Whenever I told anyone that I would be in New Zealand for
part of my gap year, a surprisingly large number wanted to know if I would be
visiting as many Lord of the Rings
sights as I possibly could. Maybe they knew how much of a Lord of the Rings geek I am. Or maybe they were just as interested
in the movies and the locations where they were made.
Regardless, no one would be too surprised to learn that the
Lord of the Rings was a pretty hefty reason for me deciding to go to New
Zealand of all places (I mean, besides the fabled beauty of the land and
kindness of the people, but that was the second most common thing for people to
tell me—that it was so beautiful and that I would love it, but yeesh, people,
you’ve gotta stop hyping up this sort of thing, you make it too easy to picture
NZ as the digitized Lord of the Rings
landscape you find in The Hobbit movies.)
Yes. I, along with countless others made the pilgrimage to
this country just because of a trio of epic films. Call me a geek. Don’t worry,
you won’t hurt my feelings: I wear that title proudly.
In all seriousness though, I owe the Lord of the Rings films a lot. They’ve had an unimaginable impact
on my life.
Honestly. They have. That’s not overstatement. That’s just
not a dramatic turn of phrase.
I mean it.
Don’t believe me? Let me tell you a story.
As a little kid, I easily understood that sometimes imagined
things are more real than the things you can taste and touch and feel. After
all, it was imagined things that crept through the shadows and terrorized me in
the dark. And it was stories that lit up my world at night. It was words
floating through the air telling of far of peoples, and places, and adventures
that rocked me to sleep. It was the games I played, spinning strange plots and
dangers that kept my mind up in the clouds all day long.
I was a kid who grew up surrounded by the lexicon of
fantasy. And Lord of the Rings only
added fuel to the fire. We rented the first movie when it was released on dvd,
back when there was still a Blockbuster a few blocks away from us. My little
brother was too little to watch the movie, so my other brother and I would “go
to bed” and only once the little guy was soundly asleep would we creep back
downstairs and turn on the movie.
At this time in my life, Lord
of the Rings was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Up to that moment,
I’d been fed mostly on lighter things. Fairy tales and myths. Bed time stories
meant for children. Talking animals and sparkling magic wands.
But Lord of the Rings
was something else. It was bigger, grander. More solid. It had heft and history
and depth. Strange languages and ancient songs. War and death. Love and loss.
Loyalty, friendship, courage, and fear.
I could keep going.
The only other story I had to compare it to was Harry Potter, and I’ve already written
plenty in other places about what HP
has meant to me. But I think what set Lord
of the Rings apart was its otherness. It did not take place in this world.
The world it exists in is bigger, much more ancient, and familiar and
unfamiliar at the same time. I set out in search of other stories with a
similar flavor, and for a long time most of what I read was the fantasy novel
that took place in a medieval, middle age world. The sort of place Renaissance
fairs try and evoke.
But there was something compelling about the stories as
well, something beautiful and heartbreaking, something uplifting and profound.
This was the first story whose possibility of meaning struck me to the core.
And, well, the plot is pretty amazing. How much I wished I
could enter the story and join in I cannot tell you. But for any number of
years my day dreams were dominated by my adventures as a member of the
fellowship.
Lord of the Rings was one of the first stories that taught
me what it is to be swept up and consumed by another world. But the big
connection, the big shifting point, the moment that I can point to on the
timeline of my life and say “This was important” didn’t happen until I was in
eight grade...
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