[Bêthberry]

There are many very interesting thoughts to consider here, so please bear with a long post! (RL renovations to my kitchen have kept me from responding sooner. I am becoming more intimately acquainted with aisles 18-21 of Home Depot than I ever thought possible.)

LOL,Gandalf the Grey! I should have known you would take a tangent I'd overlooked! Yes, I reread specific passages for RPs purposes, too. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

Gayalondiel, reading Tolkien orally is an intriguing idea I'm going to use for my twelve-year old daughter. She is so wrapped up in her 'female empowerment' books that she isn't interested in Tolkien. I'm going to suggest reading The Hobbit while we're at camp. Some of those passages should make for great campfire reading!

Child, there is so much to think about in your post. My Tolkien history has similarites to yours. I first read LOTR years ago and enjoyed it as a great read and then was overwhelmed with other reading demands.

Then, I was introduced to a different Tolkien in graduate school, through his Old English work. My prof gave us a brief chronology for the period, ending with "Sic transit gloria mundi." ('So goes this glorious world', for those of you who haven't had the glorious experience of Latin.) That expression reverberated through all our reading of the OE canon. It became more profound when, a few years later, that prof died while I was still in grad school. And later again when his daughter appeared in the first freshman comp course I ever taught. 'Poignant' does not adequately describe my feelings about that.

"Sic transit" returned for my second reading of LOTR, at my mother's bedside last November, for four excruciating weeks while she underwent medical tests in hospital. My mother has survived three primary cancers. She and my father put their faith in medical science and it worked over twenty-five years. Now, although that science can tentatively explain what is happening, it cannot understand it or stop it. My purpose as I sat with my mother was to help her and my father voice and admit what they knew, that my mother was dying, and to find ways to bring passages of the Bible to them that would provide some meaning for them as their science reached its logical conclusion. That reading of LOTR was the revelatory one for me. There were times when I would simply have to put the book down to catch my breathe.

Liriodendron , as someone who reads The Silm as an encyclopedic kind of history, I am intrigued by your comment that it provides illumination for the songs and verses in LOTR. I think they are generally not adequately appreciated by fans.

Ravenna, "Hope" indeed. I can think of few other modern works which provide such a sense of hope as does LOTR.

Birdland, point well made and taken! What did you think of Derek Jacobi in the televised Graves? [But honestly, Dombey? I was so overwhelmed by Paul's death that I couldn't go on. But Little Dorrit... [j/k)] Those books I wish to inhabit, I reread. But I do have a sense that Tolkien is an author who is particularly reread so often. Maybe I'm wrong about this, though.

Calencoire, your statement makes a great refutation for all those 'speed reading' courses marketed around these days.

Arwen Imladris, that's an interesting relationship you mention between being at The Barrow-Downs and rereading Tolkien!

Helen, I, too, would add other Tolkien works to my reread list, particularly 'On Fairy Stories.' I don't think his conception of eucatastrophe has ever received adequate recognition. (Is there a new thread possibility here?) To me, the extent of Tolkien's use of revelation is profound. (George MacDonald is on my fall/winter reading list.)

To conclude, here's my--partial--list of rereads: Anything by any of the Brontes, from Emily's Wuthering Heights through Charlotte's four novels, to Anne's overlooked The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Ditto Austen. Not George Eliot. John Donne's poetry and meditations. Once upon a time, D.H. Lawrence, but I've outgrown that. The novels and poetry of Canadian Jane Urquhart.

Bethberry