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Elmwood Park in Syracuse: Upstate landscape, so much like Middle Earth.
(Sean Kirst | skirst@syracuse.com)
So let me tell you a wild story. A few years ago, I was in contact with the Tolkien Society in England about a column I was writing (I attach it with this piece). One night, out of curiosity, I sent the group an e-mail. I mentioned how "Bloomsday" has become an international reading day for fans of James Joyce. I asked why there is no international reading day for lovers of Tolkien.
Then I forgot about it, until I got a note a long time later from the Tolkien Society folks. They wanted to know if it was all right for them to mention me on their web site as the founder of the Tolkien Reading Day.
So I figured I should actually do something about it.
This year, that reading day is March 25. The coolest thing, of course, would be to get a bunch of Tolkien enthusiasts together in Syracuse and then to just read passages and shoot the breeze about how the trilogy matters in our lives. But since I'm too disorganized to put something like together, I'll do the next best thing:
I'll use the blog as a kind of electronic pub, and I'll invite anyone who wants to do it to take a favorite passage of Tolkien, reflect on what it means to you, and then to send it to me at my forum or at skirst@syracuse.com.
And it will show up here, and I won't feel as if I'm blowing off a response that meant something from the Tolkien Society.
- Sean
The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)
December 22, 2002 Sunday Final Edition
ON THE RUN AGAIN WITH JRR TOLKIEN
Sean Kirst, Post-Standard columnist
This is a picture that has existed in my head for 30 years, a picture as vivid as any memory from my life:
A man named Aragorn is running, bent over, following a faint trail in the dust. Behind him, tall and slender, lopes a figure whose feet barely touch the ground. They are accompanied by a bearded dwarf, who is huffing, armor clanging, as he battles to keep up.
Their quest is desperate, almost hopeless. They are chasing a company of orcs, savage and tireless goblins, who have kidnapped their best friends and are now many miles away. There is a chance, already, that the captives have been tormented or killed. The companions don't stop. Exhausted, they run on. I can see them, in detail, even as I write these words.
This was always a private image, a kind of secret inspiration. On long and solitary cross-country runs in high school, when my side ached and I want ed to quit, I would think of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, bent over the trail. Even as an adult, in particularly trying situations at the office or at home, I would see Aragorn and his friends, running on.
I am writing this at noon, on a Thursday. In about eight hours, I'll join my family and some friends in watching the newly released "The Two Towers," the second cinematic chapter in "The Lord of the Rings." I anticipate that I'll see on the screen what I've always hidden and treasured, in my head.
Maybe you've had a similar experience with other books, turned into films. But I can't think of any movie that's had such an effect on me.
That is, really, the wonder of the thing. I expect this film, at least in part, to match my imagination. I expect that it will be done in an appreciative, almost reverent, fashion. For so many of us who created our own internal landscape from JRR Tolkien's literary ring of power trilogy, Peter Jackson's films are doing what the Mirror of Erised (spell it backwards) did for a startled Harry Potter: They are providing a way of viewing buried dreams.
And, like Harry's mirror, they keep pulling us back.
No literary characters ever burned their way into my mind like Tolkien's heroes, villains and anti-heroes, which meant my standard for these films seemed almost unreachable. Jackson, at least the first time around, surpassed my hopes. A year ago, by coincidence, I finished reading "The Hobbit" to my children only a few days before we saw "The Fellowship of the Ring."
It turned me into an emotional wreck. My whole family had the same weepy reaction to seeing Bilbo Baggins and his hobbit hole for the first time, and we joined the entire theater in shedding tears when Gandalf, a kindly wizard, died. Then we went to see the movie five or six more times, and immediately bought both versions of the DVD, and spent a whole year waiting for ...
Tonight.
How do I explain it? The books, and the first movie, really do compare with the Mirror of Erised, where every viewer seems to find something different in the glass. I first read the trilogy as a young teen-ager - even though Tolkien himself, long before he died in 1973, maintained the books were better read for the first time by adults.
In this case, thinking back on the way so many images were hot-wired into my teen-age imagination, I respectfully disagree with the old man. At that age, you cling to one last hope in elves and goblins. Tolkien described them in vivid detail, from scent of sweat to drying blood. Then he bound the whole thing together with friendship - which a child sometimes honors more deeply than adults.
As a boy, reading the books, I could see Middle Earth through our house window. I found Mordor, the land of shadow, just down the street in a dirty and fenced-off steel plant, bordered by mounds of slag where my friends and I played army. I was still young enough to look at a tree and to see a face in the bark, a childhood pleasure that Tolkien guaranteed I would preserve for life.
I saw Middle Earth in the industrial cities of Upstate New York, especially Buffalo. To a 14-year-old, saddened by the disintegration or desecration of once-grand bridges and towers, that city was akin to Tolkien's Minas Tirith - a great city where men and women from across the sea built monumental works that fell into seemingly unstoppable decline.
Beyond all else, the books were permeated with sadness, with a profound sense of loss. I was the youngest child in a family that had known too much death, and I lived with that feeling, even if I couldn't touch it. That sorrow was in every corner of our house. No one said it, but the unspoken idea was that life was somehow better, in the years before my time.
Frodo and Gandalf simply found a way to put it into words.
Even now, every day, I revisit Tolkien's world when I walk my dog on trails at Elmwood Park. The stone walls and bridges were built during the Great Depression, near a hillside cleared long ago of brush and trees. Eventually the trees grew back and reclaimed the park. It is reminiscent, to me, of Tolkien's Ithilien, a fallen garden touched by shadow, which becomes part of its beauty.
Yet those are only my reasons, and my reasons alone, for loving Middle Earth. It is an intensely private place, with many entranceways. Some people go there seeking political or religious parallels. Some go there because they love tales of war and valour. Others simply take great joy in a great story.
Over the years, I never told anyone about my vision of Aragorn running the trail, doubting that even my closest friends could exactly understand, maybe a little worried about why the image never left my mind. The deep joy of this whole Tolkien revival is realizing just how many others, even as adults, share in some form of that secret.
We'll soon find out if this second movie, like the first one, can let those secrets out.
Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Post-Standard.