Harry Potter and the First Time Readers

Oh. My. Goodness. The words of Galadriel disarmed me, I cannot imagine what they did for Gimli.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned about Tolkien from my first read of Lord of the Rings, besides the fact that lots of people have very strong opinions about Tom Bombadil, is that he didn’t want anyone allegorizing his work.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is filled with grand figures: mighty wizards like Gandalf whose wisdom and knowledge of Middle Earth is utterly priceless and vital for the fellowship, noble kings like Aragorn, who in the movies is more reluctant to take that role, but in the books, is ready to become king, and ancient evils like the evil of Saruman, where he makes a Ring himself and seems to lose all sanity for his actual purpose.

The Bridge of Kazad Dum is the most action packed chapter I have ever read in my life. I read this chapter in a plane, and the woman next to me, who was reading smut on her kindle…no shame…actually looked over to me to see if I was okay. When my jaw kept dropping and I kept taking sharp intakes of air because of how nuts this chapter was, so looked at me like I was a crazy person. BUT SHE WASN’T READING WHAT I WAS READING!!! This chapter was so good…and so different from the book too.

Okay. So this essay was originally something I was doing just on my own time. And it was so fun that I decided to start writing it down…and it became this. What I want to do is to take the little book that they found next to Balin's tomb that was kind of hard to read and had words covered over with blood and guts. And I want to just process out loud for myself what is going on there.

I feel like I found another fun tidbit of Tolkien's writing in the middle of Fellowship of the Ring. Fire. Now fire is a common theme I think in the writing of Tolkien because it’s essential for survival and morale.

I have been writing this essay for 2 days! And I’ve FINALLY figured it out. I could not figure out why this chapter was so captivating to me. I wrote about how I thought it was the most action packed chapter in the whole story. I wrote about the tales of Moria. I wrote about the characters and their own personal journeys through this chapter, but I COULD NOT FIGURE IT OUT, until I reread the stinking title of the chapter and it all clicked.

I already fear this is going to be a weird essay because I’m going to do some live processing in this one. I don’t really know what I think or feel on this subject yet and have never really thought about it all that much, but this chapter just seemed to spark something in my mind that I found pretty interesting. So bear with me.

So it finally happened. I shed a tear while reading. Now, I have welled up and teared up before while thinking about certain sections of this book.

That scene in the book when they are climbing Caradhras…phew. That is actually terrifying. And today the video is going to be a bit different than the typical book analysis. Because I had a moment happen to me that was eerily similar, and I want to tell that story.