Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber Read Free Book Online Page B

Seventeen magazine, I could not go wrong. (Although I did spend many a fruitless hour cudgeling my brains while trying to figure out what the heck all of those “Modess . . . Because” ads were selling. In case this phenomenon is before your time, in olden days it was considered indelicate to come right out and talk about, er, feminine hygiene products, even when you were trying to sell them. The ads in question always showed a woman dressed entirely in white, and placed in a romantic, usually moonlit setting, with the only text anywhere in the ad being: “Modess . . . Because.” I kept yelling, “Because what?! Because why?! Dear Lord, tell me, else I shall run stark mad!” at the magazine until Mom made me stop. A friend of mind has since suggested that perhaps all the genteel societal taboos of our past surrounding girlstuff might seem less Neanderthal and more Empowering if we thought of them as contributing to the Women’s Mysteries. “Agatha Christie . . . Because?” I don’t think so.)
    But I digress.
    Then, one fateful day, it all changed. I was reading the new issue of Seventeen , and when I reached the book review column, what did my wondering-albeit-myopic eyes see but a paragraph in praise of something called The Hobbit by someone (O, vile enchanter!) named J. R. R. Tolkien.
    They said it was a good book.
    They said it was a fantasy, but they still said it was a good book.
    They said it was a fantasy, and a good book, and that it would be all right if I actually went out and read it!
    They implied that it would likewise be all right if I admitted to having read it afterward, even if I made said admission out in public where boys could hear me.
    At first I was a bit suspicious. For all I knew, the person writing the book review column was some Machiavellian hag who had decided to give her helpless readers a bum steer because she didn’t want us growing up to be her competition in the field of Matrimony. (Serve her right if we did grow up to snaffle up all the good husband material! That would teach the wizened crone to try having a career and marriage! The very notion!) Were I to read The Hobbit then somehow the boys would know that I had dabbled my frilly pink brain in the dark tarn of fantasy/science fiction and rendered it unattractive thereby. Since I was already wearing glasses, buying clothes in what they then referred to as the “Chub” department, and stuffing whole boxes of tissues into the cups of my Who-Do-You-Think-You’re-Kidding training bra, I was not about to do anything else that might handicap me in the Great Husband Nab-a-thon that was life pre-Liberation.
    And yet . . . and yet . . . and yet, this was Seventeen magazine, my guiding light, my girlie gospel, my glossy guardian angel through the sweltering, noxious, soul-devouring morass of adolescence. (Anyone who thinks I am exaggerating has not been a teenager for a long time.) If I couldn’t trust it, well, what could I trust? Besides, the book did sound kind of . . . interesting. I went to the library and checked it out.
    Shortly thereafter I was back at the library, clawing at the card catalog like a refugee from a Romero movie, only instead of “Braaaaiiins . . . Braaaaiiins . . .”I was moaning, “Tolkiiiieeeeeen . . . Tolkiiiiieeeeen . . .”
    Which brings us to the trilogy. I can’t blame Tolkien for my present writerly state without slopping a big, gooey ladleful of the onus onto the trilogy’s platter.
    I am not the first to blame things on the trilogy. Get any sizeable group of SF writers together and somewhere in it, like a hairball in a bowl of hummus, you will find one or more persons ready to tell you that Tolkien ruined it for everyone by inaugurating the Rule of Trilogies. Yes, according to some people, all post-Tolkien fantasy had to come in three volumes or forget about it. (Of course, there is the little matter of Dante’s Divine Comedy , which might likewise be viewed as the great-great-great-grandpappy of