Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber

British schools was big on kings and acts of Parliament, and was full of dead people. It had a certain strange, mechanistic structure to it. What happened in 1066? The Battle of Hastings. Full marks. And what else happened in 1066? What do you mean, what else happened? The Battle of Hastings was what 1066 was for . We’d “done” the Romans (they came, they saw, they had some baths, they built some roads and left) but my private reading colored in the picture. We hadn’t “done” the Greeks. As for the empires of Africa and Asia, did anyone “do” them at all? But hey, look here in this book; these guys don’t use runes, it’s all pictures of birds and snakes; but, look, they know how to pull a dead king’s brains out through his nose. . . .
    And on I went, getting the best kind of education possible, which is the one that happens while you think you’re having fun. Would it have happened anyway? Possibly. We never know where the triggers are. But The Lord of the Rings was a step-change in my reading. I was already enjoying, but The Lord of the Rings opened me up to the rest of the library.
    I used to read it once a year, in the spring.
    I’ve realized that I don’t any more, and I wonder why. It’s not the dense and sometime ponderous language. It’s not because the scenery has more character than the characters, or the lack of parts for women, or the other perceived or real offenses against the current social codes.
    It’s simply because I have the movie in my head, and it’s been there for forty years. I can still remember the luminous green of the beechwoods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow. The protagonists don’t figure much in the movie, because they were never more to me than figures in a landscape that was, itself, the hero. I remember it at least as clearly as—no, come to think of it, more clearly than—I do many of the places I’ve visited in what we like to call the real world. In fact, it is strange to write this and realize that I can remember stretches of the Middle-earth landscape as real places. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to.

 
    GALADRIEL
    The Fellowship of the Ring
    Chapter VII: “The Mirror of Galadriel”
    I suppose the journey was a form of escapism. That was a terrible crime at my school. It’s a terrible crime in a prison; at least, it’s a terrible crime to a jailer. In the early sixties, the word had no positive meanings. But you can escape to as well as from . In my case, the escape was a truly Tolkien experience, as recorded in his Tree and Leaf . I started with a book, and that led me to a library, and that led me everywhere.
    Do I still think, as I did then, that Tolkien was the greatest writer in the world? In the strict sense, no. You can think that at thirteen. If you still think it at fifty-three, something has gone wrong with your life. But sometimes things all come together at the right time in the right place—book, author, style, subject and reader. The moment was magic.
    And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.
    One day I was doing a signing in a London bookshop and next in the queue was a lady in what, back in the eighties, was called a “power suit” despite its laughable lack of titanium armor and proton guns.
    She handed over a book for signature. I asked her what her name was. She mumbled something. I asked again . . . after all, it was a noisy bookshop. There was another mumble, which I could not quite decipher. As I opened my mouth for the third attempt, she said, “It’s Galadriel, okay?”
    I said: “Were you by any chance born in a cannabis plantation in Wales?” She smiled, grimly. “It was a camper van in Cornwall,” she said, “but