Greetings all you coots! I have resisted this thread for too long…
First, my credentials. I have been reading LotR about once a year, every year, for the last 21 years. I took a course at university in which we spent six weeks on LotR; I have published an article about it myself. I have taught a non-credit university level course about LotR. But most importantly, I own the DVDs of the movies.
Second, my Middle-Earth moment. I am a new father. One night, not long after the birth of my beautiful boy, I came home from work very late, exhausted and terribly upset by a profound professional set back. As I walked down the street to my home, I saw the lights in the windows, and when I came in, my wife was there, and I sat down and she put my son on my lap and I said – and, as Eru is my witness, I was entirely unconscious of the echo until afterward – “Well, I’m back.”
And you know what – for all the times I’d read that book, and for all the work I’ve done with it, I never
really got it until that moment.