by Karen Haber
Then I picked up the first book and started again. I spent a long time looking at the runes.
Already, as I admit this, I can feel the circle of new, anxious but friendly faces around me: “My name is Terry and I used to draw dwarf runes in my school notebooks. It started with, you know, the straight ones, everyone can do them, but then I got in deeper and before I knew it I was doing the curly elf ones with the dots. Wait . . . there’s worse. Before I’d even heard the word ‘fandom’ I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, because a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen’s fine prose. It was a really good bit when the ores attacked the rectory. . . .” But around about then, I suspect, the support group would have thrown me out.
Enthralled I was. To the library I went back, and spake thusly: “Have you got any more books like these? Maybe with maps in? And runes?”
The librarian gave me a mildly disapproving look, but I ended up with Beowulf and a volume of Norse sagas. He meant well, but it wasn’t the same. It took someone several stanzas just to say who they were.
But that drew me to the Mythology shelves. The Mythology shelves were next to the Ancient History shelves. What the hell . . . it was all guys with helmets, wasn’t it? On, on . . . maybe there’s a magical ring! Or runes!
The desperate search for the Tolkien effect opened up a new world for me, and it was this one.
History as it was then taught in British schools was big on kings and acts of Parliament, and was full of dead people. It had a certain strange, mechanistic structure to it. What happened in 1066? The Battle of Hastings. Full marks. And what else happened in 1066? What do you mean, what else happened? The Battle of Hastings was what 1066 was for. We’d “done” the Romans (they came, they saw, they had some baths, they built some roads and left) but my private reading colored in the picture. We hadn’t “done” the Greeks. As for the empires of Africa and Asia, did anyone “do” them at all? But hey, look here in this book; these guys don’t use runes, it’s all pictures of birds and snakes; but, look, they know how to pull a dead king’s brains out through his nose. . . .
And on I went, getting the best kind of education possible, which is the one that happens while you think you’re having fun. Would it have happened anyway? Possibly. We never know where the triggers are. But The Lord of the Rings was a step-change in my reading. I was already enjoying, but The Lord of the Rings opened me up to the rest of the library.
I used to read it once a year, in the spring.
I’ve realized that I don’t any more, and I wonder why. It’s not the dense and sometime ponderous language. It’s not because the scenery has more character than the characters, or the lack of parts for women, or the other perceived or real offenses against the current social codes.
It’s simply because I have the movie in my head, and it’s been there for forty years. I can still remember the luminous green of the beechwoods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow. The protagonists don’t figure much in the movie, because they were never more to me than figures in a landscape that was, itself, the hero. I remember it at least as clearly as—no, come to think of it, more clearly than—I do many of the places I’ve visited in what we like to call the real world. In fact, it is strange to write this and realize that I can remember stretches of the Middle-earth landscape as real places. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to.
GALADRIEL
The Fellowship of the Ring
Chapter VII: “The Mirror of Galadriel”
I suppose the journey was a form of escapism. That was a terrible crime at my school. It’s a terrible crime in a prison; at least, it’s a terrible crime to a jailer. In the early sixties, the word had no positive meanings. But you can escape to as well as from. In my case, the escape was a truly Tolkien experience, as recorded in his Tree and Leaf. I started with a book, and that led me to a library, and that led me everywhere.
Do I still think, as I did then, that Tolkien was the greatest writer in the world? In the strict sense, no. You can think that at thirteen. If you still think it at fifty-three, something has gone wrong with your life. But sometimes things all come together at the right time in the right place—book, author, style, subject and reader. The moment was magic.
And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.
One day I was doing a signing in a London bookshop and next in the queue was a lady in what, back in the eighties, was called a “power suit” despite its laughable lack of titanium armor and proton guns.
She handed over a book for signature. I asked her what her name was. She mumbled something. I asked again . . . after all, it was a noisy bookshop. There was another mumble, which I could not quite decipher. As I opened my mouth for the third attempt, she said, “It’s Galadriel, okay?”
I said: “Were you by any chance born in a cannabis plantation in Wales?” She smiled, grimly. “It was a camper van in Cornwall,” she said, “but you’ve got the right idea.”
It wasn’t Tolkien’s fault, but let us remember in fellowship and sympathy all the Bilboes out there.
A BAR AND
A QUEST
ROBIN HOBB
I can’t write a scholarly essay about Tolkien. I’m not a scholar. Nor can I produce a carefully reasoned analysis of just how The Lord of the Rings changed not only fantasy but literature for my generation and generations to come. I am not only too close to it, I am at ground zero. I am a product of his impact. Like the rider in the rocket, I don’t know the mechanics of launching it or the thought that went into designing it. All I can tell you is that it carried me up to where I could see the stars, and nothing has looked quite the same since.
1965? I think that is right. Odd that I cannot put a more precise date to it. My family lived in a log house in a rural setting outside Fairbanks, Alaska. So I was about thirteen.
In the front yard of our log house, on stilt legs about fourteen feet tall, there was a small log cabin. In the dark cold of an Alaskan winter, in a good year, that cache was full of meat. Quarters of moose or caribou, frozen solid, leaned hooves-up against the walls. The hide was left on this grisly plenty to protect the meat from drying out. We had an electric freezer on the back porch as well, but the cache provided a space to store our hunting bounty until it could be cut into serving portions, wrapped in white paper and set into the plug-in freezer (which, often enough in the Fairbanks cold, was not plugged in for most of the winter!).
In summer, the cache served an entirely different purpose. It was mine. In a household rampant with seven siblings, not to mention their friends hanging out, it provided a small space of privacy for me. Bedrooms and living room had to be shared. No one except me wanted the cache. I could drag sleeping bags and cushions up there, and, for the summer at least, have my own room. With me went my books. Lots of books. Out of sight of both parents and siblings, I could hide from chores and the world at large, and read. One of the untrumpeted benefits of that Midnight Sun is that a flashlight is not necessary for late-night summer-reading. With plenty of Off! insect repellent and army-surplus mummy bag, my evening was complete.
This was the setting for not only my first reading of The Lord of the Rings, but for many repetitions of it. The sensory memories connected with those books are bumpy cottonwood logs under my back and glimpses of blue sky through the close-set logs of the cache’s roof.
I started with the Houghton Mifflin paperback with the pinky cover for The Hobbit, brought home from the rack at the drugstore. I went on to the Ace rip-offs for The Lord of the Rings. When I discovered that those who were courteous at least to living author
s would not have bought the Ace editions, I saved rigorously and purchased all four books in Houghton Mifflin hardbacks. They cost me a whopping $5.95 each. It took me so long to acquire the whole set that the bindings did not match.
The Hobbit had, of course, Tolkien’s own art on the cover. Two had jackets by Walter Lorraine, and the third had the darker art by Robert Quackenbush. But the covers didn’t much matter to me. It was the pages within that I needed to possess. The same hardback editions still sit on the shelves in my office. Their dust jackets are frayed and eroded. Opened, they lie flat, the stitching peeking out at me between the pages. Yet, opened to any page, the words still have the power to draw me in and pull me under, and, ultimately, to take me home.
I have lost track of how many times I have reread them over the years. Nor can I recall how many copies of The Lord of the Rings I have purchased over the years. They have been gifts for friends, both young and old; and there have been sets that went off to college with my children. The last time I reread The Hobbit was less than a month ago, as I shared it with my youngest daughter. I can recite the opening paragraph from memory, yet I never deliberately memorized it. Phrases and sensory images from the books float up into my mind at odd times: “fireweed seeding away into fluffy ashes,” winter apples that were “withered but sound,” or the smell of fresh mushrooms rising from a covered basket.
I suspect it is difficult for readers who have grown up in a time when The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are acknowledged as classics to understand the breathtaking impact they had on readers like myself. I simply had never read anything like it. I was an omnivorous reader, steeped in fairy tale books, the classics, mythology, mysteries, and adventure. In those days before I discovered Tolkien, I was devouring science fiction and pulp at the junkie rate of at least a paperback a day. It wasn’t that there was no good stuff out there. There was. I’d found Heinlein and Bradbury and Simak and Sturgeon and Leiber. All those encounters marked me. But Tolkien claimed me as no other writer ever had before.
His magic wrapped me and took me under, and when I came out of it, I was a different creature. Even as I sit here now, looking at a computer screen and trying to analyze why that is so, I am somewhat at a loss to explain it. Maybe it was the age I was, or the place I was in my development of reading taste. Maybe it was just the juxtaposition of Tolkien’s Middle-earth and the restless sixties. But perhaps magic doesn’t have to offer any explanation for why it worked. Perhaps it simply is.
Yet I think I can sieve out a bit of it. I had three distinct sensations at the end of The Lord of the Rings. One was the simple, unbelievable void of “It’s over. There’s no more of it to read.” The second was, “And I’ve never encountered anything like this. I’ll never find anything this good again.” The third was perhaps the most alarming: “In all my life, I will never write anything as good as this. He’s done it; he’s achieved it. Is there any point in my trying?”
Taking the third sensation first: Even in those days, I knew I was going to be a writer. I had been writing since I was in first grade, creating short stories almost as soon as I mastered sentences. By the time I finished junior high, I burned with the fixed ambition that I was going to write amazing books, someday. To discover that someone had already written the most amazing books that could possibly exist raised the bar to an almost impossible height for me.
Raising that bar was the most wonderful thing that anyone could have done for an ambitious young writer.
The fantasy I had read before that time simply didn’t take itself seriously. Before anyone sends me a list of a hundred serious fantasy books that existed before Tolkien wrote, let me concede that I completely accept all responsibility for my ignorance. I am sure there was important fantasy out there, and some of it had probably even made it to Fairbanks, Alaska. I’m simply saying that I hadn’t found it. Not until The Lord of the Rings.
Much of the fantasy I had read before Tolkien was unmistakably written “for children.” Some of it had that snide, winking-at-the-grown-up-in-the-room humor that some adults find amusing and children find irritating. (After all, if you think I’m that stupid, why are you writing for me?) Some was written with the kind of humor that becomes a barrier to the reader taking the character or story seriously. How can you care about the hero when his next contrived pratfall is probably less than a page away? Why commit to a character whom the writer has not invested in emotionally?
Much of what I read was sword-and-sorcery, rollicking adventurous stuff; fun, but written with a fine disregard for any morality regarding theft or mercenary murder. Serious, long-term relationships among the characters did not seem to exist. The happy ending was usually that the character managed to walk away unscathed and unchanged. Some of the fantasy I’d read was written in the simplistic “Once upon a time” format where the Prince and the Giant and the Glass Mountain are all capitalized, just to make sure the reader knows he is in the throes of a classic fairy tale. Even The Hobbit, much as I enjoyed it, was not devoid of some such condescension toward its characters.
Yet in The Hobbit I discovered elements that had never before shone so clearly for me. Setting was fully developed. True setting is far more than descriptive passages about birch trees in winter, or picturesque villages. Tolkien’s setting invoked a time and a place that was as familiar as home to me, yet unfolded the wonders and dangers of all that I had always suspected was just beyond the next hill. Here, too, were characters that rang as true as chimes, pompous Thorin and competent Balin, and Gandalf the wizard, subtle and quick to anger. I met them, and as the book progressed, I knew them. Tolkien allowed me to love them, without fear that on the next page I would discover the hollow cardboard or the contortion in the plot for the sake of a pun. Nor was the plot a linear thing, however the “There and Back Again” on the title page might imply it. It sprawled out in odd directions, touching older magics with the calm assumption that the reader would know they had always existed and always would. Magic rings and Mirk-wood were not issues that could be neatly cookie-cuttered to fit within the covers of this book. They extended beyond the edges of the page, and Tolkien made no apology for that. Like the maps in the hardbacks, his word unfolded larger than mere covers could encompass.
RIGENDELL
The Fellowship of the Ring
Book 2, Chapter I: “Many Meetings”
But more challenging to me was that this writer wrote about things that mattered, and he did not scruple to say so. If you take what someone else has stolen, can it ever be truly yours? What matters more, loyalty to your friends or preventing widespread bloodshed? There were issues of what comprised real courage, and when did doing what was right become more important than doing what was glorious. Bilbo was a simple character, good-hearted and honest, yet complex in that he faced decisions where happily ever after extended beyond a question of personal gain or safety.
The ending was not what I had expected. Surely Bilbo had deserved to be the flamboyant hero, the slayer of the dragon? And the dwarves! I had expected Thorin to indeed finish as King Under the Mountain, with all the dragon’s gold, and his companions all intact. What had become of the requisite Happily Ever After, in which everything finishes exactly as it was at the beginning of the story, only better?
Clearly, this writer who had chummed me in with a “once upon a time” beginning was up to something.
I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring with the impression that I now knew what to expect of Tolkien. I was wrong. Almost at once, I was swept from the deceptively ordinary birthday party preparations into the darkness and intrigue of ancient magic. A subtle change in both language and tone gave fair warning that I had stepped past the interface of “fairy tale” into the darkness and intrigue of ancient magic. Issues I thought had been resolved in The Hobbit were revealed as but the tip of the iceberg. Even characters I thought I knew suddenly showed a greater depth of being.
Gandalf was more than an irascible wizard; he was a force moving in this world, a powe
r to be reckoned with. Bilbo’s indecisiveness about the Ring troubled me. If Tolkien had not already convinced me to care deeply about that character, that dilemma would not have been such a harbinger of things to come.
Tolkien had warned me that one could step out into the road and simply be swept away by it, carried off to parts not only unknown, but unimagined. His words took me, and for three volumes, spanning six books, I was his. I had read long books before. I had read series of books about the same characters. But (and this may seem inconceivable to current fantasy readers) this was my first encounter with a trilogy, a single story told in three volumes. Never before had I read one work that spanned so many pages. The impact was much greater than, “Wow, this is really a long story.” To my way of thinking, the story and my experience of it were all too brief. Tolkein had been allowed the pages and the sheer number of words required to flesh out this world. I had experienced the depth that fantasy could have. For years afterward, other fantasy books, no matter how profound, would seem shallow in comparison. I would hunger for the richness of prose that took its time to tell the story, not as efficiently as possible, but as intricately as the tale deserved.
So that was the gauntlet that had been thrown down before me as a potential writer. Could I do what he had done? Could I create fantasy that had a moving, intricate plot, a rich setting, and characters that stepped off the page and into the reader’s heart? The bar had been raised.
