Once More With Footnotes

another message, too. It ran: "Look, we've been trying to tell you for years which books are good! And you just don't listen! You're not listening now! You're just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can't stop you! We can tell you it's rubbish, it's not relevant, it's the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn't care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stu p id, stupid, stupid!"
     
                  And, once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper's Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called "narrative fiction" among the top fifty "masterworks" of the l ast thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings again.
     
                  The Mona Lisa was also in the top fifty masterworks. And I admit to suspecting that she was included by many of the voters out of a sheer cultural knee-jerk reaction, mildly dishonest b ut well meant. Quick, quick, name of the greatest works of art of the last thousand years! Er ... er ... well, the Mona Lisa, obviously. Fine, fine, and have you seen the Mona Lisa? Did you stand in front of her? Did the smile entrance you, did the eyes fo llow you around the room and back to your hotel? Er ... no, not as such ... but, uh, well, it's the Mona Lisa, okay? You've. got to include the Mona Lisa. And that guy with the fig leaf, yeah. And that woman with no arms.
     
                  That's honesty, of a sort. It's a vote for the good taste of your fellow citizens and your ancestors as well. Joe Average knows that a vote for a picture of dogs playing poker is probably not, when considered against the background of one thousand years, a very sensible thing to cast.
     
                  But The Lord of the Rings, I suspect, got included when people stopped voting on behalf of their culture and quietly voted for what they liked. We can't all stand in front of one picture and feel it open up new pathways in our brain, but we can — most of us — read a mass-market book.
     
                  I can't remember where I was when JFK was shot, but I can remember exactly where and when I was when I first read J. R. R. Tolkien. It was New Year's Eve, 1961. I was babysitting for friends of my parents while they all went out to a party. I didn't mind. I'd got this three-volume yacht anchor of a book from the library that day. Boys at school had told me about it. It had maps in it, they said. This struck me at the time as a pretty good indicator of quality.
     
                  I'd waited quite a long time for this moment. I was that kind of kid, even then.
     
                  What can I remember? I can remember the vision of beech woods in the Shire; I was a country boy, and the hobbits were walking through a landscape which, give or take the odd housing developme nt, was pretty much the one I'd grown up in. I remember it like a movie. There I was, sitting on this rather chilly '60s-style couch in this rather bare room; but at the edges of the carpet, the forest began. I remember the light as green, coming through t rees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.
     
                  I can remember the click of the central heating going off and the room growing colder, but these things were happening on the horizon of my senses and weren't relevant. I can't remember going home with my parents, but I do remember sitting up in bed until 3 a.m., still reading. I don't recall going to sleep. I do remember waking up with the book open on my chest, and finding my place, and going on reading. It took me, oh, about twenty-three hours to get to the end.
     
                  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 an d 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 he a rd the word 'fandom' I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane