Once More With Footnotes

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 n ot best placed to appreciate Miss Austen's fine prose. It was a really good bit when the orcs 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 sta nzas 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 struc ture 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, the y 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 b irds 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? Po ssibly. We never know where the triggers are. But The Lord of the Rings was a step-change in my reading. I was already enjoying it, 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 re alized 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 cu r rent 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 beech woods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greene ry 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 le a st 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 p laces. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to.
     
                  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 '60s, 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 th at 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 wron g with your life. But sometimes things all come together at the right time in the right place — book, author, style, subject, and reader. The