cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/650959
I feel like everyone has a special memory of how they first learned about Lord of the Rings. For me it was right around when the first movie came out. I watched it non-stop with my sisters friend’s elder sister. Anytime my sister would go over to play I’d be watching. I ultimately got the books but it was a huge undertaking for my age and never actually read it for an embarrassing long time. I did memorize the dwarvish rune alphabet in the appendix of my copy. Drove my teachers nuts writing with it.
My mother read them to my brother and I when I was around 6. The Christmas after I was given a beautiful illustrated copy of the lord of the rings.
I was introduced to Lord of the Rings by my mother and aunt. The set I read in early middle school was the same set they each read in middle school. I saw the old Hobbit cartoon and didn’t connect with it much. Me and many family members eagerly attended the LotR movie releases though and occasionally stood in line for hours when that was a thing.
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.
My mom was part of that hippie generation that gave LOTR its first taste of success. I read her copies about 1970 or so. That generation of fandom was quite different from what there is today. Now we’ve got volume after volume of additional information and stories and wonderfulness, but back then there was LOTR, The Hobbit, and some scholarly works. We couldn’t even be baffled by the Silmarilion yet!
Me and my mom read the hobbit when I was younger. My mom was always the smart one, and we had our little moments. The movies came out when I was fairly young, 10 maybe. I vividly remember when I first saw it, with a friend who I’ve since grown apart from.
I tried to get super into the books, even the silmarillion and I doubt I was really following back then, and I guess i just kept trying, cause now I love it, and have re read the books a few times now, and they are really very good, along with all the world building stuff.
