Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber

Verbiage of the Week.
    In the long years since I first hid in a meat cache and journeyed all through Middle-earth, I’ve heard a great deal of criticism of Tolkien. That he has “no strong female characters,” that the books move too slowly, that he does not tell us enough about what the characters are feeling and thinking are perhaps the most common complaints. Some of this strikes me, quite frankly, as the criticism of those who want writers of a different time and place to miraculously conform to what is considered politically correct now. Some strike me as a complaint of readers wishing that all writers wrote in what we consider to be a “simple, modern style.” I continue to be astonished by people who tell me that they couldn’t get past the third chapter, or that they were bored, or could find no character to identify with. Sometimes I am left wondering if we have read the same books at all. But perhaps in the end it all comes down to discovering his magic at the right place and time in your own life. If that is so, then all I can say is that I am grateful that I was the recipient of that miraculous coincidence of time and situation.
    He has left his mark on me. Even after all the years, the bar he raised for my writing is still as high. I am still striving to leap it as effortlessly and cleanly as he did. I still come away with bruised shins, but the drive to attempt it has not diminished. Likewise, I continue to quest for Story, though these days I accept that I will never find anything “exactly like” J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The only possible fix for that hunger is to pick up those worn hardbacks again and once more enter into a world that has perhaps become more familiar but no less wondrous to me over the years.
    And as I wonder whether I have said all I want to say here, the perfect coincidence occurs. It is one of those deus ex machina happenings that good editors throw out and life throws at us near constantly. A sharp hammering at the door downstairs interrupts my quiet morning with my computer and my cup of coffee. No sign of dwarves nor wizards with staffs denting my front door, but only the UPS man who has thoughtfully left a package just far enough away from the threshold that I have to go out barefoot on the frozen porch to claim it.
    I don’t hesitate. Stenciled down the side of it is “TITLE: J. R. R. Tolkien.” It has come from overseas. I drag it in and haul it upstairs to my office before tearing into it. Treasures long awaited come to light. HarperCollins hardbacks with the Alan Lee illustrations; The Hobbit and a delicious fat single hardback containing The Lord of the Rings in one volume with gleaming dust jackets in a sturdy box. Slit the wrap with a thumbnail and pull them out to heft the books. I open one, testing the sturdiness of the binding. Ah. A good print size. I lean closer and smell the delicious scent of new book. Well, these should get me through another thirty years. What else? A paperback of Farmer Giles of Ham , embellished exactly as it should be with Pauline Bayne’s art. And at the bottom a boxed edition of The Hobbit , in a very portable size, including postcards with Tolkien’s art and an unfolding map with images by John Howe. It also includes a CD of Tolkien reading from his work, which could become a supplement to my well-preserved LP of him reading Elvish. I think I intended this last one as a Christmas gift for someone, but at the moment I can’t recall for whom, and the CD is already playing. The familiar rich voice fills my office, and suddenly Gollum is “looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes” as he paddles his little boat on the underground lake. Too late. This is mine, My Precious, and I doubt it will ever be gift-wrapped and placed under a tree.
    I open the handy little edition of The Hobbit and thumb through it. Hmm. They have appended the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring to the end, as a teaser. I am not sure I approve.