When I was about ten years old my Mum and Dad gave me a fantasy book to read, one that I would love all my life. A story about a hobbit. Once I’d devoured the story of Bilbo’s journey to the Lonely Mountain, I went on to read The Lord of the Rings, and I’ve been re-reading it ever since.
So, when my daughters wanted a story, we began sitting down for half an hour in the evenings to read. Reading a beautiful story about dwarves, and wizards, and dragons. After we’d finished, I pulled out three, larger red books and we started reading about four hobbits, caught up in a war over a ring that destroys your mind and soul. It took months, but here’s three things I learnt from the experience.
These stories were always meant to be read aloud. I feel like there’s two “voices” in Tolkien’s work. One is Tolkien the professor of language and history, which I often paraphrased and explained to give the girls more understanding of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The other voice is a rich, rolling rhythm, the storytelling voice, with characters who were earnest, conflicted, and occasionally silly (“Fool of a Took!”) These were the parts that left my girls entranced. They laughed at their favourite hobbits, were terrified by the Nazgûl, and argued over who should marry Aragorn.
(Side note: my eldest dressed up as a stately Galadriel for Book Week, and my middle girl made for a feisty and brave Éowyn).
The inter-connection of Tolkien’s events is mind-blowing. Taking the time to read it slowly, bit by bit, stopping to explain various events, highlighted just how much Tolkien must have mapped out every movement of heroes and villains, and it was a lot of fun watching my girl’s faces light up when they put together someone leaving one plot line and turning up in another – the “so THAT’S what it meant!” moments.
The ending is goddamn heartbreaking. We lose this in the movies, but the ending is a great, slow, arc of goodbyes, where our hobbits travel back through every stage of their journeys to say their final farewells. It’s made all the more poignant as it’s clear that many of the non-human characters that we’ve grown to love are saying goodbye to Middle Earth. To have the final adventure finish with Saruman falling dead at the same green door where Bilbo had greeted a dwarf so many years ago shook us all. The girls and I talked a lot about addiction and the corrupting power of evil, and while they felt sorry for Gollum and understood why Frodo and Bilbo had to leave, my middle girl wept unashamedly at the very final goodbye, not out of grief but simply because the deep emotion built up over four books had resolved in such a bittersweet way.
But this, of course, is not the end of the story. My youngest girl is only six, so in about four years or so I’ll be able to put her to bed, pull out an old, well-worn book, and begin to read:
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…”
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