meta-rec: Tolkien

I love Tolkien like I love breathing, and in much the same unconscious way. It's all buried down deep within my heart of hearts, and I rarely think of Middle Earth nowadays. In middle school it was quite different - everything I experienced was mediated through Tolkien, absolutely everything. But then I got too close to it, and couldn't quite manage to lose myself in the quest anymore, and I went away from LotR.

(It interests me, too, how my departure from Tolkien opened up the spaces in my heart and mind that my current work on feminist readings and fairy tales and the sort of literary-fairytale-novel thing that people like Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper write for children currently inhabit. When I was drowning in Middle Earth, I very much expected to work on ancient literature and heroic homoeroticism and Beowulf. But those things have all fallen away, giving precedence to passions which are perhaps even older. I belonged to fairy tales before I belonged to hobbits. But I digress.)

I've been sticking my tip-toes back in, and the amount of feeling I have for LotR has surprised me all over again. It's inexpressible. I love them more than I've ever loved anything else. They are everything to me. I had to leave Middle Earth, but I think I'm ready to come home.

I want to point y'all in the direction of fictualities' meta-work on her rereading of Tolkien, to be found here. She's brilliant, and insightful, and these essays are a perfect way back in to what really makes Middle Earth worthwhile: the character moments, the parallels, the moments of pure and utter heartbreak, the sense of an illimitable history spilling out before your feet. They've been making me ridiculously happy all morning, for which thank you, fictualities! Thank you a million times and one. If I sound gushtastic, it's because I've spent the last hour laughing and sobbing and loving them all so much I could burst, and I really needed this release.