beneath the resin-scented darkness of the Trees

I'm reading The Lord of the Rings for the fourth time in my life. After I complete it, I suspect that I'll stop trying to keep count. It's a tremendous series and one of the greatest influences of my adolescence. I never became one of those freaky Renaissance fair folks who talk in Olde English at home, but I might have been guilty of making maps of my own little world and writing hideously-derivative tales of dragon-slaying and wizardry. I went on to read a whole slew good-to-lousy fantasy novels, always hoping to recapture some shred of newness and wonder I felt the first time I read a Tolkien novel. Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings, Orson Scott Card - oh yeah, I read books like Zorachus and even made the mistake of checking out a few Forgotten Realms books. It was never the same, though. There's nothing quite like genre fiction after you get 1 or 2 generations away from the original.

Something far more profound about Tolkien grabs me as I turned one page upon another. Tolkien's rendering of scene is absolutely stunning. The descriptions and feeling of hill, dell, river and season rendered images of my imagination that that the movie could never hope to touch. In single, almost throwaway lines, Tolkien rendered a feel wiith all the thrift of Hemingway at the height of his powers.

Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a shadowy sea.

The land of Middle Earth has a physicality that feels very removed from the world of today. With electricity, industrialization and gas-powered vehicles, we can hurl ourselves from one space to another with little thought to the weather, time of day or time of season. Instant gratification allows us to eat a strawberry or eat a hamburger any day of the year. It has taken a girlfriend who knows far more about plants than I to tell me the names of plants and their seasons of flowering. I've never known because I've never had to know.