In the beginning was the Word

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Monday 25 August 2024

Tolkien fandom is an international, informal community of fans of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, especially of the Middle Earth legendarium, which includes The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

The concept of Tolkien fandom as a specific type of fan subculture sprang up in the United States in the 1960s, in the context of the hippie movement, to the dismay of the author (Tolkien died in 1973), who talked of “my deplorable cultus“.

Tolkien fandom changed in character with the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy between 2001 and 2003, attracting both a wide audience of existing fans (“book-firsters“) and many people who had not read Tolkien’s books (“film-firsters“).

The large audience made the artistic conception of Jackson’s artists influential, indeed creating a stereotyped image of Middle Earth and its races of elves, dwarves, orcs and hobbits shared by fans and artists alike. 

Some fans, known as Tolkien tourists, travel to places in New Zealand to visit sites where scenes in the films were shot.

A “Tolkien Reading Day“, held annually on 25 March, an anniversary of the fall of Barad-dûr, was proposed by Sean Kirst, a columnist at the Post-Standard in Syracuse, New York, and launched by the Tolkien Society in 2003.

Above: John Roland Reuel Tolkien (1892 – 1973)

The name Barad-dûr translates to “dark tower“.

The main villain, Sauron, began to stir again and chose Mordor as a stronghold in which to build his fortress. 

It was strengthened by the power of the One Ring, which had recently been forged.

Its foundations would survive as long as the Ring existed.

The wizard Gandalf described the Ring as being the “foundation of Barad-dûr“.

The Dark Tower is described as being black, composed of iron, and having battlements and gates.

In The Two Towers Barad-dûr is described as “that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power“. 

The same paragraph goes on to say the Dark Tower had ‘immeasurable strength‘.

The fortress was constructed with many towers and was hidden in clouds about it:

“Rising black, blacker and darker than the vast shades amid which it stood, the cruel pinnacles and iron crown of the topmost tower of Barad-dûr.” 

The structure could not be clearly seen because Sauron created shadows about himself that crept out from the tower. 

In hobbit Frodo’s vision on Amon Hen, he perceived the immense tower as “wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron“. 

There was a lookout post, the “Window of the Eye“, at the top of the tower.

This window was visible from Mount Doom where Frodo and Sam had a terrible glimpse of the Eye of Sauron. 

Barad-dûr’s west gate is described as “huge” and the west bridge as “a vast bridge of iron“.

In The Return of the King, hobbit Sam Gamgee witnessed the destruction of Barad-dûr:

“Towers and battlements, tall as hills, founded upon a mighty mountain-throne above immeasurable pits.

Great courts and dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, and gaping gates of steel and adamant.”

Barad-dûr, along with the One Ring, Mordor and Sauron himself, were destroyed on 25 March.

Do you remember the first book that had an impact on you?

Perhaps it was one that was read to you or the first one you were able to read yourself.

Or was there a book later in your childhood that had an influence you didn’t discern at the time?

Many noted authors have said they were deeply moved by what they read as youngsters.

In some cases it was one particular book that made them want to be writers and to which they still return for inspiration years later.

Even once a writer is established, a classic author may serve as their mentor.

Martin Amis has said:

“When I am stuck with a sentence that isn’t fully born, it isn’t there yet, I sometimes think:

“How would Dickens go at this sentence?

How would Bellow or Nabokov go at this sentence?”

What you hope to emerge with is how you would go at that sentence, but you get a little shove in the back by thinking about writers you admire.”

Above: Martin Amis (1949 – 2023)

If that sounds like a strategy you would like to employ, it can be handy to have the masters nearby.

You don’t have to limit yourself to the greats.

Above: Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

William Faulkner’s advice was:

“Read, read, read.

Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.

Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master.

Read!

You will absorb it.“

Above: William Faulkner (1897 – 1962)

Vladimir Nabokov advocated reading poetry:

“You have to saturate yourself with English poetry in order to compose English prose.“

Above: Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977)

For Maya Angelou, the Bible was the greatest inspiration:

“The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful.

I read the Bible to myself.

I will take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.“

Above: Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014)

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, referred to her love of books when she was young and said:

“Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.“

Above: Harper Lee (1926 – 2016)

Eudora Welty found that:

“Virginia Woolf was the one who opened the door.

When I read “To the Lighthouse”, I felt:

“Heavens, what is this?”

I was so excited by the experience I couldn’t eat or sleep.

I have read it many times since, though more often these days I go back to her diary.

Any day you open it to will be tragic.

And yet all the marvellous things she says about her work, about working, leave you filled with joy that is stronger than your misery for her.”

Above: Eudora Welty (1909 – 2001)

It was the works of Kafka that literally shocked Gabriel Garcia Marquez into writing:

“One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka.

I went back into the pension where I was staying and began to read “The Metamorphosis”.

The first line almost knocked me off the bed.

I was so surprised.

The first line reads:

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that.

If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.

So I immediately started writing short stories.“

Above: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927 – 2014)

Ralph Ellison told The Paris Review:

“In 1935 I discovered Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, which moved and intrigued me but defied my powers of analysis.

At night I practiced writing.

I studied Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Stein and Hemingway.

Especially Hemingway.

I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story.“

Above: Ralph Ellison (1913 – 1994)

Ray Bradbury advises:

“You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfume and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.“

Above: Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012)

That is harder to do now that libraries are being turned into multimedia centres in which actual books sometimes are the quaintest and most neglected element, but it is good advice nonetheless.

Until iPads and Kindles and other e-readers can give off the lovely smell of an old book (and probably it is only a matter of time), at least those of us brought up on traditional books will always have a place in our hearts for them and for libraries.

In today’s busy world it can be a challenge to find the time to read, but it is still one of the best ways to feed your mind.

How long has it been since you’ve read some of the classic authors like Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway or Dickens?

Plan reading sessions into your schedule because reading nourishes the brain and brings peace into an otherwise hectic day.

Is there a famous work you have always intended to read but haven’t gotten around to?

Make an appointment with yourself to read a book.

You may also want to revisit some of your favorites.

Consider the books you found most formative.

Choose one you think would warrant re-reading or reviewing and schedule the required time.

This time read it not only for enjoyment but to analyze what made the book so powerful for you.

What can you learn from that author’s methods that might help you make your own writing more vivid and influential?

For starters, consider:

• What is the story about, in a sentence or two?
• What is at stake for the protagonist?
• What does the story reveal about the characters, and how?
• How does the opening capture your interest?
• How do the action and the central conflict escalate?
• What are the story’s surprises?
• What emotions does it envoke in you? How does it do that?

If you are an architect, you should certainly read architectural literature.

If you are in computers, you must keep up with what is being written about terabytes, hacking and the latest operating systems.

Reading the books and trade magazines as well as clicking out the key websites of your particular field will not only keep you informed.

It will show you how experienced writers are turning the jargon and the complexities of your vocation into readable prose.

But no matter what your field of expertise, you should also read books, magazines and newspapers designed for the general reader.

Through the daily paper and online news sites contain much that is swill, they also contain some good writing.

From them you can learn to write leanly, to get to the point, and to compress several facts into a clear sentence.

If you read mysteries and romances, you will discover how writers create curiosity and build tension.

You will also learn how to construct an event, a person, or a place with just a few well-chosen words.

Read novels.

You will see how words can be used to communicate subtleties and stir emotions, how words can be arranged one way to make you worry, another to make you laugh.

Above: Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)

Read magazine articles and you will see how quotes are pared down from lengthy interviews until they contain nothing but the words that matter.

Notice how opinions are supported by facts.

Watch to see how the writer makes his points by calling on outside help, such as scientific reports, quotes from books, surveys, etc.

Then go to the online version and see whether they have a longer version so you can see what was edited for the print copy.

Read.

Listen to what you read.

Listen for the sound of the language, the music.

Note the punctuation, the spelling, the logical progression of information.

Find the things that fail, also.

Listen to how two similar sounds come together in your head.

Hear how the use of the wrong word wakes you from your reading spell.

Be a critical reader.

Look upon all that you read as a lesson in good writing.

Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin, but it is not only what you read that is important, it is how you read, too.

When starting to read a novel for the first time, or re-reading an old favourite, try to view it as an editor would, looking “through” the text in X-ray fashion, as it were.

Reading books in this way allows you to examine a narrative closely, locating and identifying deep structure and embedded themes.

How does the writer bring their themes to life?

What most appealed to you about the story?

How was that dramatized in the narrative?

Try to begin reading not just for pleasure, but also for ideas.

Reading in this way can be a great source of inspiration.

You should not hesitate to use all this stimulation and motivation to kick-start your own work.

“A work is eternal not because it imposes a single meaning on different men, but because it suggests different meanings to a single man.”

(Roland Barthes)

Above: Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980)

Of course, it is good to read as widely as possible – especially outside your race, class and gender – but, as a writer, returning to the same book many times over can be just as, if not more, instructive.

When you finish reading a novel for the first time, your memory of it does not stay fixed forever.

It shifts and evolves.

Years later, you mıght find yourself talking about it, only to discover that your memory has retained just a few scraps – mythic representations – of the text.

You realize that, in the intervening years, you have reconstructed in your mind an entirely different book – an inner book of “received beliefs” – from the actual one.

This is when the value of re-reading becomes obvious.

A book comes alive with each new reading.

A book is born again every time you pick it up.

When you re-read a book, it will appear to be different on a second or third reading, but the book has not changed, you have.

Any text has the potential for several different interpretations.

No one reading can ever exhaust a text’s full potential because, on re-reading, each reader will search for connections in their own way, excluding other possibilities and thus making them aware of their own role in the play of meaning.

It is not the case that subsequent readings are any “truer” than the first – they are just different.

The fact that readers can be differently affected by the same text shows the degree to which reading is a creative process.

If you read a single book many times over, it marks the changes in your life.

Whatever happens, you continue to have a conversation with it.

Novels are second lives.

Novels reveal the colours and complexities of our lives.

Novels are full of people, faces and objects we feel we recognize.

When we read novels we are sometimes so powerfully struck by the extraordinary nature of the things we encounter that we forget where we are and envision ourselves in the midst of the imaginary events and people we are witnessing.

At such times, we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real than the real world itself.

We dream assuming dreams to be real.

We read novels assuming them to be real.

There are many ways to read a novel, many ways in which we commit our soul and mind to it.

We observe the general scene and follow the narrative.

We transform words into images in our mind.

We wonder how much of the story the writer tells is real experience and how much is imagination.

We wonder:

Is reality like this?

Does the novel conform with what we know from our own lives?

At the heart of the novelist’s craft lies an optimism which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality.

Under the influence of such optimism, we both assess and derive pleasure from the precision of analogies, the power of fantasy and narrative, the building of sentences, the secret and candid poetry and music of prose.

We make moral judgments about both the choices and the behaviour of the protagonists.

We judge the writer for his moral judgments regarding his characters.

We congratulate ourselves on the knowledge, depth and understanding we have attained.

The sweet illusion that the novel was written solely for us slowly arises within us.

We read to discover that we are not alone in the universe.

It is Tolkien Reading Day.

I reach for a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and begin to read:

“When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.“

Sources

• Wikipedia

• The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk (Faber and Faber)

• 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost (Berkley)

• Writing a Novel, Richard Skinner (Faber and Faber)

• The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien (Harper Collins)

• Your Creative Writing Masterclass, Jurgen Wolff (Nicholas Brealey)