When did you first read Lord of the Rings?

[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.