When did you first read Lord of the Rings?

[Nogrod]

Heh, the hazyness of the years but the vividness of certain memories...

Btw. do you remember a cartoon version of the LotR that used pictures from Bakshi's movie? I remember reading it secretly at school when I was at third grade or something (like 9-10 years old). Why I had to bring it to school and read it there when the teacher didn't notice I have no memory on. Weird indeed.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Mister Underhill

Inzila -- cross-posted! One thing I thought was funny reading that old thread was the contrast between your sigs then and now.

Ripping the dust-jacket -- ouch. I'm champing at the bit to read LotR to/with my son (he's only 3), but fortunately I don't have any editions with dust-jackets for him to rip. Then again, there is that fold-out map at the back of my red leather slipcase edition...

Yes, older now, and hopefully bit wiser.

My 6 year old has already repaid me for my own carelessness with other people's property.

Originally Posted by Nogrod

Btw. do you remember a cartoon version of the LotR that used pictures from Bakshi's movie? I remember reading it secretly at school when I was at third grade or something (like 9-10 years old). Why I had to bring it to school and read it there when the teacher didn't notice I have no memory on. Weird indeed.

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.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

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.

Wasn't that the cover image the movie poster as well? I remember my copy had the same pic on it but the background I think was white. My version of it was like a regular cartoon album (a bit bigger than the standard A4 papers and maybe fifty pages or so), the pics were screenshots from the movie but I think there were those "speech bubbles" there for the lines of the characters. But I'm not sure.

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...).

[deagol]

"Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy."

This is the first thing that popped into my head when I started thinking about my first reading of the trilogy. I had purchsed The Return of the King paperback through mail order from Ballantine and it had not arrived by the time I had finished The Two Towers. It was the very first time I can remember being absolutely frantic about what would happen next and unable to find out.

I was introduced to The Hobbit at age 12 by a book club flyer at school and, at first glance, it did not look to be my cup of tea at all. Elves and goblins and magic rings? Oh . . . no, thank you. I don't think so. For perspective, as I recall, my reading material of choice that year had been the HMS Bounty trilogy. But my Language Arts teacher -- this was the '70s and we referred to English class as "Language Arts," can you dig it? -- who knew I was an avid reader, reommended it. Long story short, I devoured The Hobbit in two or three bites and found, somewhat surprisingly, that I still had a taste for the fairy tale. Two years later, as a freshman in high school I had an English teacher (in high school English class was just English class again) who would assign us one book to read -- in my day that book was The Catcher in the Rye -- and allow us to choose one. He had a cabinet in the class full of ratty old paperbacks, primarily of the fantasy and science fiction genre, and that is where I found out that there was a sequel to the funny little hobbit story -- and that the tale was, indeed, much darker and more sorrowful than I had at first imagined. It turned out that I had a latent taste for fantasy adventure after all, and I spent as much time as I could that school term and even my summer vacation poring over those books (once I got my hands on them), and even to this day, I always find something new and interesting to marvel at whenever I have occasion to open one.

[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.

[Erendis]

June 2003 in the island of Hydra,granny's house.I started with FOTR,read it at once in 5 hours-we are talking about serious crave to do so back then,my granny didn't dare even to talk to me-.

Then, when I went to the bookstore next day to buy TTT,the casier asked "Hey,I 'm thinking around starting it myself,does it worth reading?",I answered "Sure,and I'm eager to read the next one today" to his ultimate shock.
One week after,it was ROTK,and tehn came The Hobbit,Silmarilion,UT ...and the Downs.

Back to thet summer,I was already a dedicated moovie fan,but that night at granny's house was a real revelation.

Thanks,Galadriel,for the amazing thread!

And thank you,Professor,for giving me the love of my life.May you rest in peace.

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Ah, me. It's rather close to the time of year when I first read LotR -- it was June, as I recall, when I was 11, which means it's 45 years ago. It was just about the time when the book was being "discovered" on college campuses, but that wasn't where I first noticed it (obviously ). For a month or two prior to that, my second brother (who was all of 13) had been devoutly reading what looked like a prayer book during Sunday Mass. Now, I knew him well enough to know that there was no way he was really that pious, so after we got home one Sunday, I snuck a look under the embossed plastic cover he'd put on the book, and discovered that it was one of the volumes of LotR. I'd never seen that particular brother so engrossed in any reading, so I decided I'd give it try and see what was so interesting to him.

I admit, it took a little effort to get into it, but not that much. By the time the hobbits left Bree, I was hooked. (and I'll also admit that I would been hooked more easily if not for Tom Bombadil. I was not the kind of kid who went for silliness. Very long story, and beside the point.)

I reacted to it in many ways. The most powerful single reaction was that I found in the character of Gandalf the adult role model I lacked, having come from an extremely dysfunctional family in which one parent was horribly abusive and the other was not allowed to bond with us. Tolkien was also one of the first authors I'd read who made me want to tell stories of my own, though he was not the last. But I loved the detail in the world he built, and that has been a strong influence in my own writing.

[Loslote]

I first "read" it when my mom read it to me. I must have been either nine or ten, (because I was still dating things by where I lived, so I couldn't have gotten used to the idea of actually staying in one place yet, which means the first couple of years in Alaska). I totally loved it at the time, but I'd mostly forgotten it (although I still remebered vividly certain parts of it - Saruman's multi-colored cloak and the story of Aragorn's death in particular. I read it again as a "school" book when I was...um...I think thirteen, maybe twelve, and that time it stuck. I read Sil, the HoMEs, UT, etc, etc. I don't remember when The Hobbit came in. I think my mom read it to me, but I don't really remember it (although I know the story well enough to be able to fumble through the Spanish version, so I had to have read it sometime... )

I loved the sense of history behind everything. The idea that there was something before now, and before that, and even before that, and that it all affected what was happening now in such an important way. I also loved the languages, particularly elvish. That's what brought me online - I was looking for elvish resources. Through a very roundabout way, that ended up here. (Very, very roundabout - including my mom having tea with Nurumaiel's grandmother and mother, and happening to mention LotR. Ah, Lady Luck will have her say. ) Anyway, during my first read-through I was so engrossed, my mom wouldn't even know where I was for hours on end, because I would hole up somewhere and totally forget where I was (a common conversation was "Lottie, take out the garbage." "Okay." *an hour later* "Lottie, take out the garbage." "Okay." *an hour later* ... you get the idea, only with my real name instead of Lottie. )

[Isabellkya]

I first read LOTR in High School. I was prompted to read the series via my math/physics teacher, as he was absolutely obsessed and put an extra credit question - LOTR related on the end of each exam. If you stumped him, he would give you double EC points.

I can not even recall my initial reaction, other than I enjoyed it - and have reread routinely in the years following.

Thinking about it now, I wonder why my parents never had copies; as they are both huge book readers, fantasy included. Though I do recall my mother telling me about my uncle having copies of the books.