Anu Recommends #11
Middle Earth March: journeys, core themes, and choices in Tolkien's work, plus a very heartwarming #BookTwitter moment
Hi and welcome to the Storyteller!
Before I dive into this week’s issue, I wanted to thank you for all the love on the first edition of Story Sunday—and for my first-ever published short story. I have many others planned over the year, and no matter how many years I’ve been doing this, it’s always heartening that so many want to and enjoy reading my words.
Hear ye, hear ye!: Middle Earth March 2023
For those of you not following me on Instagram, Middle Earth March is upon us once again! Started a few years ago by the wonderful tolkien.folk, this is an annual month-long celebration of the worlds and words of Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien across Instagram and Twitter. This year, there are nine prompts, and I’m going to try and share my thoughts about them on here every Sunday in March.
But first, I want to share something from last year’s MEM, for those of you new to my Tolkien journey, and for others who want a refresher.
My Path to Tolkien.
One of my enduring memories from when I was 11 is of my father glued to a fat book with a wizard on the cover against a greenish-grey background. He would read it after he came home from work and after dinner and before bed. Having discovered books and my subsequent love of reading through him, I, of course, asked him what book it was that he was so immersed in. Dad was 14 or 15 when he first glimpsed Tolkien at a friend's house, in his father's library. He read the books, enraptured, and always wanted to return to that world one day when he could afford to buy them himself.
That is what he was doing then. He was rediscovering a world that had stayed with him for all those years, a world that he then wanted to share with me and my sister a year later when I got handed his copy of The Hobbit which I took to school for just over a week and read everyday in break and free periods.
My sister, ten years old at the time and wanting to do everything I did (ah those days), was too impatient for me to finish The Hobbit and picked up The Lord of the Rings. It took her like three months to finish but finish she did while I patiently waited. We had never read something that powerful, imaginative, or affecting, and both our lives were never the same.
Over the years, and through the first trilogy, it's a love that has only deepened. Middle Earth is home, instant belonging, offering up new facets of itself during every visit; these characters and these stories intensely familiar but equally fresh every time I meet them, still showing me new perspectives, and always always full of wisdom and courage and hope to live a good life in a good way and to fight for everyone's right to do so.
MEM Day 1: Journeys and core themes
When I think about Tolkien, I think about fellowship, loyalty, duty, courage, magic, nature; there are many different ways in which his characters find beauty and hope throughout their collective and independent journeys. However, he is equally unflinching about the sacrifices they have to make, how their experiences irrevocably alter the fabric of their futures and of who they will be after the goodbyes have been said and "real life" is upon them and us once more. Homely comforts and the desire for exploration beyond one's borders; wanting a life to be at once quiet and big and knowing it can be both. Knowing too the personal costs involved, the irreversible evolution of self, the inevitable change during and after any journey or adventure.
Throughout the narrative, there is also an acknowledgement of how a journey is as much about experiences and the people as it is about choices, and how each main journey continues many mini journeys within it.
In all of this is embedded the personal journey of us readers. The path we trace and later retrace along with the characters as it, and they, become wonderfully familiar over the years. But also the path we're personally on when we slip between those pages, and the new things it teaches us, reflects back to us; keeps of us within it. The path that lies ahead, with all its uncertainty and possibility. Where may it lead? We cannot know until we take that first step.
The Lord of the Rings is a book I've spent long hours with since I first read it in my early teens. Middle Earth remains home, through and with all the changes, however long I stay away, while retaining the original wonder that took hold all those years ago.
Isn't that one of the best journeys to keep undertaking?
MEM Day 5: Characters’ choices
“We shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same—like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?”
Choice is a pretty standard narrative device in most stories, but especially in fantasy. It's an important part of Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces and Christopher Vogler's resultant The Hero's Journey.
Tolkien’s world is no different.
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
As we very well know from Bilbo's choice not to slay Gollum in his cave under the mountain, the choices we make could impact things we know not, in ways we know not. Every step our Middle-Earth adventurers take or don't is a choice that fuels the next. Sometimes, they don't even have the luxury of choosing to decide; the choice is thrust upon them.
Whether Bilbo's choice to head out that door (without a handkerchief!) and keep making difficult choices, or Thorin's choice to do what he ultimately does, or even Bilbo's when he decides to take the Arkenstone to the "enemy". Whether, later, it is Frodo's choice to become the Ringbearer knowing full well the fate that awaits, or Sam's, Pippin's, and Merry's choice to accompany him to whatever end, or Gandalf's and Galadriel's to reject the Ring so freely offered, or Eowyn choosing to follow her uncle and brother into battle, or the Ents choosing to go to War against Isengard, or Aragorn taking up the mantle he was born to, or the choice Arwen made when she stayed put for love, even if it meant sacrificing ever seeing her family again. Even Lobelia, that irrepressible Sackville-Baggins, who chose to defy the bullies that had taken over the Shire (@coffeecoffeecat, this one's for you!).
"I will take the Ring to Mordor, though I do not know the way."
It's interesting to see the characters faced with these choices, many of them demanding too much from those who must take the toughest of decisions. Part of the narrative tension is watching all of them struggle to make what they feel is the right one, then hope it's the right one, and finally face and live with the consequences of that choice. This makes for engaging character development and powerful storytelling. A complexity that Tolkien makes the most of—his work is particularly intriguing because the seemingly contradictory entwining of fate vs free will and choice is present in it more often than not.
Please share your Tolkien story, if any (good, bad, lukewarm - anything), with me. I’d love to read about it!
And for those of you worried that March's newsletter issues will be Tolkien-heavy, fear not! Now that I've set the stage, so to speak, the future issues this month will have other bookish content in it as well.
There is some good left in this world, and it’s worth fighting for
This was one of my online highpoints of the last week of February; watching a local and international community come together to save an independent bookshop, and also come up with ways in which they can continue to expand this goodwill and support reading and literacy in the community while helping a local, small, woman-owned business.
The only way to order books from the Book Bodega at the moment is via bookshop.org (and only if you’re in the UK), but I will be getting the owner, Sapphire Bates on The Storyteller soon to talk about running a bookshop, share recommendations, and indulge in all kinds of wonderful bookish talk, so stay tuned!
As always, please feel free send in recommendations—books, movie, TV shows, authors to interview, ideas of what you’d like me to write on, rants/ramblings/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) and more. Just drop me a line and turn this into a conversation, even if just to say hi and let me know what you thought of the latest issue :) Or share this with someone you think might enjoy it.
Take care and see you next week!
Anu
If you really like the newsletter, please feel free to buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/anushreenande
You can find me on Twitter at @AnuNande (follow for all the football chatter) and on Instagram at @booksinboston.
Can I just say I am all for a Tolkein-heavy month of stories!
Its amazing you (and your sister) got into LOTR so early. I tried reading it in High School but had to give up. I returned to it when I was in University and thank god I did. I'd be living in a dimmer world if I hadn't.