meta-rec: Tolkien

[lotesse]

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.

Comments

[fictualities.livejournal.com]

*hugs you*

You have made me feel guilty about suspending the reread in medias res. Argh! RL intervened. Tolkien is so much a part of my mental furniture that I knew I'd get back to it someday -- but someday isn't going to be until at least December. *hates RL*

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.

I see what you mean about Cooper and Alexander -- they're in a head space that's mostly different, and while both of them focus on male characters, there's less of that, hmmm, myopia that Tolkien sometimes has about femininity. In theory, he's all ready to grant the power of what he defines as femininity -- in fact his cosmology demands this -- but in practice, as a writer, he falls short. The emotional energy of his work lies elsewhere.

At the same time I think the fairy-tale world is one of his sources among many -- Tolkien works as well as he does, I think, because he's fundamentally dialogic. Just about everything he'd ever read or encountered was grist for the Middle Earth mill. So the elements of those other worlds are there, I think, particularly in the early hobbit material and in Goldberry, hovering in a somewhat indefined way outside of M.E. history at the edges of the narrative.

[lotesse]

Agreed completely.

And don't feel guilty. Reading Tolkien should never be an obligation, you know. It's miles too important for that.

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

Thank you SO much for this.

We, here, me and my breakfast club buddies, are going to have New Zealand Day [not on the day, Feb 6, which is a Weds, but on the sunday before], including all three movies [EE of COURSE] and NZ food, photos of both NZ and the movie, and as much BookTolkien as I can get people to read.

This will help, a lot!!!!

Blessings on your head, m'dear

[lotesse]

I've been crashing around in Tolkien for the last few days... it makes me happier than anything. Oh Sam.

I'm glad you're going back to it too :)