I have been a very protective fan of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien since I was a kid. These days being a protective fan is considered a bad thing, because we're all supposed to embrace the mediocre people who all want a piece of the thing we love and have made a part of our lives long before social networking influence and mass internet marketing were things. Cultural rape is cool now, and those of us who disagree are considered the enemy or the new, excessively used and therefore now meaningless term, "Toxic."
I first read The Hobbit for a book report in the seventh grade, choosing it randomly from a list based on the title. I naively didn't look beyond it to any connected books or try to research the author, and frankly, I didn't originally think I agreed with how the dwarves and elves were portrayed, based on my narrow idea of fantasy at the time which was informed by fairy tales, C.S. Lewis, and shows like David the Gnome. It did stick with me, though, and I came to find that Tolkien's elves and dwarves were the best.
A year or two later I saw a copy of The Return of the King, with a glorious painted cover, at the local library and recognized the author's name. I checked it out and soon discovered that I was entering the story at a very late point. I felt disappointed and distraught, because I needed to know why Gandalf was with someone named Peregrin Took and why they were riding with haste toward a city called Gondor.
I don't exactly remember all of the details, but I think I explained this mistake to my uncle who then gave me a box set of the most important books I would ever read. In that box was the familiar edition of The Hobbit from my book report and it was accompanied by a trilogy of books collectively called The Lord of the Rings.
I read all of these books with excitement and became a changed person through the experience. Around this time I was also discovering Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. My life was becoming more magical, and my imagination leveled up a thousand times in just a couple of years.
Time moved on and real life became more difficult. My family went through some hard times, and things became horrifically uncertain. Through all of that, though, I had Tolkien's work and an imagination bolstered by that work and fantasy gaming.
About a year or two later, while playing D&D at the local game store, I overheard two adults discussing a movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. They discussed Elijah Wood being cast, and I remember thinking that the kid from Flipper would never work as Frodo. I dismissed the discussion and went back into the fantasy world of my imagination.
When The Fellowship of the Ring eventually did release it blew me away. It wasn't what I had imagined and it wasn't like anything I had constructed in my mind when I read Tolkien, but it was nevertheless a beautiful fantasy movie to behold. My family was going through another difficult and tragic time when this first movie came out, and having the memories of the film and listening to its soundtrack kept me sane.
I attended the midnight releases of The Two Towers (I slept on a friend's couch after seeing it on a school night with him and his sisters) and The Return of the King. While Star Wars was the trilogy of my early childhood and remained special, The Lord of the Rings became the trilogy of salvation which held me together as my time as a teenager wound down. These films and the books upon which they were based meant everything to me, and I invested so much time into becoming a lore expert of Tolkien's work. The books always held a higher place, but the movies were a more immediate escape and balm for me when things got rough. I even portrayed Tolkien in a Senior year biography project, and I went on to ramble in a muddled English accent (possible only thanks to a childhood filled with exposure to Doctor Who, Monty Python, Blake's 7, Are You Being Served?, and other BBC programs) about the man's life for over twenty minutes, all the time waving around an unlit pipe.
Ever since then I have continued to hold onto my love for Tolkien's work. I have butted heads with numerous people who were just movie zealots talking ignorantly out of their asses about what Tolkien's work supposedly actually means, and I have exposed many people who have lied about their interest in Tolkien just to be a part of a popular thing. Again, I am a protective fan, and I especially don't suffer fools when discussing Tolkien or anything I care about.
Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy was a complete disappointment. It was so bad that it made me reconsider my appreciation for the trilogy I enjoyed as a kid. I decided that I still very much cared for those movies, but nothing was ever going to be more important than the original works. As far as I was concerned the trilogy from my childhood, the Ralph Bakshi film, and the Rankin-Bass movies were the only adaptations I would ever care about or allow.
Next came Amazon and their bloated, excessive series The Rings of Power. It is nothing more than expensive garbage fan fiction made to satisfy the ego of that talentless, cueball dip shit known as Jeff Bezos. It's badly written, disrespectful of Tolkien's lore, and it's full of modern day inserts which have no place in anything related to Tolkien.
The future looks grim for anyone who actually cares about Tolkien, as there is a new anime (ugh) that has been made as a prequel to an aspect of The Lord of Rings coming later this year. It looks to be as awful as it sounds, and it's made a ridiculous main character out of a person who had maybe two sentences to describe them in the original appendices to The Return of the King.
Considering everything, and looking back fondly on my first experiences with Tolkien's work, I believe that no matter what Hollywood and the dumb-dumb bandwagon consumer crowd try to do to Tolkien's work, that work will outshine and outlast it all. Tolkien and his legendarium will live forever, and these derivatives and adaptations, regardless of quality, will fade ultimately into nothing.
Here's to J.R.R. Tolkien and the immortality of his amazing secondary world!
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