A Sense of Place

"But what does it really look like?"

The inside corners of her eyebrows pull center. She's been sitting at her end of the tired, blue-striped couch, gazing slack-jawed at the carpet for over an hour. Now, she looks right at me. Direct eye contact, unblinking and clear.

Jen and I are reading "Three is Company," Chapter 3 of J.R.R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring.

The fact that we're even sitting here on the couch with the decades-old, thousand-plus pages of red-leather-bound fantasy is a personal victory. When Jen was 5, I read "The Hobbit" at her. She paid half-attention until shadows of Mirkwood became too present in the corners of her room. Shortly after her 9th Birthday, just weeks ago, she asked if we could resume Bilbo's journey. I knew it was just an excuse to spend time curled up in the arms of her sometimes-distant and distracted father. Knowing broke my heart no less.

By the time Smaug lay dead under the waters of Lake-town, she was entranced. The night we finished "The Hobbit," we immediately started the trilogy, and have been making our way out of the shire with Frodo for the last few days.

"What do you mean Jen?"

Her eyes bear witness to a frustration her grown-up face won't show. "I know he says what it looks like, but sometimes I can't picture it in my head."

I'm not sure how to answer. Tolkien, for all his faults as a writer, paints beautiful still-life. I re-read the section:

The sun went down. Bag End seemed sad and gloomy and disheveled. Frodo wandered around the familiar rooms, and saw the light of the sunset fade on the walls, and shadows creep out of the corners. It grew slowly dark indoors. He went out and walked down to the gate at the bottom of the path, and then on a short way down the Hill Road. He half expected to see Gandalf come striding up through the dusk.

"I don't know Jen, I can see it pretty clearly in my head. The way the house can look old and tired at the end of a long day. When the sunset stops being orange and starts just seeming gray, and we haven't turned on the lights yet? It's a sad, kind of melancholy time of day."

She quiets, thoughtful. I let the silence sit, marvelling at the wisdom of 9 years: able to pose questions yet often too full of chaos to walk to the answers.

"There's a movie of this, isn't there? Can we watch it?"

"No." I laugh. It's my best parenting laugh. I call it my "Are you insane?" laugh.

"Why not? If I'm old enough to read the book, why aren't I old enough to see the movie?"

She's across from me on the other end of the couch, knees pulled up to her chin. Her short brown hair frames her face, and for a minute she seems a 20-year-old ball of young woman. She pouts, cracking the mold and becoming my little girl again. I give her foot a squeeze.

"It's not that you're not old enough. I just want you to have your pictures in your head, before you see the movie and get someone else's pictures in your head."

We read on. The chapters in "The Lord of the Rings" are far longer than I remembered. Reading it aloud, the prose seems more dense, but also more fluid. Forty-five minutes later, Frodo and Sam and Pippin have spent the night with elves. Jen laughs and squirms with delight at Sam's reactions to the fair-folk, channeled through my best vaudevillian camp. She throws her head back in deep, full laughter. I'm delighted to realize that Sean Astin's Sam -- the one from the movies -- is nowhere in my head as I play the part. My sense of character is entirely my own.

After the inevitable cries of "More daddy, more!" I shovel her into bed. I kiss her palms, and she rubs the kisses into her cheeks, a ritual some 5 years running. I shut her door halfway, and stand a silent vigil for a handful of seconds, as I have nearly every night for a decade. She rolls over a few times, tumbling blankets and pillows as she nests.

I descend one flight of stairs.

"She down?" asks Jess.

I nod. I kiss her briefly, hug her hard, nuzzling the soft spot below her ear.

"I'm going to get back to work, K?"

She nods, and I retreat one more stairwell and one lifetime to the basement.

Sitting behind the blue glow of the screens, I re-enter Middle Earth, this one rendered not by Tolkien's prose or Peter Jackson's cameras, but by the computers sitting in the cubicles of programmers in Westwood, MA.

I wasn't planning on playing Lord of the Rings Online tonight. Kids asleep, I have work to do. But it's not playing that I'm doing anyway, it's wandering. At first, I jump into the Mines of Moria, Turbine's latest expansion. Pure tourist, I walk across bridges and along the beds of underground streams, examining the pattern of light as it reflects through ancient columns: god rays rendered solid in the mists from omnipresent waterfalls.

But my mind keeps going back to Frodo, leaving home on that night so long ago when I was 10. I switch characters. I too have a small, portly and frightened hobbit holding station in Hobbiton. It's mid-day in the Shire, but I make my way up the hill to Bag End. I wait. The sun sets. The light of the sunset fades on the walls. Shadows creep out of the corners. I half expect to see Gandalf come striding up through the dusk.

"This is what it looks like Jen," I mutter to the concrete walls and the numbing hum of computer fans.

Comments

That was wonderful Julian.

Wonderful article. I can't wait until my daughter is old enough that I can read The Hobbit to her. I read some of it to her before she was born — to get the geek genes percolating.

I, too, felt the trepidation of watching the movies for fear they'd write over the imagery in my head. I've only re-read LOTR once since ROTK came out (I was reading it every year when the movies were being made) but was happy to feel that most of what I saw in my head was what I'd seen beginning when I was thirteen.

The one part in the movies that really took me by surprise and made my heart jump into my throat when I wasn't expecting it was when Sam and Frodo dressed up like orcs and looked down into Mordor. For some reason I didn't realize how important that image was to me, and the movies nailed it. Of course, I also wept like a baby several other times during the movies. This one moment just snuck up on me.

Literary bliss. Thank you for writing this Julian. Fantastic job.

I showed both girls, Four and Seven, FOTR yesterday, up to the point where they arrive in Rivendale. I'm sorry but Mercury is in retrograde and my whole day went to sh*t and I needed some comfort while I folded laundry. They were CAPTIVATED. Four came down this morning and said she couldn't go back upstairs or Golem would follow her, but up she went, eventually. Not yet sure how I'm going to handle the Merry/Pippin capture scenes, but maybe we can just keep watching the nice Hobbitty beginning over and over. She can definitely watch the animated ones - not all that scary.

Lovely piece too Rab. Definitely my comfort place.

Fantastic article, Julian. You've only made me more excited, as if that were possible, about my son being born in three months.

Here I thought I could just stay in my hidey cave and not participate, and then rabbit had to go and make me all sentimental about geeking up my son. He's only three, but he can already hum the Indiana Jones theme by heart. Thanks for luring me into my first post, Julian.

Though I dread having to read the songs aloud. I certainly won't attempt to sing them.

Yew, here's a little inspiration if you decide to sing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9WmxwgW2J0

I really never try and sing the songs. I read them like an epic poem.

Janinora, I can't believe you showed four the FOTR. Them's scary Black Riders!!!

I remember distinctly having a conversation with my wife about this. We were driving around with Indignant jr in the back of the car just having hit the Babies r Us for supplies and just out of the blue I aske her, "So, when do you think I'm going to read him The Hobbit?" My wife says to me, "He's only eight months old." I say,"yeah so when do you think I should start reading it to him?"

As to the movies, I'd wait a little while. The orks and the Uruks are pretty damn scary. The first fight against the goblins in Moria is pretty intense. Major nightmare material for a nine year old.

rabbit wrote:

But oddly, my sense of what things look like in the shire is vastly more like Turbine's than Jacksons. I think that's particularly true of the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil.

Absolutely, Turbine also managed a home run with their interpretation of the Trollshaws in my book.

Nice. I just started reading the Hobbit to my 9 year old daughter last week. It's been a long time since I read her bedtime stories, but she's really enjoying me reading a chapter a night to her before bed.

I read the books when I was just a year or two older than her, and they were really a watershed moment for my internal imagination. There is a Middle-Earth that exists only in my head, a private place, and while it was nice to see places and characters done such justice in the movies .. well my place is still better.

A lovely piece on the joy of reading to your kids, and the power of imagination. I read to my daughter every other night (my wife and I take turns, each reading different books). The Hobbit is on our to-do list when she gets just a little older. Right now we're reading The Chronicles of Narnia, and just the other night we had the same conversation about why I don't want her to see the films until she has experienced the books.

When I first got onto the site this morning and saw a Rabbit article with a sentimental name, I couldn't help but smile. Your articles are my favorite part of this site. The fact that you often include your family life really makes you - in my mind at least - the penultimate Gamer with a Job, or Gamer with a Life. This how GWJ can become meaningful to me, a blending of our strange little sub-culture with things as real as raising a child and hugging your wife. Too often we keep the two worlds seperate. We exist in a secret world of chainsodomy and jargon, and never allow our escapism to be touched by our other life.

Ahem.

I'm also fortunate that the movies have never destroyed my personal vision of Middle-Earth, although I do like the movies. However, because the plots of the movies are much simpler and easy to remember I'm sometimes surprised when I read LOTR and find the differences in the plots which I've forgotten about. But then, this allows the trilogy to surprise me whenever I read it again, so its not a bad phenomenon.

And I agree with the above, you do make parenting sound wonderful.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

The closest thing to an exception I can think of is now whenever I read Gandalf I hear Ian McKellan. But he was so close to how I already pictured the character, I couldn't tell you if it had been overwritten or not. The man forever owns the role for me.

For me Gandalf will always have the voice of Michael Hordern, Aragorn will ever be Robert Stephens and Frodo will always be Ian Holm. Was not the films that set these in concrete, but rather 26 nights in my teens years listening to the BBC radio dramatization, full cast info can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lor...(1981_radio_series)

Hey, Rabbit, love your stuff.

I'm probably not grokking this correctly, but I'm a little hung up on this paragraph:

The fact that we're even sitting here on the couch with the decades-old, thousand-plus pages of red-leather-bound fantasy is a personal victory. When Jen was 5, I read "The Hobbit" at her. She paid half-attention until shadows of Mirkwood became too present in the corners of her room. Shortly after her 9th Birthday, just weeks ago, she asked if we could resume Bilbo's journey. I knew it was just an excuse to spend time curled up in the arms of her sometimes-distant and distracted father. Knowing broke my heart no less.

Reading that last line, I think I'm meant to understand that your heart would be breaking even if you weren't aware that your daughter was just looking to spend time with you, which would mean that the asking of you to resume the storytelling would be heartbreaking by itself. I'm not sure I understand why that is.

I see that Katerin wrote about some of the inherent loneliness of being unable to fully pass on the entire magic of your own experiences to your children, but you wrote sitting down with your daughter was a 'victory.'

Not trying to pick apart the writing, just trying as a parent to get an understanding for the source of the heartbreak.

I do apologize if I am simply being dense.

For some reason I have never got on with Robert Stephens's interpretation of Aragorn. He seemed just too up himself (which Aragorn is to a small degree, but not to the extent that Stephens portrays him). I also really loved Bill Nighy's Sam and especially Peter Woodthorpe's Gollum were brilliant.

One thing my children can experience, however, even at 3 and 5, is Howard Shore's mighty score, which just never gets dull. I rate it higher than anything by John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, or any of that crowd.

I let my elder son watch the Rohirrim charge and the Mûmakil attack from ROTK. He pronounced them as being very cool.

webdanzer wrote:

Reading that last line, I think I'm meant to understand that your heart would be breaking even if you weren't aware that your daughter was just looking to spend time with you, which would mean that the asking of you to resume the storytelling would be heartbreaking by itself. I'm not sure I understand why that is.

I see that Katerin wrote about some of the inherent loneliness of being unable to fully pass on the entire magic of your own experiences to your children, but you wrote sitting down with your daughter was a 'victory.'

Not trying to pick apart the writing, just trying as a parent to get an understanding for the source of the heartbreak.

I do apologize if I am simply being dense.

I don't think you're misunderstanding, what I think he's trying to suggest is that a "heart break" can connote more than anguish, but also having your heart so over-full with love and promise that it can't stand it anymore.

HedgeWizard wrote:

I don't think you're misunderstanding, what I think he's trying to suggest is that a "heart break" can connote more than anguish, but also having your heart so over-full with love and promise that it can't stand it anymore.

Ah, that would explain it.

Thanks!

Great, great piece. The interaction with your daughter is priceless. How lucky you both are!!

KaterinLHC wrote:

Good work, rab.

janinora wrote:

Lovely piece too Rab.

Is this what we're calling him now? I was not informed but I'm game. And all I have to see is this, "A little too rab."

McChuck wrote:
KaterinLHC wrote:

Good work, rab.

janinora wrote:

Lovely piece too Rab.

Is this what we're calling him now? I was not informed but I'm game. And all I have to see is this, "A little too rab."

He's Captain A. Rab to you Bob Dylan fans out there.

Great article, I joined specifically to comment on it. Your comments about being a "sometimes distant and distracted father" combined with the way your article ended was a very poignant illustration of how I sometimes feel alienated from the people I love by my work and hobbies. I wish you and your daughter the best as you enjoy your journey through middle earth and hope they provide you both with much joy, happiness and, most importantly, many hours of together-ness.

EpicBig wrote:

Great article, I joined specifically to comment on it.

That means more to me than anything else!

Hedge/Web: Thanks for having the whole conversation without me!

McChuck wrote:

Is this what we're calling him now? I was not informed but I'm game. And all I have to see is this, "A little too rab."

Watch it Chucky. Or should I say McJazzy McGuns ...

Bring it on. My skin is so thick NASA uses it on the shuttle.

McChuck wrote:

Bring it on. My skin is so thick NASA uses it on the shuttle.

Hopefully not on the Columbia.

Well done, Julian.

Clemenstation wrote:

Kudos on holding off on the movie. I've seen a lot of parents do that... 'Oh, this is a classic? Well let's plop the kids in front of the TV for 12 excruciating trilogy hours while we drink highballs in the kitchen.'

That parenting makes me jealous from a number of different angles.

SuchStrings wrote:

the penultimate Gamer with a Job

Uh oh. Now they're going to start fighting over who's the ultimate. Should we take bets?

McChuck wrote:
KaterinLHC wrote:

Good work, rab.

janinora wrote:

Lovely piece too Rab.

Is this what we're calling him now? I was not informed but I'm game. And all I have to see is this, "A little too rab."

"You know, if I had a face like yours, I'd try to make up for it with some sort of personality."

I had to register just to say that this was a great good. Fantastic job, rabbit.

Yew wrote:

Though I dread having to read the songs aloud. I certainly won't attempt to sing them.

They become much easier once you realize that pretty much every Elvish song can be sung to the tune of Greensleeves.

When I sing the dwarf songs, they tend to be more rythmic than melodic, which makes them easier to read aloud.

That said, when I read the Hobbit to my daughter, I just read the songs as poetry.

EDIT: Incidentally, I should probably mention that my daugther was under a year old when I read her The Hobbit. No sense in staving off the inevitable.

janinora wrote:

She can definitely watch the animated ones - not all that scary.

One of the animated versions has drawn-over costumed actors for Orcs, and is pretty scary. I recall The Hobbit and RotK being pretty tame however.

For me Gandalf will always have the voice of Michael Hordern, Aragorn will ever be Robert Stephens and Frodo will always be Ian Holm. Was not the films that set these in concrete, but rather 26 nights in my teens years listening to the BBC radio dramatization, full cast info can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lor...(1981_radio_series)

It's definitely worth picking up the BBC radio production of The Hobbit and LotR. I have them both on tape and wish there were a way to exchange those tapes for CDs. Pick them up before your next road trip with the kids. There's an easy 14 hours of audio between the two.

One way to keep your own images for the books is to listen to Rob Inglis' fantastic unabridged reading of the trilogy. (I got mine via inter-library loan.) My wife and I are most of the way through Fellowship after listening to it on two cross-country trips this past year; it will obviously be a long-term project! But it's great to hear the words that Tolkein wrote. Inglis is great at using different voices to make it easy to distinguish characters, but not enough that you feel like it's being "performed" in front of you. The still-lifes, as you call them, are wonderfully soothing and evocative when listened to aloud.

I have a paperback copy of Hobbit to read to my 7-year old when she's ready. Or, should I say, when I'm ready; she's been reading since she turned 3, and is reading way over her level, so that's no problem. I'm trying to think of where to find the energy to read it every night for a half-hour or so. (The answer, of course, is to just do it, I know.) Reading time with all three of my little ones (7, 3, and 1) is precious time and I won't trade it for the world.

I'm not making it a point to indoctrinate her with geek-related material. I'm priming her with a love of reading, and encouraging her to tell her own stories. (She's not seen the Star Wars movies, much less LotR.) She's shown enough interest in dragons and spaceships, and seen me play enough pen & paper D&D, Baldur's Gate, and Magic:the Gathering that she'll get there on her own, if she wants. I remember that my parents had Asimov, Clarke, and Tolkein around the house, and I found that path pretty well, myself.

Lovely piece, Julian.
Just lovely.

You've so sweetly touched upon the nuances of so many things that are so dear to me, that I just found myself smiling, and feeling like I heard a story about my OWN kids. From the thrill of getting to share this incredible book (for thirty years my favorite) with your daughter, to the brief but sympathetic interaction with your spouse, to the wishing for your daughter all the joy of that book, or any other, to be her own all rang so true. And that sentiment speaking into the dark of not only the reason you love gaming, but how at the best of times it CAN take us places we would never otherwise be able to go, made me understand why I miss this hobby so much.

Wonderful, sir.