far and deep into this whole other world that I didn't even want to touch the idea of possibly reading anything he wrote. The Lord of the Rings, to me, was in the same realm as those dark cloaked figures in basements playing Dungeons and Dragons and playing video games that were too complex to even comprehend. A little dark, a little shady, scary and too much for me to really give much thought. I was wrong.

In 2001, I was dragged to the first installment of the movie version. The trailer looked interesting enough, not my type of movie really, but I liked movies and figured I would go. The funny thing was that I didn't even know until the movie ended that that was only the end of the BEGINNING of the movies. I remember sitting in the theater, shifting in the seat almost two hours in, trying to bring feeling back into my bum and hips thinking, "This doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. Where the heck is Mount Doom?" Then the movie ended an hour or so later and it wasn't until after that moment of complete confusion that I realized, this is a massive story... just imagine how crazy the book must be. The book is almost always better than the movie! And ever since then, I've wanted to tackle reading this behemoth. It hasn't been until now, almost ten years later that I am getting around to it.

Tolkien was a scholar and knew exactly what he was doing. He didn't just create a thinly veiled alternate world that resembles the world in which we live (Pullman, Rowling, L'Engle, etc.), he went full throttle and created this entirely new earth populated with all manner of myth along with men complete with history and genealogy (Mieville, Clark, etc.) that all writers in the genre can only now aspire to be inspired by. It seems almost impossible not to see his influence in so many of the modern writers. Just having read the intro and first three chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, I can see the similarities and themes that others must have derived from Tolkien's model. I can't say that I am surprised to read that the writing alone took years and the revisions span decades and even now, there are left discrepancies and faux-historical inaccuracies. How could there not be? Furthermore, as daunting as the task of reading it may be, it was never meant as a trilogy, but published in three parts because of the changes that needed to be made and because of Tolkien's work on appendices and histories and such. What all this entails, I can't quite say as I have only just begun the journey along with Frodo and the others and after hours of reading, we have yet to quit The Shire. Weren't they already quite in harm's way and beyond the edge of their home less than half an hour in the movie? Ah, movie magic.

I always hate to compare movies with books because movies are so limiting in a manner to a story and in most cases, I rarely see a movie before reading the book, but having seen all the movies a number of times and having been so impressed by the scope of the movie's interpretation, I am blown away by the book. Only just now getting into this novel, I find that there is so much more that we didn't get and couldn't get in a film version. I am compelled to keep reading...

More later.