Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber Page A

you’ve got the right idea.”
    It wasn’t Tolkien’s fault, but let us remember in fellowship and sympathy all the Bilboes out there.

A BAR AND
A QUEST

ROBIN HOBB
     
    I can’t write a scholarly essay about Tolkien. I’m not a scholar. Nor can I produce a carefully reasoned analysis of just how The Lord of the Rings changed not only fantasy but literature for my generation and generations to come. I am not only too close to it, I am at ground zero. I am a product of his impact. Like the rider in the rocket, I don’t know the mechanics of launching it or the thought that went into designing it. All I can tell you is that it carried me up to where I could see the stars, and nothing has looked quite the same since.
    1965? I think that is right. Odd that I cannot put a more precise date to it. My family lived in a log house in a rural setting outside Fairbanks, Alaska. So I was about thirteen.
    In the front yard of our log house, on stilt legs about fourteen feet tall, there was a small log cabin. In the dark cold of an Alaskan winter, in a good year, that cache was full of meat. Quarters of moose or caribou, frozen solid, leaned hooves-up against the walls. The hide was left on this grisly plenty to protect the meat from drying out. We had an electric freezer on the back porch as well, but the cache provided a space to store our hunting bounty until it could be cut into serving portions, wrapped in white paper and set into the plug-in freezer (which, often enough in the Fairbanks cold, was not plugged in for most of the winter!).
    In summer, the cache served an entirely different purpose. It was mine. In a household rampant with seven siblings, not to mention their friends hanging out, it provided a small space of privacy for me. Bedrooms and living room had to be shared. No one except me wanted the cache. I could drag sleeping bags and cushions up there, and, for the summer at least, have my own room. With me went my books. Lots of books. Out of sight of both parents and siblings, I could hide from chores and the world at large, and read. One of the untrumpeted benefits of that Midnight Sun is that a flashlight is not necessary for late-night summer-reading. With plenty of Off! insect repellent and army-surplus mummy bag, my evening was complete.
    This was the setting for not only my first reading of The Lord of the Rings, but for many repetitions of it. The sensory memories connected with those books are bumpy cottonwood logs under my back and glimpses of blue sky through the close-set logs of the cache’s roof.
    I started with the Houghton Mifflin paperback with the pinky cover for The Hobbit , brought home from the rack at the drugstore. I went on to the Ace rip-offs for The Lord of the Rings. When I discovered that those who were courteous at least to living authors would not have bought the Ace editions, I saved rigorously and purchased all four books in Houghton Mifflin hardbacks. They cost me a whopping $5.95 each. It took me so long to acquire the whole set that the bindings did not match.
    The Hobbit had , of course, Tolkien’s own art on the cover. Two had jackets by Walter Lorraine, and the third had the darker art by Robert Quackenbush. But the covers didn’t much matter to me. It was the pages within that I needed to possess. The same hardback editions still sit on the shelves in my office. Their dust jackets are frayed and eroded. Opened, they lie flat, the stitching peeking out at me between the pages. Yet, opened to any page, the words still have the power to draw me in and pull me under, and, ultimately, to take me home.
    I have lost track of how many times I have reread them over the years. Nor can I recall how many copies of The Lord of the Rings I have purchased over the years. They have been gifts for friends, both young and old; and there have been sets that went off to college with my children. The last time I reread The Hobbit was less than a month ago, as I shared it with my youngest