[pursuing it with eager feet]
I'm not exactly sure how old I was when my father read me The Hobbit. I know we were still in our house in Cleveland, so younger than nine; I don't think my sister had been born yet, so probably younger than seven. I don't remember if it came before or after A Little Princess, which was the other formative book of my childhood, and I've given up trying to remember exactly. The story begins: I was five or six or just beginning to be seven, and my dad read me the entirety of The Hobbit out loud, and in so doing he tipped over the first of a row of dominoes that, it turns out, are still falling fourteen years later.
I talk about ~The Reading Of The Hobbit~ like it was some great turning point sometimes. I've painted it that way in essays intended to impress figures of academic authority, and dramatized it to sound like that in telling stories with a time limit. I make it sound like when he turned the first page I was a perfectly ordinary kid, and that after the death of Thorin Oakenshield in the last chapter I was a changed person - that I abandoned the world of the living and dove headfirst into geekdom, and that every current quirk of my personality and taste in fiction can be traced back to Bilbo's trek to the Lonely Mountain, as related by my father. This is actually probably bullshit.
I don't remember exactly what I did after Dad read me the The Hobbit. I know I loved it, like all little kids love stories - I remember I called the lighting department of the local Home Depot "Mirkwood" for years afterward because the hanging spidery lamps made me think of the trees in the book. I remember I made Dad stop the book so we could sing the songs together. I remember my games of pretend started involving Elves shortly thereafter. But, you know, I was six, or seven, or whatever the hell, and it wasn't-- you don't call things formative events when you're a kid. You don't build weird totemic altars to the past, or think with misty gravity, This book has Changed Me Forever. You fill in the events later, pack the gaps with who you are now, like building a proto-language, and what you end up with has almost nothing to do with what the child who was you actually experienced. That's how it is.
The characters in The Hobbit didn't matter much to me as a kid. I liked them, but I was a tiny girl and they were all big hairy dudes, cool to watch go on an adventure but not terribly easy to relate to. What I remembered was the world. I-- do you remember this? Reading your first fantasy novel ever, the first one you really... really lived in? Do you remember the first time you read a book that wasn't just a story, but a goddamn universe? That was what The Hobbit changed about me, I think - after I read it, the world got a hell of a lot bigger, because I... sort of stopped living in just one of them at a time. I'd always made up stories, but it wasn't long after The Hobbit that I started making worlds.
And all the other things that book left me with, they were smaller, but no less precious, no less important. When I was twelve, my father was away on business two weeks of every month. He went to California, to Germany, to Japan, and every time he came back we read another piece of The Lord of the Rings. We finished the trilogy in six months together (a six-week break was required after the passing of Gandalf, because my heart could not, in fact, go on). The first movie came out a year later. My crowd of friends and I built fortresses out of sticks and treehouses out of plywood in the woods behind our subdivision and called them Rivendell and Minas Tirith and Barad-dur, and we raised and destroyed a hundred kingdoms in a hundred worlds with wood swords and short attention spans. I started writing fanfiction (I cringe to remember it, but I'm not going to pretend it wasn't relevant to my future, god help me). I made a best friend, and we started out writing parodies of The Silmarillion and are still building worlds from nothing together today. I reread The Hobbit five or six times through middle and high school, and though I understood the workings of its world better than I had when I was six-or-seven, the settings painted in my mind were the same ones I'd fixed there when I was small.
When I moved out of my parents' house to go to college, it was at the tail end of two years where I hadn't been sure we would ever trust each other again. I was shaky on my feet when I left, desperate to leave but terrified to go, moving blindly toward a hope that had kept me more or less sane for the past six months, finally allowing myself to think I had a chance of a relationship with my parents again. My father's card to me was just a piece of printer paper folded up, with all of "The Road Goes Ever On" typed on it. I've moved back and forth five times since he gave it to me, and I still have it.
When I come home, we play Lord of the Rings Risk, my dad and my sister and I. When Dad takes over Beorn's Carrock, every time, as he places his pieces he booms at us triumphantly, "AND WHY DOES HE CALL IT A CARROCK???" and we chorus wearily, "Becaaaause that is what he calls it." My sister has never read The Hobbit.
Tonight I saw The Hobbit on the big screen, in 3D. Go see it if you'd like to; don't if you wouldn't. I won't tell you it's better or worse than the book or whatever. I just-- This world that Tolkien built didn't change me, I guess. That's a stupid way to put it. It-- it was just with me. All these years, that world has lived in me, and tonight I saw it on the big screen, painted so much like I imagined it, vast and beautiful and dangerous and so, so alive. I could have recited half the lines. I knew every word to the songs still. It-- I can't believe how lucky I feel, to live in a time and a place where we can create worlds so beautiful, not just to imagine but to see.
It's another world, and a fictional one, but it's been informing and enriching and enlivening my experience of this one for so long. It's been the conduit to creating so much beautiful connection between me and other people. Maybe it wasn't transformative, but it was important, and today I saw that story alive, and I'm so, so happy. There is too much of me tangled up in that story for me to critique it honestly. I'll be seeing it again, and reading the book for the first time in three years as soon as I can find a copy.
I talk about ~The Reading Of The Hobbit~ like it was some great turning point sometimes. I've painted it that way in essays intended to impress figures of academic authority, and dramatized it to sound like that in telling stories with a time limit. I make it sound like when he turned the first page I was a perfectly ordinary kid, and that after the death of Thorin Oakenshield in the last chapter I was a changed person - that I abandoned the world of the living and dove headfirst into geekdom, and that every current quirk of my personality and taste in fiction can be traced back to Bilbo's trek to the Lonely Mountain, as related by my father. This is actually probably bullshit.
I don't remember exactly what I did after Dad read me the The Hobbit. I know I loved it, like all little kids love stories - I remember I called the lighting department of the local Home Depot "Mirkwood" for years afterward because the hanging spidery lamps made me think of the trees in the book. I remember I made Dad stop the book so we could sing the songs together. I remember my games of pretend started involving Elves shortly thereafter. But, you know, I was six, or seven, or whatever the hell, and it wasn't-- you don't call things formative events when you're a kid. You don't build weird totemic altars to the past, or think with misty gravity, This book has Changed Me Forever. You fill in the events later, pack the gaps with who you are now, like building a proto-language, and what you end up with has almost nothing to do with what the child who was you actually experienced. That's how it is.
The characters in The Hobbit didn't matter much to me as a kid. I liked them, but I was a tiny girl and they were all big hairy dudes, cool to watch go on an adventure but not terribly easy to relate to. What I remembered was the world. I-- do you remember this? Reading your first fantasy novel ever, the first one you really... really lived in? Do you remember the first time you read a book that wasn't just a story, but a goddamn universe? That was what The Hobbit changed about me, I think - after I read it, the world got a hell of a lot bigger, because I... sort of stopped living in just one of them at a time. I'd always made up stories, but it wasn't long after The Hobbit that I started making worlds.
And all the other things that book left me with, they were smaller, but no less precious, no less important. When I was twelve, my father was away on business two weeks of every month. He went to California, to Germany, to Japan, and every time he came back we read another piece of The Lord of the Rings. We finished the trilogy in six months together (a six-week break was required after the passing of Gandalf, because my heart could not, in fact, go on). The first movie came out a year later. My crowd of friends and I built fortresses out of sticks and treehouses out of plywood in the woods behind our subdivision and called them Rivendell and Minas Tirith and Barad-dur, and we raised and destroyed a hundred kingdoms in a hundred worlds with wood swords and short attention spans. I started writing fanfiction (I cringe to remember it, but I'm not going to pretend it wasn't relevant to my future, god help me). I made a best friend, and we started out writing parodies of The Silmarillion and are still building worlds from nothing together today. I reread The Hobbit five or six times through middle and high school, and though I understood the workings of its world better than I had when I was six-or-seven, the settings painted in my mind were the same ones I'd fixed there when I was small.
When I moved out of my parents' house to go to college, it was at the tail end of two years where I hadn't been sure we would ever trust each other again. I was shaky on my feet when I left, desperate to leave but terrified to go, moving blindly toward a hope that had kept me more or less sane for the past six months, finally allowing myself to think I had a chance of a relationship with my parents again. My father's card to me was just a piece of printer paper folded up, with all of "The Road Goes Ever On" typed on it. I've moved back and forth five times since he gave it to me, and I still have it.
When I come home, we play Lord of the Rings Risk, my dad and my sister and I. When Dad takes over Beorn's Carrock, every time, as he places his pieces he booms at us triumphantly, "AND WHY DOES HE CALL IT A CARROCK???" and we chorus wearily, "Becaaaause that is what he calls it." My sister has never read The Hobbit.
Tonight I saw The Hobbit on the big screen, in 3D. Go see it if you'd like to; don't if you wouldn't. I won't tell you it's better or worse than the book or whatever. I just-- This world that Tolkien built didn't change me, I guess. That's a stupid way to put it. It-- it was just with me. All these years, that world has lived in me, and tonight I saw it on the big screen, painted so much like I imagined it, vast and beautiful and dangerous and so, so alive. I could have recited half the lines. I knew every word to the songs still. It-- I can't believe how lucky I feel, to live in a time and a place where we can create worlds so beautiful, not just to imagine but to see.
It's another world, and a fictional one, but it's been informing and enriching and enlivening my experience of this one for so long. It's been the conduit to creating so much beautiful connection between me and other people. Maybe it wasn't transformative, but it was important, and today I saw that story alive, and I'm so, so happy. There is too much of me tangled up in that story for me to critique it honestly. I'll be seeing it again, and reading the book for the first time in three years as soon as I can find a copy.