Tom Bombadil!

Some time in the past year I had a terribly guilt-inducing realization: I am thirty-one-years-old and I have not read The Lord Of The Rings. I am completely uncertain as to how this happened. My entire life I have loved fantasy - dragons, sword play, wizardry, the whole lot of it. I read The Hobbit as a boy and enjoyed it thoroughly. I read the entire Chronicles of Narnia, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, Madeline L'Engle, and even plowed through about fifteen of Piers Anthony's Xanth novels. And yet somehow I was never compelled to sit down and read the undisputed masterpiece of the genre.

So now the time has come to correct this egregious oversight. I am currently on page 290 of book one, The Fellowship of The Ring and absolutely loving it.

I have hit some blocks here and there, primarily I am disappointed in my own imagination. So much of what I am attempting to visualize as I read has been tainted by the films. It is very hard to shake the faces of actors, even when I find a great deal of evidence against keeping that particular cast for the version playing out in my particular corner of the astral plane as I read. For instance, Elijah Wood's face was so prominent in the films (not to mention the DVD case I've been looking at the past six years) but the character who sets forth in the novel is a plump little Hobbit of age fifty. For Bilbo Baggins I've managed to replace both Ian Holm and the animated Bilbo of The Hobbit cartoon (a Daisy favorite) with a slightly diminished, furrier version of Prof. David Bevington, renowned Shakespearean scholar and charming neighbor. And the Aragorn of my mind is forever flickering back and forth from Viggo Mortensen to Barack Obama (I'm not 100% sure why.)

But what has been wonderful are all the new discoveries. My chief delight has been the expansion of the Tolkien world. The environment of Middle Earth has become a character in its own right. In addition, all the characters are so much more developed - for the first time I see Gandalf as a person who actually feels at risk on the adventure and who endures its hardships (cold, wet feet, uncomfortable bedding, grumpiness when deprived of smoking) as opposed to the plot propellant/deus ex machina he is essentially reduced to in the film version (though I do love me some Sir Ian.)

And then of course, there's Tom Bombadil. I had long been told about this character as being the single largest, yet most understandable, omission from the Peter Jackson films. In fact, it seemed whenever I mentioned that I had begun reading Fellowship, anyone who had read the book before inevitably asked, "Have you gotten to Tom Bombadil yet?" No one could explain why this character was so fascinating, nor could anyone summarize exactly what he does in the book, but now that I have read it, I must say ... actually, I don't think I can explain him. But when you read it, be prepared for that for which you cannot prepare. And enjoy.

Ps. I'm very much looking forward to Treebeard now.