While this week’s series of entries has thus far deliberately excluded the experience of seeing the films for the most part, and may do so for the balance of the week, I’ve admitted their role as catalyst in prompting my renewed acquaintance with the books.

In the weeks leading up to the release of last year’s The Fellowship of the Ring, as each new trailer flashed before me, I was excited and pleased to note how the filmmakers and trailer editors had cut the previews to appeal both to general audience and knowledgeable fans. My wife began to express a great deal of interest in the film, something I was also happy about, as my canonically intellectual-geek tastes exclude, oh, lots of things that she finds rewarding, and not just chick flicks.

I think Speed is a drag. Although the scale of the film and Will Smith’s charm were not lost on me, I felt Independence Day was some sort of direct physical attack on my person. SUV Dependence Day is a better title. In other words, dear reader, if you’re a statistically representative member of the United States’ movie going populace, I hate every movie you love, give or take 80%. My wife, bless her, sees the worth in the vast majority of our great nation’s entertainment while I can’t get over the failure of Gummo at the box office. On our first date, I asked my wife to attend a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, and Viv didn’t know who she was.

Not one of you is unfortunate to not have had the experience of attempting to explain who the filmmaker is and why I wanted to see the film to a person you barely know but wish to court. Rule of thumb: documentaries about Nazis are a poor choice for a first date.

So. It’s a rare and pleasing experience when my better half lets me know a film I’m looking forward to is one she wishes to see as well.

Eliding the film as promised, once we emerged from the theater, she couldn’t stop talking about it. Nor could I. Some part of this past week’s writing assumed linguistic form first in our discussions last December.

Naturally, being a plot-oriented filmgoer, she lingered on the affecting scene of the battle on the bridge at Khazad-Dum, and it’s emotional power in the film. That scene, and another powerful scene of battle which I remain silent upon in order to keep to my course, were much discussed between us.

Vivian has an amazing gift, not, I’ve been told, terribly uncommon among the children of immigrants. Television acted not only as behavioral and adaptive model for these kids, reinforcing the dominant culture’s values and assumption, but as a consequence, as a sort of surrogate family figure, providing comfort and stability when one’s parents expressed the stress and isolation of living in an alien culture.

Which is to say: my wife, she likes the telly. Being no dummy, she’s a natural plot predictor; it’s not uncommon for her to predict, accurately, the entire plot of a television show out loud from theme to credits before the first commercial break. Certain kinds of films that are strongly formulaic (if I were to name names, I’d say something disparaging about slasher flicks here) are also susceptible to her predictive powers.

Given that she can read the future of fictional characters on screens large and small with the veracity of the bruja she doesn’t even know she is, it was only a matter of time before she noticed how I would avoid answering troubling questions like, “What will they do now, without Gandalf? How can they expect to make it to, this, um, wherever it they’re going?”

Accusingly she turned to me.

“He’s not dead, is he? He’s coming back!“

She’d figured out the dirtiest trick that Tolkien plays on his readers. I, of course, suggested that it was not my place to lead her backstage, but that we did, of course, have a very early draft of the screenplay in the house.

“I knew it!” she crowed in triumph. “But won’t you just tell me?”

“If you are really curious, you can read the book,” I suggested, not very helpfully. Much to my surprise, after only minimal cajoling, she agreed.

However, she had a caveat. Reading in bed is her modus operandi, but she sensibly retains the habit of allowing herself to drop off when her eyelids droop, even if she’s reading! After having made little progress over a week, what with the dropping off after a sentence had been started as is traditional among her people (that’s a JOKE! Don’t hit me! OUCH), she flapped eyelashes at me in the manner that indicates a favor will be requested.

“Will you read to me?” she enquired mincingly.

I was too crafty for this gambit, pointing out how my mellifluous and dulcet monotone would surely lull her to sleep with despatch.

“Why don’t you read it to me instead?” I wondered, exhibiting my customary combination of laziness and chutzpah.

She drew back. A commitment to read nearly a thousand pages aloud is not given lightly. I pointed out that we could try it as an experiment, and if it proved onerous, we could renegotiate. These terms were accepted, and within a month, she’d completed the first book, reading at a respectable rate.

As part of the compromise, however, I was obliged to sing Tolkien’s poetic airs aloud to improvised melodies based on the Irish library I’d learned over the past five years or so.

And so it was that I came to appreciate what had always been merely irritating doggerel, annoying frippery preciously wedged into the narrative in indulgence of Tolkien’s penchant for trifles of verse. Make no mistake, I’m still no great fan. The verses feel forced and lack both the burnish of the genuinely antique and the passion of independently executed verse, developed not as stage prop but as an independent work of art.

But as stage props go, they are nicely crafted. I found, much to my surprise, that as I sang them I could make educated guesses about what sort of folk form to use behind the verses, and that their rhyming structures appeared to have been designed to fit the musical forms I’d been learning, vernacular fashion, for the past while.

A rhyme scheme might run ABAB or AA BB or AAB AAB or even ABABC; but found that a jig, or reel, or slip jig, or polka, or even other forms that I don’t know the names for (the commonly associated melodic form under the oldest Childe ballad, Henry Lee, for example, is one I don’t know the name of but was able to use), perfectly fit the Professor’s linguistic fancies.

It deepened my appreciation of the bones that Tolkien had built. The books feel familiar not only because of our open celebration of them, but because Tolkien’s attention to the craft he was nearly inventing – grafting fiction to the folk tradition – was the product of a deeply knowledgeable scholar, in a kind of literary special effect in which the actors are seamlessly ensconced within latex appurtenances crafted in the basement labs of an Oxford professor.

Triumphantly, and not without deep struggle in the second half of The Two Towers, as is traditional, Viv completed the entire book, all aloud, sometime in early November, as I recall.

Within a week or two, we’d watched the DVD of the film again at home; much to my pleasure, my wife found that the experience clearly deepened her appreciation for the film; and shortly thereafter we began another book. I hope that many of the books I enjoy will open to her in shared experience now.

Rereading the novels was a fascinating, and unique experience. I believe that the last time I read them was at around age 19 or 20, before I completed college, possibly before I declared a major. Therefore, it’s probable that I read them naively, that is, in ignorance of literary devices and critical techniques, solely as story-oriented entertainments.

This time, I was reading the works as an adult, and one with a fair amount of experience thinking and writing about created works from a critical and theoretical perspective. Thus, as I read the books, I experienced them on at least two new levels for the first time.

First, I had the privilege of observing my own interaction with the book; this was an unexpected level, but one which I came to treasure. Second, I had access to much (certainly more than when I was a child) of the basic assumptions that Tolkien would have held about the education of his readership, having read extensively in both European history and Classical history and mythology.

Much to my surprise, my years of playing Irish music also helped me to appreciate the songs and poetry that Tolkien scattered throughout the book, material that I had routinely simply skipped in the past. Furthermore, my interest in folklore (which came out of the music) helped me to recognize many of the themes and characters that Tolkien was borrowing and re-clothing in the garments of Middle-Earth, from Wormtongue and the Ents (Ok, so those came from the Wizard of Oz – ;)) to the horsemen of Rohan and yellow-booted rhyme-spouting Tom Bombadil.

Finally, I also saw, for the first time, some of the mildly bothersome deliberate and accidental assumptions that Professor Tolkien was making that led to certain qualities of the book.

At the first level, I cannot stress enough how beautiful and precious it is to unspool a childhood memory in real-time. It lends a completely unduplicable power to the experience. To read a book you read as a very small child is not the same experience as looking at a photo. It’s doing the same thing you did as that child, and as you read it, memories of your initial experience rise up, unbidden, to create a new, deeper experience.

For me, this was most true in re-reading the book in the chapter titled “The Bridge at Khazad-Dum”. As a child, this was my first exposure to even the idea of death, and I recall the grief and fear I felt, as I realized that books held traps and pain as well as life. I don’t have direct recollections of tear-stained discussions with my parents, but there’s no question that Gandalf’s fall taught me of man’s end, and my own, and my family’s.

On the second level, both of reading with a background of familiarity with many more of Tolkien’s allusions and borrowings and of recognizing and appreciating structures and techniques used by writers, the books spread out deliciously before me, and I came away from them with a greatly enhanced appreciation for Tolkien as a writer, as someone in control of words on the page, and aware of his activity as a writer.

It’s not an original observation on my part to note that Tolkien struggles with the act of writing throughout the books – but he does include direct depictions of this in his inclusion of Bilbo and his book. Tolkien’s writing is at its’ best when he depicts specific individual acts of great bravery or sacrifice. It’s taut and efficient and tense and honest.

It’s weakest when his love for ancient literary forms leads him to emulate rhetorical devices employed within them, such as listing and repetition; it’s also weak when he emulates the traditional underpopulation of the ladies in Northern European legend. His one great chance comes when the daughter of King Theoden enters the story. Because of a plot choice he makes, we’re denied access to her internal life, and though the reader rides with her for many pages, one never is granted access to Eowyn as we are to Aragorn.

Tolkien’s careful, meticulous doubling of every significant event or character in the book, once recognized as both literary device and philosophical expression, greatly enhances the works’ power. The Two Towers is merely the double that made topline status; Merry and Pippin; Sam and Frodo; Frodo and Bilbo; The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; Elrond and Galadriel; Elrond and Tom Bombadil; the Mountain of Caradhras and the Mines of Moria; The Wood Elves and the High Elves; Sauron and Sauruman; Sauruman and Gandalf; and on and on and on.

Another observation, not my original one but lovely and precious to hold in one’s mind, is that the great theme of the books is that of addiction. Whether to pipeweed or power or to the ring itself, Tolkien is musing about the end of things and about giving up that which is beloved, about the end of empire, and about the end of his world, which he saw with World War One, as a young man. Tolkien unabashedly looked longingly at the mythic past of the Pax Britannica, and it’s worthy of note that the late Victorians romanticized the same things that the good don wrote of with such love.

Here in Seattle, I live in a home constructed in 1928 by an entrepreneur from Montana who dotted this section of the city with his beautiful apartment buildings. He designed them with the help of an 1890’s pattern book, published in the UK, and intended as an architect’s pattern book for English country homes of the Gilded Age. Thus, my living room sports faux box-beams of dark-stained wood, carefully scored as though adze-hewn in the forest preserve that surely harbors hart, stag, and unicorn. A large half-scale non-functional fireplace anchors the room. It’s constructed with a medieval servant’s-bench within the alcove, where, in the original, a scullery-maid would have sat to turn the spit.

My house, and Tolkien’s work, are twentieth-century renovations of the Victorian love of things medieval. My love for these things stems partly from the successful presentation of the vision of the past as a romantic and orderly place, partly from the aesthetic strength of the things themselves, and partly from positive childhood experiences of the idea.

The aspect of the books that I found the most troubling was the South Africa-born author’s consistent association of “dark”, “swarthy”, “black”, “swart”, “flat-faced”, and such adjectives to delineate not only the frightful orcs but also the men of the South who fight with Sauron in the War of the Ring. This objection seems facile and not worth consideration at first, but if one really considers it, it becomes an aspect of the works which (uncomfortably I fear) rewards reflection.

Tolkien was interested in constructing an artificial pre-Christian mythos for Northern and Western Europe. He did so both before and after World War Two. It stands to reason that a linguist taken with the cultures and folktales of Europe’s northern peoples would tend to incorporate traditional imagery of the noble in his work. That imagery is the root of our culture’s adoration of the tall and the blonde.

Does that mean that that idea is either good or accurate? Absolutely not. But insisting that something you love, Wagner or Tolkien, is something that it’s not is a failure of both honesty and nerve. So what else does Tolkien celebrate that I do not?

Well, feudalism, war itself (oddly, since he had harrowing experiences in the trenches), the concept of in-born nobility, anti-rationalism, a luddite resistance to the machine – geez! As a value transmitter, I’m hard put to find a single thing in the books that made it through. It’s worth noting, I think, however, that the blonde/dark duality, the anti-technological underpinning and so forth, functions only as window dressing.

The heart of the book is the humanization (um, you know what I mean) of the author’s subjects. From Gandalf’s blustering refusals to admit personal failures (a repeated theme throughout the books: an immortal, practically Christ’s double, an angel of the Lord who uses bluster to camouflage personal failings) to Aragorn’s flight from his heritage to Bilbo’s self-satisfied sense of self, Tolkien rarely fails to show us how these creatures he’s somehow imported from the lays of the skalds and the chansons des gestes are real beings that live in a real world. He does it with the gentle humor and idealizing eye of a beloved grandparent who will not speak ill of even the truly evil – in Gollum’s case, of course, we are presented with the most carefully realized doubled being in the book, and Sauron he wisely leaves to our imaginations.

In a way, then, it’s only appropriate that the troubling specter of race lurks behind The Lord of The Rings – for the author went to vast trouble to create complex world with inflected characters. It’s by no means a topic he was ready to address, and so it simply haunts the work. I don’t think it means the books are bad or dangerous. In fact, if we are prompted to begin actually discussing these matters, to constructively address our own invisible assumptions on such matters, perhaps we may be better off in the end.

I first heard of the Peter Jackson film adaptation of Lord of the Rings the way almost everyone else in the computer industry did – online. I knew Jackson as a filmmaker for both over the top kookery the likes of Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive – which are among the most extreme, yet good humored, films ever made – as well as the film which sort of graduated him as a serious film-maker, Heavenly Creatures, which I thought was OK, but not as interesting to me as his earlier material.

“Great,” I recall thinking, “He’s clearly got the right streak of extremity to do a good job. I hope it works out.” That was the last I really thought about it, except noting from time to time with surprise that the ongoing production was garnering an increasing wave of excited and approving commentary online from some very opinionated and ornery forums, such as Slashdot and in some online film-geek communities. I still wasn’t really paying attention, but the general sense of the commentary I was picking up was that, yes, Jackson’s extremity of commitment to his film projects was coming through in the production.

Then the first trailer for the film was publicly released on Apple’s web site sometime in 1998, I think (I could be way off base). A co-worker mentioned it to me and the real geeks of the office all gathered around a 21″ Apple monitor to watch. When the dust cleared, we all burst out gabbling at once in excitement, amazed. The first film was still over a year away from release but it was apparent that the cinematic approach Jackson had settled on somehow resonated with our own privately constructed visualizations of Tolkien’s world.

I’d seen the 1978 Bakshi animated version as a kid. It gets a bad rap to this day that it does not deserve – Bakshi’s Nazgul are excellently creepy, and his use of rotoscoping and aggressively artificial visualizations give the film a cinematic depth rare in animation, as well as a serious tone which is one of the reasons I have a soft spot for the film. Sadly, if predictably, his story compression and avoidance of the Brothers Hildebrandt style of warmly-firelit, Maxfield Parrish Middle-Earth scenery guaranteed the touchy animator a box-office disaster. Apparently, he’s still not over it, and has been quoted dissing Jackson’s project.

Television animators Rankin-Bass had produced a cute, featherweight adaptation of The Hobbit for broadcast at about this time – utilizing the holiday special formula of cuteness and musical numbers. I recall being, oh, mildly irritated by the adaptation. Then, following the Bakshi disaster, Rankin-Bass picked up the last half of The Lord Of The Rings and made their own conclusion to Bakshi’s attempt on Tolkien’s fastness, entitled Return of the King.

Unfortunately for me, this film made the understandable business decision to eschew Bakshi’s darkly psychedelic vision in favor of… cuteness and musical numbers (there is a memorable orc marching song which is entitled ‘Where There’s A Whip, There’s A Way’). Today, you can conveniently purchase all three of these miscegenated projects on DVD at your local Costco… at a higher retail price than the four-disc extended edition Jackson Fellowship of the Ring.

Seeing the trailer for what promised to be a pleasing translation of the books made me happy, but I again more or less forgot about it, keeping an eye on the horizon for the release date of the film.

Sometime in 2000 I realized it was time to find a copy of the books again and work through them. I expected it would take up to three months, reading in the evenings. I was disappointed to find that editions of the trilogy that employed Tolkien’s numerous watercolors on the covers or supplementing the original illustrations by the author were not easily available. I decided not to fight it and picked up the trade paperback edition that features the watercolor art of the Jackson adaptation’s production designer, the most easily available edition prior to the films’ release.

To my surprise, I tore though the books in well under a month, leaving quite a bit of time before the December 2000 opening of the first of the new films. An unexpected benefit was the reinvigoration of my knowledge of characters and situations in the books. This made the experience of the trailers seen that summer in theatrical distribution much richer and involving, and helped to greatly raise my level of anticipation for the film.