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Pull up a chair. My name is Walter Ashdown. I taught high-school English
in Eugene, Oregon, for thirty-one years, and retired in 1996 with a bad knee
and a good pension. My granddaughter set up this page for me last year and
showed me how to add to it, and I have been adding to it ever since.
I first read The Hobbit in 1949, when I was twelve, in a green library copy that I renewed so many times the librarian finally told me to let another child have a turn. I read The Lord of the Rings as the volumes came out in the middle fifties, and like everyone else I spent a very long year waiting to learn what became of Frodo and Sam. I have read it, by my own count, twenty-three times since: alone, aloud to my wife on car trips, aloud to each of our three children, and now aloud to the first two grandchildren. The third is eight months old and will have to wait a bit. In 1965 the paperbacks arrived and my students discovered the book all at once. For a few years there wasn't a sophomore in the building without a copy in a back pocket, and some of them wore buttons announcing that Frodo lives. I confiscated nothing. It was the best reading my classes ever did. |
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The Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, in South Africa, and grew up in and around Birmingham, England. He was an orphan by twelve. He fought on the Somme in 1916 and lost nearly all his closest friends in that war. He spent his working life as a professor at Oxford, a scholar of Old and Middle English, and one of the Inklings, the little circle of friends who read their work aloud to each other, with C.S. Lewis among them. He was a philologist first and last, and this is the key to him. He made up languages for the pleasure of it, and he said more than once in his letters that the stories grew up largely to give those languages a world to live in. When a name in Middle-earth sounds exactly right, that is not an accident. He had usually been working on it for thirty years. He died on September 2, 1973, twenty-six years ago today as I write this. |
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Why these books People who haven't read Tolkien think it is a book about wizards and battles. There are wizards and battles. But the heart of it, for me, is a small person who takes on a job far too big for him because somebody has to, and a friend who will not let him do it alone. I taught Beowulf and Macbeth and The Old Man and the Sea for three decades, and I never found a better book about courage than this one, or about what it costs. It is also a book about loss: about beautiful things passing out of the world, and the ones who stay behind. I understood that part much better at sixty than I did at eighteen. |
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On these pages: The Books, and How to Read Them — everything Tolkien wrote about Middle-earth that has been published, in the order I'd recommend, with a word or two about the rest of his work and my own shelf. On the Rumored Films — what we know about the pictures New Line Cinema intends to make, and an old reader's hopes and worries. |
