I’d waited quite a long time for this moment. I was that kind of kid, even then.
What can I remember? I can remember the vision of beech woods in the Shire; I was a country boy, and the hobbits were walking through a landscape which, give or take the odd housing development, was pretty much the one I’d grown up in. I remember it like a movie. There I was, sitting on this rather chilly sixties-style couch in this rather bare room; but at the edges of the carpet, the forest began. I remember the light as green, coming through trees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.
I can remember the click of the central heating going off and the room growing colder, but these things were happening on the horizon of my senses and weren’t relevant. I can’t remember going home with my parents, but I do remember sitting up in bed until three a.m., still reading. I don’t recall going to sleep. I do remember waking up with the book open on my chest, and finding my place, and going on reading. It took me, oh, about twenty-three hours to get to the end.
Then I picked up the first book and started again. I spent a long time looking at the runes.
Already, as I admit this, I can feel the circle of new, anxious but friendly faces around me: “My name is Terry and I used to draw dwarf runes in my school notebooks. It started with, you know, the straight ones, everyone can do them, but then I got in deeper and before I knew it I was doing the curly elf ones with the dots. Wait … there’s worse. Before I’d even heard the word fandom I was writing weird fan fiction. I wrote a crossover story setting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Middle-earth; the rest of the kids loved it, because a class of thirteen-year-old boys with volcanic acne and groinal longings is not best placed to appreciate Miss Austen’s fine prose. It was a really good bit when the orcs attacked the rectory.…” But around about then, I suspect, the support group would have thrown me out.
Enthralled I was. To the library I went back, and spake thusly: “Have you got any more books like these? Maybe with maps in? And runes?”
The librarian gave me a mildly disapproving look, but I ended up with Beowulf and a volume of Norse sagas. He meant well, but it wasn’t the same. It took someone several stanzas just to say who they were.
But that drew me to the Mythology shelves. The Mythology shelves were next to the Ancient History shelves. What the hell … it was all guys with helmets, wasn’t it? On, on … maybe there’s a magical ring! Or runes!
The desperate search for the Tolkien effect opened up a new world for me, and it was this one.
History as it was then taught in British schools was big on kings and acts of Parliament, and was full of dead people. It had a certain strange, mechanistic structure to it. What happened in 1066? The Battle of Hastings. Full marks. And what else happened in 1066? What do you mean, what else happened? The Battle of Hastings was what 1066 was for. We’d “done” the Romans (they came, they saw, they had some baths, they built some roads, and left), but my private reading coloured in the picture. We hadn’t “done” the Greeks. As for the empires of Africa and Asia, did anyone “do” them at all? But, hey, look here in this book; these guys don’t use runes, it’s all pictures of birds and snakes; but, look, they know how to pull a dead king’s brains out through his nose.…
And on I went, getting the best kind of education possible, which is the one that happens while you think you’re having fun. Would it have happened anyway? Possibly. We never know where the triggers are. But The Lord of the Rings was a step-change in my reading. I was already enjoying it, but The Lord of the Rings opened me up to the rest of the library.
I used to read it once a year, in the spring.
I’ve realized that I don’t anymore, and I wonder why. It’s not the dense and sometimes ponderous language. It’s not because the scenery has more character than the characters, or the lack of parts for women, or the other perceived or real offences against the current social codes.
It’s simply because I have the movie in my head, and it’s been there for forty years. I can still remember the luminous green of the beech woods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow. The protagonists don’t figure much in the movie, because they were never more to me than figures in a landscape that was, itself, the hero. I remember it at least as clearly as—no, come to think of it, more clearly than—I do many of the places I’ve visited in what we like to call the real world. In fact, it is strange to write this and realize that I can remember stretches of the Middle-earth landscape as real places. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to.
I suppose the journey was a form of escapism. That was a terrible crime at my school. It’s a terrible crime in a prison; at least, it’s a terrible crime to a jailer. In the early sixties, the word had no positive meanings. But you can escape to as well as from. In my case, the escape was a truly Tolkien experience, as recorded in his Tree and Leaf. I started with a book, and that led me to a library, and that led me everywhere.
Do I still think, as I did then, that Tolkien was the greatest writer in the world? In the strict sense, no. You can think that at thirteen. If you still think it at fifty-three, something has gone wrong with your life. But sometimes things all come together at the right time in the right place—book, author, style, subject, and reader. The moment was magic.
And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.
One day I was doing a signing in a London bookshop and next in the queue was a lady in what, back in the eighties, was called a “power suit” despite its laughable lack of titanium armour and proton guns. She handed over a book for signature. I asked her what her name was. She mumbled something. I asked again … after all, it was a noisy bookshop. There was another mumble, which I could not quite decipher. As I opened my mouth for the third attempt, she said, “It’s Galadriel, okay?”
I said: “Were you by any chance born in a cannabis plantation in Wales?” She smiled, grimly. “It was a camper van in Cornwall,” she said, “but you’ve got the right idea.”
It wasn’t Tolkien’s fault, but let us remember in fellowship and sympathy all the Bilboes out there.
NEIL GAIMAN: AMAZING MASTER CONJUROR
Boskone 39 Programme Book, February 2002