I’m curious about when/how other people in the Tolkien fandom first got into it.
I first read the Hobbit when I was eight and got my tonsils out, because I had nothing to do but read, and it was a good book, but didn’t really stick out to me among the other ones I read at that time.
The funny story is how I first read LotR. My older sister and her friends were all into it around the time RotK came out in theaters, and I wanted so bad to watch the movies, but I was only nine that summer and my parents were kind of strict about PG-13 movies. So my mom made me a deal that I would have to read the books before I saw the movies, thinking I’d never get through them – or at least that it would take me a couple years (ha!).
I also remember being surprised when I started that Bilbo was in the books because I had no idea the Hobbit had a sequel. I finished in time to watch RotK in theaters that winter – and she wasn’t even able to fast forward through the bad parts! (come to think of it, it might have been my first PG-13 movie? And yeah I watched RotK before the other two)
As for the Silmarillion, I tried reading it the next year, but couldn’t make it through and eventually came back to it in either 8th grade or freshman year of high school.
So what are your guys’s stories?
Waaaay back in 3rd grade, at the turn of the millennium, my teacher took time each day if we had it to read us a portion of The Hobbit. Most of the class saw it as an opportunity for nap time, but I got hype. Like eagerly listening to the first 40 pages hype. We did a class project on it featuring runes with black paint on white plaster tiles and carving into them. (Apparently I was so proud of that, I recently uncovered it and will post pictures cause it still sorta holds up to this day.)
While we never actually finished the book in class, I went ahead and finished it at home. Over the course of 4th and 5th grade I read through The Lord of the Rings in preparation for the movies, which I adored. Case and point, I saw Fellowship of the Ring in the theater 30 times, I counted my ticket stubs.
My actual fandom interaction however didn’t really pop up until college, when my roommate @intrepidscholar managed to finally take me to a meeting of the UNM Hobbit Society. It was also this time that I got a Tumblr, (so spring 2012 for those keeping count), and I started writing fanfic for The Silmarillion.
And now here I am. It’s been quite the trip.
I had The Hobbit read to me when I was maybe five or six, and shortly after that I have vague memories of the animated Rankin-Bass version playing on the VCR at home (I remember Bard’s voice clearly even after all this time). I loved that movie, and while I had some vague idea that The Lord of the Rings existed my only pre-Jacksonian exposure was a few incomprehensible minutes of the Bakshi version when I was eight.
The next year, the early winter of 2002 (like, early November), my father called me downstairs on a Saturday morning to watch The Fellowship of the Ring with him. I was nine. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and my dad had inadvertently created a monster. After I saw FotR on DVD, I read the book in time to go see Two Towers in theaters in early February, again with my father. I held off on reading TTT until after I saw the film because Fellowship was a little overwhelming to a nine-year-old and I thought the movie gave me a pretty clear framework of what to expect. (I should have read Towers prior to watching it, though – the theatrical cut of that film is incomprehensible.) Then I saw and read RotK just about simultaneously, finishing the book in about eighteen hours.
As for the Salmon Riot, my interaction with it starts young. Shortly before my eleventh birthday, in early May of 2004, I checked it out from the library and set out to tackle it.
I got as far as the end of the Valaquenta before I realized I was in over my head and went back to LotR.
But then that Christmas I got the Books of Lost Tales, and wound up doing a book report on them – something about the light, fairytale-esque quality really spoke to me, though I was more fascinated by the many Valar than by my favorite elf trash children. I remembered a lot of the stories from the beginning of the Salmon Riot and they actually made so much more sense in the BoLT format, thus paving the way for me to actually read the S.R. proper next year when I was twelve. I was hooked for life.
And that’s how my fandom disease metastasized.
I watched Fellowship when it first came out in theaters and then read all of the books – well, I say read, I mean devoured wholesale, really – and then watched the other two movies as they came out. We had a unit on the Hobbit when I was in eighth grade and I loved it to little bitty pieces even then. We watched the animated version of the movie and I remember loving the line where Bilbo wishes, “to wear a sword instead of a walking stick, just once!” because that’s me in a nutshell. I’ve been hopelessly in love with everything Tolkien ever since. I finally got through the Silmarillion this past year – for some reason (probably because it was too biblical for my tastes) I had a problem with getting through the first chapter but once I got through that I loved the Silmarillion too. I’ve been working on collecting the History of Middle Earth books slowly and I haven’t gotten a chance to read The Children of Hurin yet, although it’s on my shelf.
Meg's Mumbles 