So I started this thing more-or-less on a whim almost eight months ago. Since then, I’ve written 49,737 words about The Lord of the Rings. To put that in perspective, that’s a bit more than 10% as long as LotR itself. The document where I’ve been writing these up stretches to 108 pages. That’s a lot of stuff. Much more than I ever thought I’d be able to say, honestly.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read LotR, and it’s impossible to quantify because much of my reading over the years was just picking it up and reading a chapter here and a chapter there. In the last decade or so the frequency there has dropped off drastically, thanks in no small part to /r/Fantasy and the ever-growing Mt. Readmore this community has blessed/cursed me with. I listened to the audiobooks a year or so before starting this (I highly recommend the Rob Inglis version to anyone who is interested), and I’ve read the trilogy straight-through probably only two or three times in the last decade. I felt kind of guilty about that, which I know is silly. Like I was neglecting an old friend. Hence my decision to start this read-along. I wasn’t really expecting it to be popular - I figured it would fizzle after a couple of chapters. No such luck.
Anyway, I’ve been a huge fan of Tolkien for a long, long time. I know I’ve mentioned that I had the privilege of taking a seminar with one of the world’s foremost Tolkien scholars when I was in college. I’ve read all the books that Christopher Tolkien has put out in the years since his father’s death, with the exceptions of Beren and Luthien and The Fall of Gondolin just because I haven’t gotten to them yet. This includes the full Histories of Middle-earth and all the minor stuff like Roverrandom and Farmer Giles of Ham. And even with all of that I was thoroughly humbled the first time I stumbled into /r/TolkienFans, and had to work pretty hard to be able to keep up with that crowd.
All of this is to say: in a lifetime of loving Tolkien, I’ve never come to appreciate his works so deeply as I have in this readalong. There are many old childhood favorites that don’t hold up so well upon close scrutiny. Books that are better left alone in your memory so you don’t get the joyful memories of them tainted by racism or flat characters or tired gender roles or anything else, until it’s time to introduce a new generation to them and then you can re-experience them vicariously for the first time. Lord of the Rings isn’t like that AT ALL. The more closely I examined the text, the more I came to recognize just what a masterpiece it is. I know the books are not to everyone’s taste, and I have no problem with that. I fully understand why someone might find the 963 words on the history and geography of Bree that opened “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” deadly dull. But I maintain that Tolkien’s opus has a depth and subtlety that few other works in the English language can ever claim to match.
I didn’t have a post about the Appendices in this read-along. I gave a fair amount of thought to whether or not I would, and ultimately decided not to. I didn’t even read them this time around, and don’t particularly plan to. It’s not that they’re not interesting - I think they’re fascinating - but more because they are so dry and fact-focused that I don’t think I’d really have any commentary to add to them. I could summarize them, I suppose, but what would be the point? I do encourage everyone to give them a try at the least, especially Appendix A and Appendix B. Those are the two that deal with the history and lore that nearly everyone finds interesting. Appendices C-F are family trees and calendars and languages and such. Appreciation of that is rarer.
Going forwards, I plan to re-watch the extended editions of the Jackson trilogy and post my thoughts on those, one post per movie. That’ll start at some point in the next few weeks. I haven’t watched them for years, and I’m very curious (and moderately trepidatious) over what I’ll think about them now.
And then after that, I’ll be starting a read-along of The Silmarillion. I’m planning for this to be more of a guided read than just my random thoughts, with the aim of giving a little help to people who have generally been intimidated by the SIl. Each entry will be a summary of the chapter, a guide on what is important and which Elves with a name starting with “F” can safely be forgotten, and then some of my random thoughts. Plan is for two chapters a week, as in the LotR read-along.
Lastly, I want to give my sincere thanks to everyone who has read and commented and followed along, and especially those people who said they decided to finally give reading LotR a go thanks to this read-along. You warm my heart.
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