Tolkien

Tolkien.  How do I praise my love for thee?

I did not line up in the cold or wear silly costumes when the movies came out.  But I can go on and on about the intricacies about the theology of the elves and the history of Middle Earth and such.  I can also tell you that the works of Tolkien had a HUGE affect on my life.

There are two and really only two famous published works by Tolkien, the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

I read Lord of the Rings before I read the Hobbit.  I read it first when I was 13, but in fairness my mother had been trying to get me to read it for a couple of years.  I resisted, as I do with every book that people give me to read, but I read it and then read it once a year until the end of high school.  I did not read much back then, only ten or so short novels a year, maybe twenty.  Looking at my mother's copy was very intimidating.  It was an unabridged version with wood and leather covers, thanks to my uncle; he even wrote the tittle and author in elf letters.  It had over a thousand pages.  It was my first big book, it was my first hard cover.  

I had been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a few years and this book was about halflings and elves and orcs and magic.  I skipped over the songs.  This book had a map that you could follow the progress of the characters and it had places that were not mentioned in the book.  The Hobbit filled in some of the holes, but not all of them.  His son finished a few of his story ideas and published them in three books.  I read them all and I learned about the magic.  In university I found some other books, novels that he published, Farmer Giles and another The Green Knight.  There were also a compilation of his works and pen scratches and there in was his greatest unpublished work.  Possibly greater than Lord of the Rings.  

Tolkien was a English professor at Oxford.  When I say he was an English professor, I mean he studied the language, its origin and its roots.  He could read and speak the dead languages that evolved into English, Anglo and Saxon.  And he invented worlds and wrote imaginary histories and used hi knowledge if Anglo and Saxon to make Elvish languages, there is more than one.  The Hobbit may have been the first, but Lord of the Rings was not the second.  People have noted before that it reads like a chronicle that does not exist on its own, but as part of a living breathing world.  The reader feels that as the story is read, that the characters know more about the world than they are saying.  Some of this story is told in snippets, but completely.  At first reading, for example, the wizard Gandalf appears to be an old man, but without a doubt human.  He is not.  He is a Demi-God, well that is the closest approximation  of what he is, Angel or Deva would be another.  His world has unseen depth, the creation story states that the world began with a note, as in music and the world was created with a song.  The sun and the moon were created last in fact, better yet, they were created many thousand years after the first race was created, and everything was cloaked in night, a night filled with stars.

His greatest work was an epic poem.  The Lay of Lüthéan.  People don't compose epic poems these days for fun, scratch that they just don't make them at all.  It had rhythm, it was in rhyming couplets.  It flowed like a song when read.  I can hardly read orally, but this prose flows smoothly from even my lips.  It is unfinished and in its unfinished form it is still close to 2400 lines in length.  It is pure beauty.

I would like to take a moment of silence 

Tolkien was a wordsmith, he did not make up many words, but he put them together in ways that could make you cry.  It is said that every picture is worth thousand words; Tolkien could write passages worth a thousand pictures.

My best reading of Lord of the Rings was a couple months after seeing the first movie when I gave a copy to a friend.  I had seen the movie a month before and the day before seeing the movie I had just finished the book.  That next reading after the story was still fresh in my head, I stopped reading the story and instead read his words, savouring his words as they were written, blew me away.

I lay modern fantasy writing, all role playing games and half of all the creativity that these medias spawned at his feet.  If it were possible to elevate him to Godhood, I would, as long as he finished his epic poem as his first business.