A Confession (Part 3)

I love to read. My favorite genre is fantasy fiction. I've read J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan, C.S. Lewis, Tad Williams and a host of others. But it all started about 25 years ago in a small hobbit hole…

I was a freshman in high school, the year, 1982. I went to a small Lutheran high school in Indianapolis and part of our English grade was to read books from a book list and then take tests on what we had read. My friends were all reading this book “The Hobbit” and I thought I would see what it was all about. So I went to the school library and checked it out. From the beginning I was hooked. The writing style of Tolkien (picture at right) was one of immediate immersion. I was lost in the details of the landscape, the people, the creatures, and the history. It was a world that in some ways was very like ours, and in others resembling nothing around me. I was so taken into this new world that hours would pass as I read page after page of this wonderful story about a hobbit named Bilbo and his adventures with dwarves, elves, trolls, orcs, and a dragon. It was unlike anything I had ever read before, which admittedly wasn't much, and it captured my attention, but more importantly it ensnared my heart.

After I finished Bilbo’s adventures in Middle Earth, I followed his nephew Frodo around for awhile in “The Lord of the Rings,” which after the last few years and the talents of director Peter Jackson, there is no need for explanation. Suffice it to say the books were better, as with any written work adapted to screen, but the movies were very, very good. I liked the books immensely and devoured them quickly…well as quickly as a slow reader can!

I had fallen in love with this genre, fantasy fiction, and couldn’t get enough of it. When I finished reading TLOTR I was a bit saddened by the end. No, not the end of the story, although that too was sad in its way. But it wasn’t so much the ending that got to me, as it was that the story was over. What in the world was I going to do now? I had been captured by the written word and taken on adventures in my imagination, and now it was all at an end. I had spent countless hours climbing mountain passes, fording rivers, following forest trails, and sitting around campfires with the same characters and now they were all gone. It was hard, to say the least, to find a replacement for this love of reading that had so fascinated me. To be sure, I did find other things to read, forced by my teachers, or otherwise, but nothing so gained control of my heart and my thoughts like the writing of Tolkien, and the fantasy world.

I made my way to the mall and B. Dalton and Walden’s and found the fantasy section teeming with stories and tales similar, if not in some cases exactly like Tolkien. I had no idea this market was out there and a large share of the book world at that. There was literally a forest of books and writers out there just waiting to be read. They all had tales and yarns to tell, stories that would once again take my mind through new lands and introduce me to new and exciting characters and creatures.

Although I have incorporated other genres of reading into my regular rotation of books, fantasy fiction is still my favorite. Fantasy is such a wonderful way to get away from it all and just imagine. I thank authors like Tolkien (and others) for grabbing me by the shirt and shaking some sense into my sometimes wee little brain and introducing me to characters like Gandalf and Aslan and Sturm and Wil and Rand. My world would be a lesser place without them and a little dimmer too.

The Friar