My mom gave me the Hobbit book when I was in early elementary school, and I loved it.

A few years later, the Lord of the Rings movies came out, though I was still too young to see them. Some of my classmates did though, but seeing them mostly imitating the “cool” characters fighting put me off of what I perceived was a generic Hollywood rip-off of the Hobbit (I knew there was a ring that makes people invisible, along with hobbits and elves, so understood that it was set in the same universe).

My godmother gifted me the first book around that time, and I realized that it was a real book by the same author. Hoping for a second Hobbit, I tried to read it but got stuck in the first twenty pages where Tolkien was describing the different types of hobbits, and gave up on it.

A few years later, the first movie was shown on TV. I didn’t have high expectations of what I still thought would be a shallow Hollywood adaptation of Tolkien’s world, but was (in hindsight predictably) blown away. I loved everything about it, enough to motivate me to give the books another try, and started looking for more information online about that world. The second movie came out on TV a little later, and I didn’t want to wait for the third one so I spent some of my precious allowance on the DVD collection and finally watched the whole trilogy.

Looking back, I don’t mind missing out on the movies the first time around; if anything, the absence of hype made it feel more personal (nevermind the slight mocking of classmates when I’d be googling “LotR” in computer class, three years after the movies came out and when the rest of my classmates were mostly over them).

And I am probably in a very small minority to have low expectations before watching the movie. The contrasting amazement and marvel I felt is something I still cherish to this day.