When did you first read Lord of the Rings?

[mark12_30]

Galadriel,

I don't believe we've met; a belated welcome to The Downs.

Yes, this thread has been done before, but I don't mind a fresh start either. Someone will find the link... maybe I'll be inspired once I've answered you.

1) When did you first read Lord of the Rings?
2) What prompted you to read it?
3) And what was your reaction (first and last)?

I think the answers will blend together...

Our teacher read The Hobbit to our fourth grade class, in 1969 or so. I loved it. In Sixth grade (1971...) I read TH for myself, and loved it. Then I tried to tackle
the trilogy; but I stalled in Book One somewhere. It just didn't take off for me-- even though my friend said it was a great book. I read Narnia instead, and Camelot. Always wanted to be a knight in shining armor... In Seventh grade I tried the trilogy again, and once I got to Weathertop I was hooked. So that was... 1972, or winter of 1973. When I say I was hooked, I mean, I wanted to MOVE there.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Galadriel, the previous thread on this question is probably buried in the depths of the forum, so a new one is fine. However, since it's not an actual book discussion, I'm moving it to the Novices and Newcomers forum. You should get lots of responses there.

While I'm at it, I'll answer your questions:
I first read LotR back in college - enough years ago that the exact time is now mythical. My then boyfriend gave me his to read, then presented me with my own Ballantine's box of the trilogy and Hobbit. The books are still on my shelf (the boyfriend, however, disappeared out of my life long ago), though so battered that I've gotten new ones for daily use. As to my reaction - I only left the books long enough to go to classes and work, spending every available free minute in Middle-earth. I was terribly disappointed when the story ended sooner than I expected - I had counted on more, but that turned out to be the appendix. If I remember rightly, I immediately started reading again.

[Inziladun]

I think I remember the old thread on this, but not whether or not I responded to it.

At any rate, my father was reading The Hobbit to me when I was five or six years old. I had gone to see the Bakshi LOTR film at the theatre, and I first read LOTR when I was nine, or thereabouts. I didn't understand all of it then, but I was interested enough to re-read it a year or two later, and then I was hooked.
I liked the idea of all that going on in our own world in some distant time, and I absolutely loved the archaic language used. The sound of the words is still probably what I love best about the works.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

At any rate, my father was reading The Hobbit to me when I was five or six years old. I had gone to see the Bakshi LOTR film at the theatre, and I first read LOTR when I was nine, or thereabouts.

Heh. That's more or less exactly my story. Although I got first familiar with the LotR when my dad started reading it to me and my little sister when I was like nine or ten. We never finished it as it was too scary for my little sis. and then I went on reading it by myself to find out what happened...

[Nogrod]

Heh, the hazyness of the years but the vividness of certain memories...

Btw. do you remember a cartoon version of the LotR that used pictures from Bakshi's movie? I remember reading it secretly at school when I was at third grade or something (like 9-10 years old). Why I had to bring it to school and read it there when the teacher didn't notice I have no memory on. Weird indeed.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Mister Underhill

Inzila -- cross-posted! One thing I thought was funny reading that old thread was the contrast between your sigs then and now.

Ripping the dust-jacket -- ouch. I'm champing at the bit to read LotR to/with my son (he's only 3), but fortunately I don't have any editions with dust-jackets for him to rip. Then again, there is that fold-out map at the back of my red leather slipcase edition...

Yes, older now, and hopefully bit wiser.

My 6 year old has already repaid me for my own carelessness with other people's property.

Originally Posted by Nogrod

Btw. do you remember a cartoon version of the LotR that used pictures from Bakshi's movie? I remember reading it secretly at school when I was at third grade or something (like 9-10 years old). Why I had to bring it to school and read it there when the teacher didn't notice I have no memory on. Weird indeed.

I had a book which was nothing but screenshots from the movie and captions. I remember it had a purple or blue cover depicting Gandalf holding Glamdring, standing by the hobbits and looking about 11 feet tall.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

I had a book which was nothing but screenshots from the movie and captions. I remember it had a purple or blue cover depicting Gandalf holding Glamdring, standing by the hobbits and looking about 11 feet tall.

Wasn't that the cover image the movie poster as well? I remember my copy had the same pic on it but the background I think was white. My version of it was like a regular cartoon album (a bit bigger than the standard A4 papers and maybe fifty pages or so), the pics were screenshots from the movie but I think there were those "speech bubbles" there for the lines of the characters. But I'm not sure.

I gave away all my cartoon-albums when I was fourteen or something. My aunt was a librarian in a small village and my parents persuaded me to give them as a gift to that library. Maybe that was a decent thing to do but I must say that looked at in retrospect I do miss some of them (not only the LotR but also the Fred albums, Valerians, Blueberries, Tintins...).

[deagol]

"Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy."

This is the first thing that popped into my head when I started thinking about my first reading of the trilogy. I had purchsed The Return of the King paperback through mail order from Ballantine and it had not arrived by the time I had finished The Two Towers. It was the very first time I can remember being absolutely frantic about what would happen next and unable to find out.

I was introduced to The Hobbit at age 12 by a book club flyer at school and, at first glance, it did not look to be my cup of tea at all. Elves and goblins and magic rings? Oh . . . no, thank you. I don't think so. For perspective, as I recall, my reading material of choice that year had been the HMS Bounty trilogy. But my Language Arts teacher -- this was the '70s and we referred to English class as "Language Arts," can you dig it? -- who knew I was an avid reader, reommended it. Long story short, I devoured The Hobbit in two or three bites and found, somewhat surprisingly, that I still had a taste for the fairy tale. Two years later, as a freshman in high school I had an English teacher (in high school English class was just English class again) who would assign us one book to read -- in my day that book was The Catcher in the Rye -- and allow us to choose one. He had a cabinet in the class full of ratty old paperbacks, primarily of the fantasy and science fiction genre, and that is where I found out that there was a sequel to the funny little hobbit story -- and that the tale was, indeed, much darker and more sorrowful than I had at first imagined. It turned out that I had a latent taste for fantasy adventure after all, and I spent as much time as I could that school term and even my summer vacation poring over those books (once I got my hands on them), and even to this day, I always find something new and interesting to marvel at whenever I have occasion to open one.

[Pitchwife]

It was Christmas - I'm not sure about the year, but most probably 1978, which means I was sixteen at the time. I'd been into science fiction for a couple of years (Star Trek!), had recently discovered the existence of something called 'fantasy' and picked up rumours about a mysterious book intriguingly titled 'Lord of the Rings' by a man with a strange surname and three initials which was supposed to be something like the bible of the genre. Star Wars played a part, too - I had read an interview with Sir Alec Guinness where he compared it to LotR and more or less said that the Tolkien influence was what had awakened his interest in playing Obi-wan. All this was very appetizing, so I pestered my parents until they consented to give me the book as a Christmas present (the price of close to 40 German Marks for the boxed paperback edition of Margaret Carroux' translation - with garish green covers featuring Heinz Edelmann's surreal drawings - being slightly above my personal budget); and the enthusiastic squee when I unpacked it was pretty much the last response to any external stimulus my family got from me till New Year's Day.

It took me a while to get into it - I didn't really appreciate all that hobbit-talk in the first few chapters, my taste in fantasy having been somewhat spoilt by heroic sword-and-sorcery à la Michael Moorcock, and the good-humoured satire on British society was wasted on me, but Gandalf scattered enough mysterious hints to make me curious how the story would go on. When the first Black Rider showed up and they met their first Elves, it started to get interesting; then we entered the Old Forest and met Tom and Goldberry, with whom (meaning both of them) I fell in love at first sight. Fog on the Barrow-Downs - brrr/wow! Barliman Butterbur was a bit of a nuisance, but Strider more than made up for it. From then on, the story inexorably gripped me more & more: Weathertop! Glorfindel! Flight to the Ford! By the time I got to Rivendell, my heart had been pierced with a knife that has staid there ever since.

IIRC, the first thing I did after finishing RotK was to re-read the whole thing (the first of I don't know how many times). Next came Silmarillion, The Hobbit and the Appendices (published as a separate volume in Germany), I don't remember in which order. At that time, being a Tolkien fan was geekish to a degree which is hard to imagine nowadays - none of my school mates had ever so much as heard of the book, but I managed to convert two or three of them; one went to the USA the following year and brought back a copy of the white Ballantine edition (or was it? Anyway, it had white covers with drawings by Tolkien himself), which she gracefully lent to me, introducing me to Tolkien in the original language and increasing my English vocabulary immensely. Then came the Bakshi movie, and that photonovel-cum-comic book version of it which Nog has mentioned... o sweet nostalgia!

Originally Posted by Zil

I had a book which was nothing but screenshots from the movie and captions. I remember it had a purple or blue cover depicting Gandalf holding Glamdring, standing by the hobbits and looking about 11 feet tall.

Yep, that pic was the movie poster (and Gandalf looks incredibly huge on it!). I still have a book with a very condensed version of the narrative (in English) according to the movie, illustrated with screenshots; don't know if it's the same one you're talking about - mine is in an oblong format with black cover; if it ever had a dust jacket it's got lost in the depths of time.

Originally Posted by Nog

I gave away all my cartoon-albums when I was fourteen or something. My aunt was a librarian in a small village and my parents persuaded me to give them as a gift to that library. Maybe that was a decent thing to do but I must say that looked at in retrospect I do miss some of them (not only the LotR but also the Fred albums, Valerians, Blueberries, Tintins...).

OT: I think I know exactly how you feel - about the Valerians and Blueberries at least, and, yeah well, the Tintins too (all classics of the comic book genre). It's seldom wise to part with the things you loved in your youth, no matter how embarrassed you may feel about them in the turmoils of late adolescence - ever so often you discover much later that you were right after all. (Same thing for some of my first LP records - what wouldn't I give today for the original vinyls of e.g. The Sweet's Give Us A Wink and Off The Record! But I digress...)

Originally Posted by deagol

"Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy."

Exactly. Most excruciating moment in the whole trilogy, and one of the best cliff-hangers ever.

Great thread topic, Galadriel! And interesting and touching responses, everybody. As Mr Underhill said, Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

[Mister Underhill]

Here's an old iteration of the question for the curious. Some of you old timers -- ahem -- I mean veteran wights will see the names and "first time" accounts of familiar old ghosts: Taimar, Birdland, burrahobbit, Maril[...], lindil, Inziladun as a young wight with only 123 posts, and others. I took special delight in reading Sharkû's less-polished English in the second post in the thread. What are you up to these days, I wonder, my old German brother?

Anyway, I noticed that I didn't answer the question in that thread. I'm sure I answered it at some point somewhere around here, but since it's been years...

The exact details of my first time are, for me, like so many others, hazy. I would have been around 12 or 13. I'm sure I was in a bit of a swoon, being ravished by the professor's vision. Among the things I do recall with some detail are being absolutely floored by Gandalf's seeming death, and the moment in Cirith Ungol when Sam realizes that Frodo isn't really dead! I was up late that night reading on, I can assure you. One thing I remember with some clarity is that soon after finishing LotR, I almost immediately picked up The Hobbit and started right over again.

Just thinking about it is bringing back some good old memories. I used to have this treehouse two stories off the ground where I'd go to read in quiet and solitude. I can't think of a more appropriate place to read the LotR than reclining comfortably in a tree. I can remember the slight sway of the branches in the breeze and the creaking of the wood as the structure flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed. It was almost like being aboard ship. What I wouldn't give to have a lazy afternoon in that treehouse. God. I have a vivid memory of reading the Star Wars novelization in that tree before I had ever built the actual treehouse. There was just a plank to sit on that I'd nailed into the saddle between two branches.

I'm trying to remember how the progression went. I was a voracious reader of sci-fi, due mainly to the aforementioned Star Wars, but that would also have been around the same time that I got into D&D. I'm pretty sure I was already branching into fantasy when my uncle noticed and gave me "the real stuff". I still have the paperbacks he gave me, though I don't read them anymore or else they'd crumble in my hands.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

[Inziladun]

Ah, so I did post in the old thread!
I think I was younger than 13 when I read them. Had to be, because my dad reminded me not long ago about my ripping the dust jacket on his FOTR when I took it for show-and-tell in third grade.

[Mister Underhill]

Inzila -- cross-posted! One thing I thought was funny reading that old thread was the contrast between your sigs then and now.

Ripping the dust-jacket -- ouch. I'm champing at the bit to read LotR to/with my son (he's only 3), but fortunately I don't have any editions with dust-jackets for him to rip. Then again, there is that fold-out map at the back of my red leather slipcase edition...