YHB has read through The Lord of the Rings about a million times, I guess, a piece of news that will not shock y’all in the slightest. For many years, through my adolescence and into my college years and postcollegiate stretch, I found that every time I read through the books I found my attention focusing on something different. At one point I was enthralled by the tragic persistence of Sam and Frodo, at another I was taken with the heroism of the Three Friends, another by magnificent wrongheadedness of Eowyn, or the profound sadness of the Scouring of the Shire. And I figured that would continue throughout my life, each time through being a different book, as I was a different me.
It was a bit disconcerting, then to find that this time through The Two Towers was pretty much how I remembered the last time. Now, it has been a year since I read The Fellowship of the Ring, so that’s a difference (usually I would read the whole thing in one go), and for another, I have a daughter now, so there’s a thing in the back of my head that wonders about whether she’s ready for them yet. I dismissed that pretty quickly, though; maybe next year or the year after, but not yet.
Anyway, I found that I still like Book Three and don’t much like Book Four. I noticed some new things that I don’t much like about Book Four—the structural things, how the pattern of travel-until-thwarted, discuss-whether-to-trust-Gollum, decide-to-trust-Gollum, travel-until-thwarted repeats itself so often. And the things that thwart them are so familiar by now that they all seem the same, too, and I am unable to keep from my consciousness that they will be quickly and rather simply overcome. I am unable, now, to remember what I thought the first time they met Faramir. Was there real peril, there? Was he a threat? Now he is Faramir the moment he shows up, and not only Boramir’s brother but as the future Steward, Gandalf’s favorite, the hero of Osgiliath, the great hope of Gondor. So there is no moment where I wonder if he is a good guy or a baddie. Ah, well.
On the other hand, I am still noticing new things. Not quite the same way, and not (at this point) things that are fundamentally changing the experience of the book. I am noticing some authorial choices that I hadn’t before—what bits of information get told when and in whose voices. Just a kind of awareness that Mr. Tolkien could have told the story of the destruction of Isengard in a different spot, or had the Battle of Helm’s Deep narrated by one of the characters, and so on. The sort of thing they call ‘sophisticated’ reading, I think, although I was not doing any particularly clever analysis or anything, so it’s not clear to me where the sophistry comes in.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.