National Tolkien Reading Day

The Red Box in the Mall

I was a kid walking through a mall with my parents when I saw it. A big red leatherbound boxed edition of The Lord of the Rings, sitting in the window of a B. Dalton bookstore. I had to have it. It was expensive, and my parents were not about to buy it for me, so I saved up. It took months, because I was a kid with other priorities and money kept finding other places to go.

About a year later I finally walked back into that mall and bought it. The thing I had wanted for a year was finally mine. I cracked it open and started reading.

And I could not get past the first fifty pages.

The Greatest Fantasy Ever Written Has a Boring Opening

I will say the thing most Tolkien fans will not. The opening of The Fellowship of the Ring is boring. Hobbits smoking. Hobbits and their customs. Hobbits and how their culture works, page after page of it. As a young reader desperate for the adventure I had saved a year to reach, I wanted to tear my eyes out.

I put the book down. And here is the embarrassing part. It took me a couple of years to get smart and try a different approach. When I finally picked it back up, I skipped ahead. Just a few chapters, past all the hobbit throat-clearing, into the real story. And the moment I hit the real story, I was hooked. I finished the entire trilogy in a couple of weeks, binge reading like a man possessed.

There is a craft lesson in that, and it is not “Tolkien was wrong.” It is that pacing matters enormously, especially at the open. A slow start is the most expensive mistake a writer can make, because it costs you readers before they ever reach the good part. I nearly lost the book I would come to love most because of fifty slow pages. I think about that every time I write an opening, and I have written a whole piece on what this book teaches, called the writing lessons of The Lord of the Rings. The opening is the first lesson, and it is a warning.

I read the trilogy again in college, and several more times across my life. It never stopped delivering. But the way in was learning to push past the front door, and that is a lesson about reading as much as writing.

The First Time She Got Out of the House

Years later, my wife was chronically ill. For a long stretch she barely left the house at all. Then The Fellowship of the Ring came out as a film, and the commercials looked genuinely good, and I had that mix every reader feels when a beloved book hits the screen. Hope and dread in equal measure. Was this going to honor the book or wreck it?

I brought her along. She came, which by itself was a small miracle, the first time she had gotten out of the house in close to a year. We sat in the theater, and she loved it. She loved it so much she wanted to see it again immediately, so we did. We just stayed in our seats and watched the next showing without buying another ticket. They let us, so I have made my peace with it.

That afternoon is one of my good memories from a hard time, and Tolkien is wrapped all through it. A book I had carried since childhood became the reason my sick wife got out into the world for an afternoon and came home happy. Stories do that. They are not just craft lessons. Sometimes they are the thing that gets someone out of the house.

The Films, and the Magic of the Extended Editions

The Fellowship film is a work of art. It takes real liberties with the book, turning what is essentially an action drama into more of an action adventure, cutting scenes and compressing storylines. But that is what film requires. These books are enormous, and no movie has room for everything. The adaptation made smart choices about what to keep, and the result holds up.

Then I got the extended editions on Blu-ray, and they made the films even better. The added scenes restore texture the theatrical cuts had to drop. The sequels were good too. The scene where Saruman is driven out of Theoden’s body and the king is restored to himself is phenomenal, one of my favorite moments in all three films. The cave troll fight is phenomenal. I could name great scene after great scene.

I have written full reviews of the films over on Master of Worlds, including my review of The Lord of the Rings. The short version is that Peter Jackson did the near-impossible and honored the spirit of the books while making them work as cinema. That is the hardest job in adaptation, and he mostly nailed it.

The Eagles: My One Unforgivable Complaint

Here is where I stop praising and start complaining, because loving a book honestly means naming its flaws.

At the end of The Return of the King, giant eagles swoop in to rescue Frodo and Sam from the slopes of Mount Doom. It is in the book, not just the movie. And I have never liked it, because it is deus ex machina, a rescue that arrives from nowhere with no real setup. There is no buildup establishing that the eagles have this kind of power and availability. They simply appear at the exact moment the heroes need saving.

The movie makes it worse, because there is even less groundwork there than in the book. You are left with the obvious, fatal question. If the eagles can fly into Mordor to carry Frodo and Sam out at the end, why not just fly Frodo to Mount Doom at the beginning and drop the Ring in? The entire quest, the whole Fellowship, all of it unravels the moment you pull that thread.

Defenders argue the eagles were established earlier, but establishing that eagles exist is not the same as setting up a logical reason for them to appear at precisely the right second. I wrote a whole article about exactly this, using these very eagles, called deus ex machina, because it is the cleanest famous example of the mistake. A rescue has to be earned and set up, or it feels like the author reaching in to save characters he wrote into a corner. Even Tolkien, even here, could not make the eagles feel like anything but a cheat. It is a minor flaw in a giant achievement, but it is a flaw, and pretending otherwise does no favor to anyone trying to learn the craft.

Rings of Power: How to Wreck an Adaptation

If the Jackson films show how to honor source material, the recent Rings of Power series shows the opposite. I rate it below one star on my movie site, which for me is close to the floor, and I do not say that lightly.

The clearest failure is what they did to Galadriel. In Tolkien she is an elf queen who has been alive for thousands of years, ancient, wise, and powerful beyond ordinary understanding. The series turned her into a petty, scrappy girl-boss warrior, charging around with a chip on her shoulder. They were clearly trying to make her a strong female character, and they failed at the one thing they were attempting, because they degraded her. They took a being of immense age and wisdom and shrank her into something far smaller and more ordinary. Strength is not the same as pettiness, and the show confused the two.

I went deep on everything wrong with it in my Rings of Power critique and my full review on Master of Worlds. The craft lesson underneath the rant is real. When you adapt a character, you have to understand what made them work before you change them. Galadriel’s power was her age and her wisdom. Strip those out to make her relatable and you have not strengthened her. You have erased her.

What Tolkien Gave Me as a Writer

The Lord of the Rings made me a fantasy reader, and eventually a fantasy writer. The worldbuilding, the sense that Middle-earth existed long before the story started and would continue after it ended, is the bar every fantasy writer secretly measures against. My own fantasy work, books like Shield of Ashes, owes a debt to the standard Tolkien set, even when I am doing something completely different with it.

But the deeper lesson is the one this whole post is about. You can love a book and still see it clearly. The slow opening, the eagles, the things Tolkien got wrong are part of how I learned what to do and what to avoid. Worship teaches you nothing. Honest love, the kind that names the flaws while still bowing to the achievement, is how a writer actually learns from the writers who came before.

How to Mark National Tolkien Reading Day

Read some Tolkien. That is the point of the day, March 25, the date the Ring was destroyed in the story. Pick a passage you love and read it aloud, which is how this work was meant to be experienced. If you have never read the books, start, and if the opening bogs you down, you have my full permission to skip ahead. I did, and it saved the most important reading experience of my life.

If you are a writer, read him with two eyes open. One eye for the wonder, the worldbuilding and the scope nobody has matched. One eye for the craft, including the mistakes, because the master’s errors teach as much as his triumphs. That is how I read him now, and it is the best way I know to honor a book that shaped me, by refusing to pretend it is perfect and loving it anyway.

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