2004 - Vol. 1, Issue 1

For years, beneath the cat-clawed reading chair in our farmhouse living room, J. R. R. Tolkien lay facedown. How The Fellowship of the Ring arrived and then remained there for so long, I have no idea. All I know is that whenever I felt like it, I could scrabble down on my knee, reach into the dust and cat fuzz, and see Tolkien on the back cover, pipe in hand, smiling his slightly snaggletoothed smile.

It was Tolkien's simple paintings that graced my parents' set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. His quiet, amateur, elegant pictures of Bilbo's hole in Hobbiton, the close gray trees of Fangorn forest, and the immense white bastion of Minas Tirith held just enough magic and understated secrecy that I was obsessed with Middle-earth long before I'd ever read a word. The photo of Tolkien on the back of each of the paperbacks completed the promise; he seemed about to spill into story right from the cover. Plus, the photo presented a slightly unusual creature for a child: a completely unintimidating big person.

Now when I see various editions of The Lord of the Rings with cover art inspired by the often overblown imagery typical of Dungeons & Dragons (a game I tried and despised as a kid, preferring kickball at recess), I shudder and can't bring myself to buy them, even though I've lost The Two Towers and very much miss the cunning, cursing, infighting Orcs, not to mention the leafy "hoom hoom" bellows of the walking tree Ent creatures. Perhaps what I miss most about those editions is the absolute Englishness of Tolkien's illustrations, a point the original publishers of The Hobbit noticed as well, fearing the Englishness would turn off American book buyers. His drawings possessed none of the deep drama, epic stateliness, or even the almost-hopeless desperation of their heroes' quest. Like Brueghel's painting The Fall of Icarus, the main subject and tragic possibilities are almost obscured or at least not presented front and center. Whether good or evil, the sorceries of The Lord of the Rings must all be unearthed and are never revealed outright.

My discovery of Middle-earth, despite the book under the chair, took a little while and had an element of the quiet desperation of Tolkien's works. My first experience with The Hobbit was at about the age of eight, when my mother read it to me aloud as I lay in a brown, claustrophobic hole of a room in a decrepit children's ward in Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. I had severe, multiple health problems, many surgeries, and many unexpected setbacks following. It was during one of these setbacks, when my stomach refused for a month to resurface from the effects of the anesthesia, that I heard The Hobbit. My physical state was terrible; too tired even to look at comics, fed intravenously through a line into my chest (at the time a relatively new and dangerous procedure), opiated and in constant pain, I would stare for hours at a catalog of Lego castles and knights. Finally, to distract me (and probably herself from worry), my mother read, and in the brown, endless gloom of the hospital, the amazing cast paraded before my eyes: Bilbo the Hobbit, who leaves the Shire to become the unlikeliest of heroes; the traveling company of proud, single-minded Dwarfs whom Bilbo joins on a fearsome mission to reclaim their dragon-stolen gold; the truculent wizard Gandalf the Grey who leads the search; and the murderous Orcs who seek to capture the Dwarfs as well as their gold. But what I remember most is the glorious salvation during the final battle when all seems lost. As the Orc armies slowly crush the Dwarfs and their allies, the surly yet-benevolent Eagles soar into view over the battlefield and the cry rises up, "The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!" Not Alexandre Dumas, not Robert Louis Stevenson, not C. S. Lewis, not Lloyd Alexander, nor any other author of tales of magic or adventure have written a better last-minute reprieve. The need never seemed as great, or the doom as sure, as when the soaring, swift eagles descended to save the day on the battle plain of my hospital room.

A year or so later, when I actually read The Lord of the Rings, my health again replicated the epic, though the situation was far less "hasty," as Treebeard might put it, than in the hospital. Unable to feed myself for various reasons, I was fed again through a chest line, but this time I was allowed to remain at home at our farm in the Hudson Valley. My father put down linoleum in the TV room so my IV pole could better roll around, a bed was brought down, and my mother undertook the hellish strain of daily care, IV feedings, and maintenance of a chest line, which, if cut, would cause me to bleed to death in less than five minutes. As for me, I chose to worry whether the cat could still sleep with me at night. The tabby answered me in typical feline fashion, becoming both scared and annoyed by the IV tubes and machinery and settling herself at a nice distance down by my knees. Forced to be in bed from nine-ish at night until ten or so in the morning, which prevented me from playing with my brother in the lawns, fields, orchards, woods, and barns of the family farm, the Shire felt like it was right outside my window — and immeasurably far away. I did get to stay up later at night when my parents watched the TV, and because of that I saw Hill Street Blues every week with my father, as well as the legendary NCAA basketball final between North Carolina and Georgetown. I also learned the joy of a big bed and kept books and Star Wars figures next to me at all times. And in the mornings, before I was released for the day from the tubes, I read The Lord of the Rings.

I was literally waking up every day with the greatest story ever told lying next to me, open. I couldn't wait to be unplugged from the IV so I could talk out all my thoughts about the ongoing action, my suspicions of the dubious stranger named Strider, the wonder of just where the unseen and morally ambiguous Gollum was lurking, the terrible fear of the Black Riders and the dense, foggy horrors of the Barrow-Downs. In my mind, I escaped with the Hobbit Frodo and his friend and gardener Sam Gamgee, through the Shire of our farm, and I leapt with them off the tractor paths into the fields to escape the sniffling Riders and their hissing breath. The penultimate chapters, however, were the two set in the despoiled, evil mines of Moria, as Gandalf and a company of the brave sought to destroy the evil Ring but were waylaid from their path. I read those two chapters — "A Journey in the Dark" and "The Bridge of Khazad-dum" — repeatedly before going on. I was amazed by the terror of entrapment when the Company, amid bones and skulls and broken swords, hears the Orc drums from the deep, sounding "doom doom," and realizes that they, too, are trapped, just like those who perished there before. I was riveted, finally, by the absolute feeling of hopelessness when the fiery demon, unseen since the ancient past, pulled Gandalf into the black, bottomless chasm of the mines. Even today, "A Journey in the Dark" and "The Bridge of Khazad-dum" remain possibly my favorite chapters ever.

If my taste seems grim, nothing held a candle to the hospital. All the surgeries, all the stays, the habitual blood, ooze, stitches, the literal, painful physical alterations and deaths of people down the hall had become commonplace, and as far as I was concerned, the claustrophobic fear of the chapter "The Bridge of Khazad-dum" was realistic, not scary. Also, since a grunting, enslaved anger was something I could unconsciously relate to, I adored the dumb, bloody quarrels of the Orcs as well, loving every scene wherein those goblins bickered and betrayed their own fears of their master, the Dark Lord. I intrinsically felt the burdens of the Orcs and of the story as a whole, because it was how things were: you wake up, are given the worst news of your life, news that you and all around you wished never to hear in their lives or yours, are then forced to journey far away to places of ghastly legend, and eventually you come home again, though the journey was often longer and more difficult than could have been imagined, and indescribable to anyone who hadn't been there.

By the time the story ended, with the dangerous Ring destroyed and the Hobbits home again, I was out of bed. Similarly to Sam and Frodo, the primary Ring-bearers, I seemed to have traveled the final distance in a crawl. The whole point of the IV feeding had been, besides to keep me alive, to get me healthy enough to undergo another major surgery. I was literally fattened for the scalpel, and the land of ashes threatened to come down on my head again. Like the books, where the victory over the Dark Lord also meant an end to the age of magic, my escape from the tubes also held an aspect of sadness; one way or another, whether terrible or fair, those enchanted mornings in bed were over — and unforgettable as well. Other battles called.

Rereading the trilogy now, amidst all the amazing hoopla of the movie releases, it seems that those long, last chapters, so desultory at times, are key, and it is Sam who is the linchpin of the whole tale. When Frodo falters, Sam forges on for both, and fittingly it is Sam who speaks to end the story: "Well, I'm back." If the question after such immense trials is, "How does one live?" then Sam provides the answer, by living. Even on the desolate plain of Mordor, hopeless and exhausted and tempted to surrender by the innate evil of the Ring, Sam thinks of his garden, and it is to his garden that he returns, to cultivate. His road, like all of ours, goes ever on and on. If there is a better model than Master Samwise in the art of how to live after everything and all, I haven't heard of him.

I am older now, and getting old, it feels. My health will still take a nasty turn, and wounds suffered in various Weathertop hospital rooms sometimes ache on dark anniversaries. The strangeness of seeing the current overload of The Lord of the Rings makes me nervous. It comes naturally to feel my memory of the epic, and the sustenance it has given me amidst its entwinement with my life, is being co–opted by a non-magical realm of strangers who can't possibly know what the Ring actually means. Whatever. I think many probably feel the same about Tolkien, and it is a testament to the inclusive power of the story that so many can inhabit Middle–earth so easily. If anything, the movies may well mean many other children will discover the books through their own methods, according to their own needs, as I did. No one needs to be, or should ever have to be, strapped with IVs and machines and subjected to surgeries to understand the lasting strength of Tolkien's unique works, though it certainly doesn't hurt.

How I see, remember, and attempt to recite through words those memories will forever be constructed and construed by The Lord of the Rings. Still being a grim-ish person, I used to plan what my last words would be. The plan might hold, though now I know, like the eternal book under the chair, the words are and continue to be the first: "The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!"