Transforming Novels
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Tuesday, April 27, 2010 11:15 PM
I was about six years old the first time I pulled The Lord of the Rings off the bookshelf. Not to read it, of course - at that age I still considered Little Women intimidatingly long - but to page through it looking for instances of the word “Arwen” because it was exciting to see my name printed in a grown-up book. Over the next few years I spent many a happy hour that way.
My parents are big fans of Tolkien’s work, obviously, and by the age of about ten I was convinced of the book’s merit and determined to read it for myself. I tried, again and again, but never got past page fifty. I thought it should be thrilling: an entire chapter about a party! But it wasn’t. I was stuck.
Then when I was thirteen my best friends were reading Lord of the Rings, so I tried again. It took a month, but I made it, and I was proud of myself. I didn’t get much out of it, though, except for a vague sense of relief that no one was ever likely to stick me with the task of destroying a Ring of Doom. My dad had told me that The Lord of the Rings was one of the books that changed his life. I thought: sure, it’s an exciting adventure, but how could reading about it change your life? I put it back on the shelf and left it there.
Fast-forward seven years. My husband and I were newly married, and his Christmas break ended a week before mine, so I had time to kill. On a whim I started again with Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party. Four days later and a thousand pages later, I knew exactly what my father had been talking about all those years.
Hearing someone named Arwen rave about The Lord of the Rings is enough to make you roll your eyes, I’m sure. Of course I like it. I’m named after it. But truly, except for the name, I’m an unlikely candidate for LOTR fandom. I never read fantasy books and I don’t like stories about wars or history or epic deeds. Give me realistic fiction all the way.
Except for this book. If I could only have five books to read for the rest of my life (horrible doom!) it would be one of them. No matter how many times I read it, I love it more every time. It pulls me in, makes me turn pages frantically, makes me cry with joy and sorrow and laugh with relief.
It teaches me, too, so much about the human condition and about truth. Not surprisingly, since Tolkien was himself a Catholic and once wrote about his book, “[It] is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision… the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
Because of this, I’m also grateful for the recent Lord of the Rings movies. They’re incredible films, and although I find them to be somewhat lacking as adaptations of the book, and I feel they miss the best and most Catholic parts of Tolkien’s work, I think that anything that leads people to read this story must be a good thing.
There’s so much learn from The Lord of the Rings. I’ve read it half a dozen times, and every time there are still many things that are new to me. I’m with my dad: it’s made a huge impact on my life.
Is there a novel that has done that for you?
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