[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Hullo to you all.

I've been enjoying this thread immensely, but I didn't want to post until I was happy in my own mind that I belong here.

To my lasting shame I can't remember when I first encountered Tolkien: it feels as though he's been a part of my life forever. But my copy of The Hobbit (a gift from my parents) is the 1983 impression, and my mother, whose memory of even the most trivial events in my life is staggering, agrees that this was a gift for Christmas, probably in 1984.

I also remember with some fondness turning up an old paperback of The Lord of the Rings unexpectedly at a relative's house at about the same time. The relative in question is not one of whom I am particularly fond, being someone with no appreciation of the sort of things about which Tolkien wrote. Most of us agree that it must have been bought for a literature course and not read since.

I appropriated this book. It was a poor copy: an all-in-one edition too poorly bound to support the weight of its own pages, with a horrible yellow and orange cover and without the appendices on languages; but it lasted me until I could buy a decent HarperCollins hardback edition. My memory, though, is of having begun my association with Tolkien by reading The Hobbit, aged 8. I scrape into this club by the skin of my teeth.