Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber Page B

daughter. I can recite the opening paragraph from memory, yet I never deliberately memorized it. Phrases and sensory images from the books float up into my mind at odd times: “fireweed seeding away into fluffy ashes,” winter apples that were “withered but sound,” or the smell of fresh mushrooms rising from a covered basket.
    I suspect it is difficult for readers who have grown up in a time when The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are acknowledged as classics to understand the breathtaking impact they had on readers like myself. I simply had never read anything like it. I was an omnivorous reader, steeped in fairy tale books, the classics, mythology, mysteries, and adventure. In those days before I discovered Tolkien, I was devouring science fiction and pulp at the junkie rate of at least a paperback a day. It wasn’t that there was no good stuff out there. There was. I’d found Heinlein and Bradbury and Simak and Sturgeon and Leiber. All those encounters marked me. But Tolkien claimed me as no other writer ever had before.
    His magic wrapped me and took me under, and when I came out of it, I was a different creature. Even as I sit here now, looking at a computer screen and trying to analyze why that is so, I am somewhat at a loss to explain it. Maybe it was the age I was, or the place I was in my development of reading taste. Maybe it was just the juxtaposition of Tolkien’s Middle-earth and the restless sixties. But perhaps magic doesn’t have to offer any explanation for why it worked. Perhaps it simply is.
    Yet I think I can sieve out a bit of it. I had three distinct sensations at the end of The Lord of the Rings. One was the simple, unbelievable void of “It’s over. There’s no more of it to read.” The second was, “And I’ve never encountered anything like this. I’ll never find anything this good again.” The third was perhaps the most alarming: “In all my life, I will never write anything as good as this. He’s done it; he’s achieved it. Is there any point in my trying?”
    Taking the third sensation first: Even in those days, I knew I was going to be a writer. I had been writing since I was in first grade, creating short stories almost as soon as I mastered sentences. By the time I finished junior high, I burned with the fixed ambition that I was going to write amazing books, someday. To discover that someone had already written the most amazing books that could possibly exist raised the bar to an almost impossible height for me.
    Raising that bar was the most wonderful thing that anyone could have done for an ambitious young writer.
    The fantasy I had read before that time simply didn’t take itself seriously. Before anyone sends me a list of a hundred serious fantasy books that existed before Tolkien wrote, let me concede that I completely accept all responsibility for my ignorance. I am sure there was important fantasy out there, and some of it had probably even made it to Fairbanks, Alaska. I’m simply saying that I hadn’t found it. Not until The Lord of the Rings.
    Much of the fantasy I had read before Tolkien was unmistakably written “for children.” Some of it had that snide, winking-at-the-grown-up-in-the-room humor that some adults find amusing and children find irritating. (After all, if you think I’m that stupid, why are you writing for me?) Some was written with the kind of humor that becomes a barrier to the reader taking the character or story seriously. How can you care about the hero when his next contrived pratfall is probably less than a page away? Why commit to a character whom the writer has not invested in emotionally?
    Much of what I read was sword-and-sorcery, rollicking adventurous stuff; fun, but written with a fine disregard for any morality regarding theft or mercenary murder. Serious, long-term relationships among the characters did not seem to exist. The happy ending was usually that the character managed to walk away unscathed and unchanged. Some of