Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I read a book last week called Meditations on Middle Earth, which is a collection of essays about J.R.R. Tolkien by some of today's leading fantasists. The essays are all fascinating reading, but they do take on a similar tone after a while. Paraphrasing the general tone, a lot of these essays read like this:

I was the "nerd" in grade school, always with my nose stuck in a book. But I really was just treading water until someone showed me a book called The Fellowship of the Ring. I started it grudgingly, but I was captivated by the second chapter and I read the entire trilogy three times in the next week. It showed me the promise of a fantasy world, and inspired me as a writer. And while I'm on the subject, critics and readers who look down on fantasy are twits.

Most of the commentators in the book report an experience pretty much like this. I don't mean to belittle them; far from it. It surely says something that The Lord of the Rings had such a similar and profound experience on many of today's finest fantasy writers. One wonders if, had they not read Tolkien's work, if these people would be producing the kind of earnest fiction featured on Oprah's Book Club, or worse, if they'd be writing at all. But as a reading experience, all those essays with similar stories to tell take on a homogenous feel about halfway in.

My own Tolkien experience was slightly different. I honestly don't remember a time when I didn't have a love of the fantastic, although I'm not sure I'd call it that. My formative fiction experience would not be Tolkien; it would, actually, be Star Wars. Tolkien came later, and he came in the midst of a big fantasy binge of mine when I was exploring Dungeons and Dragons and reading just about every "fat fantasy" book I could find that had a big map in the frontispiece. A lot of my early reading came from my mother, who -- as a grade school librarian and teacher -- knew children's lit like the back of her hand, and she always had some fascinating work of fantasy lying around. In fact, this was a common punishment for times when I was accused (though innocent I always was!) of doing something that warranted having the television forbidden to me for a while: she'd hand me a book and say, "No TV until you read this." Funny how the book she chose was often the first book in a series....

(What's more interesting to me, now that I think about it, is that my mother had a great love of fantasy and really cultivated that same love in my sister and I, and yet my mother detests actual fairy-tales and folklore, which so often form the source material for the fantasies. Loving one, but not the other, has always struck me as bit paradoxical. But I think that all mothers are paradoxical to some extent. I think they take classes in it.)

My first experience with fantasy, in the sense of imaginary-world fantasy of the LOTR type, was Lloyd Alexander's magnificent Prydain Chronicles, which are still favorites of mine that I re-read every few years and can still move me to tears at the end. Then there was Alexander's Westmark trilogy, not so much a work of fantasy as a work of "imaginary world history" (not unlike what Guy Gavriel Kay has done in his more recent novels). I read all of this stuff around fifth and sixth grades, and then in seventh grade I read Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books. Then, I read The Sword of Shannara. And only then did I finally read The Lord of the Rings.

(Yes, I read Shanarra before I read LOTR. I've never read Shanarra since. What's funny is that in Meditations on Middle-Earth, some of the essayists blast a certain work from the 1970s that is so derivative of Tolkien as to be embarrassing…I can only assume they're talking about Shanarra, since none of them actually names the book that is the object of such scorn.)

Thus, Tolkien's work didn't hit me like an awesome thunderbolt, as it did many other readers. For me, it was just another in a long line of such large-scale adventure stories. And since I'd read his followers already, some of the other things that Tolkien did made little or no sense to me. I remember thinking, "Good Lord, it takes Tolkien forever to get past all the introductory stuff and get to the plot. Why am I reading all of this talking between the Gaffer and the Bolger and the Duffer and the Quacker and whatnot? And why does he take Frodo 'off-screen' for so long in The Two Towers, and then take the others totally off-scren? And why on Earth does the book keep going for 150 pages after the Ring is destroyed and the good guys win and all?"

Of course, I was thirteen at the time. What I wanted was sword-and-sorcery, D&D, hack-n-slash adventures. Tolkien provides a tremendous amount of that, to be sure, but he doesn't do it the way his followers have done, and so a large portion of what Tolkien was trying to do simply fell off my radar screen. And I'm sorry to say it stayed there, for years. I read the trilogy and loved it, but it didn't take a central part in my reading life. I'd dip into it once in a while, re-reading passages I'd liked a lot, but that's about it, and I've always been one to dip back into books, so LOTR wasn't even unique in my life on that score.

So I didn't re-read the trilogy three times in a week, and I didn't think of myself as Frodo or even Aragorn. In fact, after seventh grade, I didn't re-read the entire work in full until my sophomore year in college. Part of this was due to a three-year period in which I became obsessive about espionage fiction, burning through every word Robert Ludlum and Ian Fleming had written to that point. Part was due to a Star Trek tie-in novel period I endured (remember, this was before Timothy Zahn came along and launched the Star Wars "Expanded Universe" novels), as well as an Arthur C. Clarke phase. (The less said about my Piers Anthony phase, the better, thank you very much.) I've become a lot better about mixing up my genres in recent years, as opposed to my youth when I would basically hone in on some genre and then OD on it. When I finally came back to LOTR, in college, I hadn't read any epic fantasy for some years. That was when the book struck me like the thunderbolt at last. Then I re-read it again three years later, and I last did a complete re-read four years ago. I'm probably due for another…but for various reasons I've come to associate the book with winter, so I'm planning to read it this winter.

I'm not sure how I'd describe Tolkien's impact on me as a writer. I've tried incorporating poetry, but my efforts there ring completely false in my ears. (I'm told, though, that Tolkien actually is not a good poet, which saddens me because I like the poems in his book. Makes me think I'm a poetic clod.) I can't boast his amazing attention to detail in the worldbuilding department, but for me, worldbuilding is something done to help the story, whereas Tolkien wrote the story as a tool to help in his worldbuilding. I tend to think that maybe Tolkien, as much as I have come to love his work (and I did love it from the get-go, just not more than some others), is not a direct influence on me, but a secondary one. He influences me through intermediaries like George R. R. Martin, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles de Lint, et cetera. I wonder if that's not true of many in my generation, and whether it will go back the other way now that interest in Tolkien is on the rise again with Peter Jackson's movies in progress.

Anyway, long live Tolkien.