Onstage, a person dressed in a black scuba diving suit sat in a wading pool, hissing out some lines that were all but unintelligible. She was playing an odd, frog-like creature that had a strange name sounding like a loud gulp crossed with a quaint expression: Gollum.
It was a junior high school skit, and without realizing it, I had just been introduced to a book — and a world — that would change my life: “The Hobbit.” I didn’t quite understand what was happening onstage; I only knew that I had to find out more.
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So began my journey into the world created by the late British author and academic John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, a journey that for many years would fascinate and entertain me and my twin sister, forge close ties with like-minded friends, comfort me at life’s difficult crossroads and bind me forever to the world of words.
By the time my sister Rhonda and I began reading “The Hobbit” — and subsequently, Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” — we already were avid readers. In a household headed by teachers of English and history, how could we be otherwise? Tales told by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen; children’s classics such as “Heidi” by Johanna Spyri and “Black Beauty” by Anna Sewell — these were part of our daily discourse.
After seeing that skit, we got our hands on “The Hobbit” and sped through it and “The Lord of the Rings” (often called a trilogy but conceived by Tolkien as one novel consisting of six books, frequently published in three volumes). Our closest friend, Ann Jasperson, became part of our Tolkien club, and many of the endless summer hours we three spent together — sleeping over at each other’s houses, going to the public pool, hanging out in our back yards — were spent analyzing the books, their characters, their plot twists. We were three nascent liberal arts majors if ever there were any.
As we pored over the books and Tolkien’s evocative maps and illustrations, we decoded one of his runic alphabets (the easiest one, to be sure) and began writing notes to each other with it. What could be more appealing to adolescents than to have their own secret language?
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I remember at first having trouble keeping the characters and locations straight, there being so many of them. How was I supposed to remember the differences between dwarves with odd-sounding names such as Balin, Dwalin, Kili, Fili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur and Thorin? Not to mention what colors their hoods and beards were, which the imaginative Mr. Tolkien took care to describe.
And just getting our heads wrapped around the concept of a creature called a “hobbit” — not exactly a household word in the early 1970s — was a challenge. But it was a fun one, and rereading the book now I can understand the hobbit’s appeal to us, straddling the worlds of childhood and adulthood as we were. Hobbits were small and cute, like the children we had recently been, and that afforded them certain advantages that bigger, clumsier creatures lacked.
I remember, too, being impatient with what I felt were tedious, overlong descriptions of landscapes. I was bewildered by the references Tolkien made to histories and mythologies he had created, stories that went so deep I sometimes felt I was drowning in them.
The result? A determination to reread the books until everything became clear. And so we did, all the way through high school and college, even as we graduated to more adult literature. Friends who knew of our interest bought us collectible editions of the four books when our much-loved paperbacks fell to pieces.
I lost count of the number of times I read the four Tolkien volumes, but I remember last reading them the summer I graduated from college and started working in a small town where I didn’t know anyone. Diving into the books was like going home, being among familiar people and places just when homesickness was at its worst.
And what of the story that so entranced us? We were still young enough to welcome fantastical creatures into our lives, and though we had never met hobbits before, Tolkien made it easy: “They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves. … They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it).”
Our hero, a prosperous, respectable hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, finds himself unexpectedly chosen by Gandalf the wizard to join a dangerous mission: journey a long distance with 13 dwarves to reclaim the dwarves’ former home and treasure under the faraway Lonely Mountain. Oh yes, and to face down the evil and powerful dragon Smaug, who stole the dwarves’ treasure to begin with. Along the way there are enough goblins, elves, giant insects, murky forests, talking birds, shape-shifting creatures, mysterious prophecies, greedy men and noble descendants to keep any fairy tale fan worth her salt happy.
Fantasy back then was extremely uncool if you were older than 7 or 8. There was no such thing as “The Hunger Games,” no “Twilight” series — and especially, no “Harry Potter.” Our obsession tagged us as nerds of the highest order. But we didn’t mind; we felt all the closer for it.
Rereading the book now, I see that as with Harry Potter’s adventures, Bilbo Baggins’ is a growing-up story. Although Bilbo is 50 (hobbits can live more than 100 years), he is otherwise like a child, with no experience of the world outside his comfortable hobbit hole and neighborhood. Suddenly things start happening to him out of his control, as life happens to us all, and he must learn to cope with — and conquer, if possible — each challenge, with his very existence at stake.
“The Hobbit” also is a morality tale. Bilbo repeatedly faces a moral dilemma: Should he save his friends from mortal danger, or escape and save himself alone? After all, he didn’t ask to go on the adventure, and he didn’t care much for treasure, as it turned out. But time and again he comes through, and grows a little more for it.
Perhaps the strongest description Tolkien gives of Bilbo’s inner struggles occurs as Bilbo approaches the fearsome dragon sleeping in its lair. “It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. At any rate after a short halt go on he did.”
For me, at least, returning to the books after encountering some of my own dragons was somehow reassuring, even though I knew there are no happily-ever-afters in real life. And Tolkien was a savvy enough writer to convey that in victory there also is pain and regret.
I also learned so many things about writing: how to see the subtexts beneath the story line, how to question why things happened, how to keep my mind open. It played no small part in my decision to become an editor, and sometime writer, for my life’s work.
I also became a lifelong fan of fantasy fiction. So when Harry Potter arrived on the scene in the late ’90s, in spite of my advanced age, I was eager to read it.
And my companions?
My sister became a teacher in Arizona, and for 12 years taught English and reading at a junior high school. She made the Tolkien books part of her curriculum and cultivated an enthusiasm for fantasy literature in her young son. When Harry Potter burst on the scene, she read all the books with him.
Ann, who was always drawing when we were kids, became an illustrator and designer who also invents toys. She remembers our Tolkien time as an entree into a fictional world she hadn’t encountered much until then.
For her, “it opened up a sort of realm of different worlds,” she says. “I was always drawing how I saw the things in the book in my head. Absolutely it played a role (in my career). When you’re in a book like that, it’s like living in somebody else’s imagination. And that was the coolest part.”
Other Tolkien rune-writing friends of ours were Adam Bezark, a writer/director who creates theme park attractions and produces museum exhibits, live shows and special events (for such clients as Walt Disney Imagineering, Universal Studios, the Kennedy Space Center and the White House); Bill Bernstein, a Los Angeles-based music editor (most recent film project: the Bond movie “Skyfall”); and Melissa Halpern, a gastrointestinal physiologist who has self-published two installments of a fantasy series.
No, not every fantasy fiction fan pursues a fantasy-related career. But I’m certain that our love of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” helped nurture creative sparks in all of us.
The subtitle of “The Hobbit” is “Or There and Back Again.” My friends and I are still journeying “there” and know that we can’t literally go “back again” to that time of discovery and awakening.
But what a fun place it is to visit.
Pam Becker is a lifestyles editor for the Tribune.
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