Back There and Again -- an introduction

Intro:

I am starting a new blog, Rereading the Lord of the Rings. In this introductory entry, I am going to talk about my plan for the blog and my background with the Lord of the Rings. I expect this to be by far my most lengthy entry in the blog.

On this blog I plan to go through the entire Lord of the Rings books, including Prologue and Appendices and give my thoughts on them, especially in light of the changed fantasy landscape in which they exist.

For many years the Lord of the Rings was the main touchstone for the genre of fantasy, especially epic or high fantasy. Oh, there was Sword and Sorcery stuff like the Conan books or the Elric series and some other seminal works like Jack Vance, but high fantasy with it's elevated themes and noble characters was very much invented by Tolkien: you could sort of trace everything to Tolkien and LOTR.

I think that that is changing. The change was gradual but I think fantasy is growing out of it's post-Tolkien adolescence into something with fewer rules and more possiblities. It started in the nineties when writers like Robin Hobb and George RR Martin took a lot of motives, themes and tropes that had long been accepted as the norm in fantasy and started carefully examining them: not so much demolishing them as looking at them in a new light, which breathed fresh life in to the genre.

I say they didn't demolish them, but right now, under their influence, these things are being demolished. I realized this when I read Joe Abercrombie's First Law series. I realized then that he was intentionally taking these cliches and deliberately just smashing them: because it was fun, it made for a better story and because they exist in order to be smashed. I don't read a lot of fantasy, in general, preferring general fiction and historical fiction and so on. Still I try to cycle in fantasy (as well as historical fiction, science fiction to my reading lists as often as I can. I am generally getting the sense that fantasy is in a kind of golden age, one led by George RR Martin and the popularity of the Harry Potter books and fed by numerous authors who are eager to write new stories, not mere rehashes of past masters

So I am curious as to how the Lord of the Rings holds up after all these years and what thoughts it inspires in me in this vastly changed landscaped in which it exists, still monumental and hugely influential but in a landscape that is becoming post-Martin rather than post-Tolkien.

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My history with LOTR and geekdom

Now, first of all I want to say that I have read the Lord of the Rings so many times in my life that I can't even count them. As a child I was a big bookworm, but in second, third and fourth grades I generally preferred science fiction. Star Trek reruns (and Planet of the Apes) was my first big thing, which I discovered as early as four years old. (I also apparently loved Lost in Space as a two-year old, but I have scant memories of them. I loved Star Trek so much, I used to stay up late on Saturday nights to watch the reruns.

The Dawn of the Planet of the Geeks

Once I learned to read, I managed to buy several collections written by James Blish that retold the stories of Star Trek in short story form. It was curious how the stories, based on original screenplays, would differ somewhat from the episodes: the production had changed the stories and scripts somewhat, probably usually for reasons of budget. I was also fond of Alan Dean Foster retellings of the animated series which I found at the local library, where I would spend hours. At the time, Star Trek original novels were scant (though beginning to appear) and I read a few of those, as well, along with novelizations of the movies.

Starting at age 6, right before I learned to read, Star Wars exploded into consciousness, a sort of big bang for Generation X, I suppose and an iconic addition to American culture ever since. At that time, of course there was no internet and even VCRS and cable TV was a thing of the future: it was not possible to just "watch Star Wars" on command as it is now. I saw it twice in the theaters, read the novelization (it may have been the first non-children's book I read, actually, at age 7 and even, eventually, read one or two novels set in the Star Wars universe. (Splinter in the Mind's Eye was one, there was another one: I think Splinter is mocked by Star Wars fans now, and I don't remember it at all -- but at the age of ten, I thought it was pretty cool.

But there were comic books that kept our memories of the film fresh and trading cards and, of course, toys that fueled our imagination. I can still remember debating among my friends on rainy recess at school, sitting around desks who the ‘other hope’ that Yoda mentioned to Kenobi was. Only one of us — a chunky red-headed kid whose father was in the military and to whose house I went to for Cub Scout meetings — guessed that it was Leia —and that seemed so far-fetched as to be laughable.

My geekdom on all things Star Wars and Star Trek was such that I literally wrote a book about Star Trek, a sort of world book, when I was ten. Nothing original, of course, just explanations of the technology, the ships, and a few of the prominent alien species featured on the show. (The Next Generation and subsequent series was at least a decade off, so the "world" was still fairly small and graspable.) My best friend at the time, Josh Gold, now a martial arts expert in LA, illustrated the book with hand-drawn diagrams of the ships and with trading cards that at the time were in circulation, much like baseball cards.

Josh moved to California and, sadly, the book moved with him: I contacted him through Facebook a few years ago but he had no memory of the book.

Not long after Josh moved, my family started moving. The oil crisis of the mid-seventies had blown up into a full-grown recession. Times were dark and my father got laid off his quite-sucessful, unionized factory job that he had worked at for years when the factory came under new ownership and laid off everybody who had worked there before; he found another one that paid considerably less; lost that job too. And eventually, we were fored to move from the Saint Louis area (where I attended one of the best school districts in the State) to SouthWest Missouri area, where I went to four different schools in the next two years, my family (two adults, three children) always in search of cheaper accommodation to survive in a situation where my father's income had gone from 13 dollars per hour to 5 dollars per hour. This situation got worse when my mother became pregnant and the winter of 1981 saw us living in a trailer in a tiny trailer park in the middle of nowhere, six miles from Mt. Vernon Missouri.

Living there was miserable and depressing. My bedroom was so small, that my bed completely filled it. It was a cold winter, with heavy snows that wouldn't be seen again in that part of the world for a decade or more. Our front door did not shut properly and every morning we would wake to find it wide open to the wintry wind, snow piled in small drifts on the threshold.

My mother was often depressed and moody and even violent and I started gaining weight, as food was one of the few escapes from our dreary existence that we had.

Furthermore my father, in an attempt to keep the family going often worked overtime, leaving early in the morning and not coming home until late at night: working first and second shifts to get the doubletime needed to keep our family "in food." I really missed my Dad at the time and I think that his absence was hard on all of us. Oh, he was there, sleeping in the morning: but we rarely saw him.

At that time I think the family went on food stamps, which increased our shame and I remember catching lice that year and feeling like God had truly cursed us. My happy golden childhood in St. Louis was over. Times had changed. I was living in a Bruce Springsteen song. (Although at the time, I didn't know from Springsteen: Mellencamp's Jack and Diane and Jesse's girl and "I Love Rock'n'Roll" and "Sister Christian" were the big hits at the time -- it was pre-Thriller times, but only barely.)

It was into this landscape that the Lord of the Rings appeared in my life.

I was one of those kids who was always reading and who was always bringing his books to school. Despite the fact that I was never particularly athletic or good at sport and was really a bit of a wuss, I was never really picked on — maybe once or twice by bullies, but not regularly. I was smarter than most kids, but was too internal for that to be a problem: people seemed mostly to have a weird kind of respect for me then. (In high school this would get worse, of course, but pre-pubescent kids have their own rules.) I was never really the only book worm and this time I became friends with a guy named Chad Stearns: a sort of slightly fat blonde kid whose father owned the local I.G.A. supermarket. He was a rich kid, I was a poor kid, but he had an older brother whose tastes in books were much like my own. So we had that in common.

One grey Friday, and I will never forget this moment, sometime in the late autumn of 1981, Chad marched up to my desk and threw a copy of the Hobbit on my desk. "Read this, you'll like it." He announced to me in the slightly arrogant way he had, his sharp Ozark accent grating in my ears. It had the copy with a painting by Tolkien himself on the cover, a painting of Bilbo sprawled across a barrel making it's way to Laketown. But it meant nothing to me and did not particularly grab me.

But I took it home and read it. Three times that weekend. And my life was changed: here was a story that seemed so familiar yet so unlike anything I had ever read before! It was as if a million suns blazed in my consciousness. I just loved it.

I quickly read through the Fellowship of the Ring, another loan from Chad after that. (He spoiled Gandalf's fall for me and then, mercilessly, spoiled Gandalf's return.)

And I begged my parents to buy me a box set of the series for Christmas. They did. I had to wait about a month for Christmas to come before I could read The Two Towers and The Return of the King, but somehow I managed to survive.

After that I was a fantasy fan. My parents used to give me one dollar a week for "allowance" which I dutifully saved up for new books. Paperback books at that time cost $2.95, which made $3.11 cents with the sales tax that Missouri imposed. That meant that every third week I was able to buy a new book (my dad would "lend" me the additional eleven cents, which I would promise to pay back but of course I never did.) After that I read the Silmarillion (slow at first but after a certain point amazing) the Covenant series (both of them, though the Second one was not yet finished: I saved up 15.95 for the hard copy of White Gold Wielder, a super-human feat of saving for a 12 year old).

So in a way, fantasy sort of revived me in a dark time of depression and loneliness. I used to spend days walking around in the field next to our trailer tossing a stick and making up my own stories, starring me as the hero, some permutation of Aragorn from the books. I'll never forget the earthy smell that covered my hands when I would come in for dinner. (Nowadays I see my seven year old son pacing restlessly in the garden in front of our home talking to himself and realize that he too is making up his own stories based on the cartoons he watches.)

The Lord of the Rings was not only a fantastic story but it also in many ways helped to bring me where I am. I read and reread it many ties in the next few years -- possibly as many as fifteen times.

After that I think I reread the Lord of the Rings (and the Hobbit) every year or every other year up until the time I moved to Europe. My tastes changed and I sort of went off fantasy, but I always returned to those books. (And the books around them: the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, especially).

In 2005 my then-girlfriend (now wife) Jana gave me an incredible gift: she gave me the Lord of the Rings in Czech and also a copy in English. So in 2006 I actually read the book three more times --- or five more times, technically. The first time, I read the story sentence by sentence: reading a sentence in English and a sentence in Czech. This took some time, but afterwards I did a second reread: an entire page in Czech and then an entire page in English. Finally, I re-read the entire series again in Czech alone. My familiarity with the story of course facilitated this, but I really think that whole exercise, which took months helped with my understanding of (written) Czech.

But it also burnt me out on the story. And that was the last time I read the Lord of the Rings, and besides a weekend reading the first Christopher Paolini book (Eragon?) a thousand page shit-fest, the last time I read fantasy at all until A Song of Ice and Fire revived my spirits after the death of my mother.

Right now it is late August and the new school year is approaching like a ten-ton truck. I plan to re-read the Lord of the rings, chapter-by-chapter (one or two chapters a week) and make a blog entry on it recording my thoughts and impressions, taking a critical eye to it but also mainly taking a personal nostalgia trip that may take me anywhere.

Readers (if there are any) are highly encouraged to add their own thoughts to my entries, or their own reviews, commentary or impressions or memories. I don't really expect this, but one can hope for a dialogue among fellow-fans.

Right now it is late August and the new school year is approaching like a ten-ton truck. This school year is shaping up to be as busy as last year, which is causing me a bit of stress and worry: beyond a thirty teaching hour load, I am also co-running a medium sized language school that employs ten full-time teachers, a full-time assistant and ten to fifteen (I never know exactly how many) part-time teachers, an accountant and some contractors for computer or other maintenance.) . This is more work than most people realize, though fortunately my assistant and co-director are quite competent in their jobs: fortunately because I don't have a lot of time. In addition to this, I am active, trying to power-walk/jog seven kilometers at least 4 times a week; reading other books; taking an intensive thrice-weekly Czech course, writing crap on the Internet, spending some quality time with my son, who is just beginning first grade in school, etc.

Fortunately, I have no real social life, or I would be really busy.

My point with all this is to say: the blog will probably grow slowly. I may not write more than one essay per week; I may not even write that. But I hope that I enjoy writing it. And if I have any readers, I hope that they will enjoy reading it. I will be posting this blog on Quora and also on another server (blogspot, or whatever, I don't know yet. )

Will add more pics later.