How did you first encounter Tolkien's works?

Well, even after having read almost every night to you, it still took about a year to get to RotK. I remember that I took RotK along with us on our trip to Boston, which was in summer 1996 or '97, I think, but never started it. As you said, I became more involved with the internet and other stuff and it had taken so long so we just stopped .

Just read it yourself and start from the beginning. I was younger than you when I read The Hobbit, LotR, and the Silmarillion .

My da read them to me and my siblings as a bedtime story(they terrified my sister. she always went to another room when dad read)When i was seven or eight i read the Hobbit but didn't get around to reading FOTR until about half a year later. once i finished LOTR i was hooked. i've been reading them ever since.

Welcome to Entmoot, Galadriel2!!

In 1979, my first year of High School, the librarian showed me a slide show of animated 'The Hobbit'. After that, I found the book and loved it. Only a few weeks later I was reading "Well, I'm back." And I was hooked.

Hullo RKittle....welcome to Entmoot!

I was 13 when I read LOTR for the first time. A copy of The Fellowship of the Ring caught my eye at a school book fair. Neat cover - Gandalf and company before the gates of Moria. My mom almost fainted when she came home from work that evening and found me cloistered in my room reading. She got me the rest of the books in a nice boxed set the next day, and I gobbled them up in a marathon reading session that left me physically exhausted but spiritually exalted. (Sounds corny, doesn't it? But every Tolkien devotee knows this feeling).

It was probably because of that initial encounter with Tolkien that I became kind of a book worm, later majored in English Literature and spent six years in grad school. If it weren't for Tolkien, I'd probabaly have received a degree in computer sciences and made a zillion bucks already in the technologies industry.

Instead, I'm the poor miserable wretch that you see today: no BMW, no stock options. Just the tale of Beren and Luthien to keep me warm on chill California nights.

some of my relatives sent it to me because they thought i was a uncultured swine.

this thread has become a beatuful compendium of stories, but certainly yours, IronMongery is one of the funniest Welcome to Entmoot!


hey! easygreen yours too

why thank you! it did make excellent toilet paper

Finally someone with a twisted sense of humor.

easygreen.......that was beautiful. *sniff*

I was about 4 or 5 when I first read The Hobbit.


No, it's true, really....

Well, a shrtened, comic-book version of it anyway. I didn't really know what I'd read, but I liked the hard-cover comic book, and brought it with me to Canada. The comic book was, and I still think is, pretty good BTW, despite the fact that it was shortened.
Later, I saw Brewhaha reading "LotR" (unlucky for him, he didn't even read The Hobbit.. he abandoned it at the end of "Fellowship" and is planning to read it after he reads the Hobbit); amazingly, when he was in grade 5. I heard him talking about it, got interested, but decided to read "The Hobbit" before I read it.
Only when I got the book out the library and read part of it did I realise that it was the same story as that comic book that I had read so long ago (I still read it sometimes; ah, memories). Then I decided to buy the three LotR books (nice canadian editions with beautiful covers; go on www.indigo.ca and search for the 3 books to see the editions; or www.chapters.ca). I bought an American "2 Towers" edition because I was visiting America at the time and couldn't wait until I returned back to Canada.
However, I decided that the edition was very ugly compared to the Canadian one, so I returned it.
Then, I was going to buy the Hobbit to complete my collection, but the previus editions started to dissapear as the company made new editions of Tolkien's books.
Finally I found a previous edition in a poorly-placed bookstore. Then I found out why nobody had bought it; somebody had scribbled in blue pen on the back of the book.
The cashier gave me a 10% discount for that, telling me that I couldn't wipe it out.
I did, though; it took some time, but I just smudged it out untill you couldn't tell that it was ever on that book.
So I got a pointless discount heh, lucky for me.
Later, I couldn't find an old edition of "unfinised tales", but decided that it was kind of a "different class" of Tolkien's books anyway, and just bought the new version (which looks, feels and is designed much better than the old one, BTW, although the cover picture is almost the same).

When I was eight or nine, while visiting relatives, my cousin was cleaning out old books and told me to look through the boxes. I picked out what I was interested in and my cousin looked at what I had left, one of which was the Hobbit. My cousin immediately picked it up and also gave it to me and told me to read it because he knew I would like it.
When I returned home, I didn't think anything more about The Hobbit for a couple of months, then I started reading it one rainy day. Well, that hooked me and I devoured the book in two or three days. Two weeks later I had to read the others. Admittedly, it took a bit longer to read LotR and the Silmarillion, but I finished them and have never left them for long since. I try to reread LotR about once a year, somewhat less for the other two.

i read the hobbit about 5 times in elementary/middle school, & every one of those times an idiot english teacher ruined it (i hate it when they do that!). i liked the book itself, but discussing things like "would you want to be a hobbit?" with a class of unimaginitive, uninterested 4th-graders just isn't fun. in 7th grade, i read FotR for the first time - my mom had this disintegratign paperback, half its pages falling out, halfway through "a knife in the dark" the publisher royally screwed up & skipped over about 30 pages - the Company (or the beginnings of it) went from plodding through Midgewater straight to Strider healing Frodo from teh Wraith-knife. for about a year, all i knew about the missing chapter was that Frodo got stabbed & the wound/knife-point almost killed him. i had to wait two years until i finished the series - my library & the others nearby DIDN"T HAVE THEM! - durign my freshman year of high school i got the trilogy in one book (tolkein's 100th birthday edition - gorgeous version, btw) as a gift. (i'm way too possessive of that book... my little sister asked me the other day if she should read LotR, & of course i told her yes; she asked if she could borrow my copy, & i told her she could only if she wore gloves while handling it, kept it in a safe when she wasn't reading, turned the pages with sterilized tweezers).

that summer my family & i went on this road trip; i remember finishing FotR just as we drove to my relatives' house in chicago - for the remainder of our visit i sat locked in a room doing nothing but reading. after a few days, all the relatives started to drive eath other crazy, & my immediate family left to go to mammoth cave. for those of y'all who've never been there, it's a huge-ass cave with guided tours through parts of it, with gorgeous forests above it. all i could think of was "Moria! Lorien!" i kept reading, & as we left mammoth cave (we stayed nearby for 2 nights) the Ents had just torn up Isengard. we drove to atlanta next (don't ask me why we drove from dallas to chicago to kentucky to atlanta to dallas - all that matters is it gave me reading time!) to visit more relatives, who i don't think i even saw because by now i was at teh point where i couldn't look away from the book long enough to blink. i finished the series about 3 days later, & my first reaction to the end was about a day in shock over how incredible the whole series was, another day of "too bad you can't read a book for teh first time again!" & a week of "that was too short - it can't be over yet!" i've never been so emotionally attached to a book - i felt like i was one of the characters. gandalf dying, gandalf returning, the battle of Pellenor (sp?) Felds, & particularly the Frodo/Shelob scene - i was absolutely convinced that Frodo was dead, & to put down the book & cried for an hour or two before i could go on.

the first time i read LotR was between freshman & soph year fo high school - i read it again earlier this year & did a research paper, but this was during first semester of senior year & i had college **** to do, so it wasn't teh best writing i've done. now that i've graduated & passed & got accepted into college, & have huge amounts of free time again, i'm starting on Silmarillion.

unrelated side notes -
- on my class ring, i tried to get the engravers to inscribe the "one ring" verse, but they wouldn't. and i didn't even ask them to do it in the Black Tongue...
- i've used the phrase "my preciousss" so many times, it's become a joke among my friends & i - they call me "gollum." but none of them have read LotR, only Hobbit, so when i ask them to use the name "smeagol" they give me blank looks.
- one great thing about havign ignorant people run a school is that you can call the administrators "a pack of Uruk-Hai" to their faces & they don't know what you're talkign about!

thanks for reading all this ramblling - i know it's long, but who cares?

aryne *

I started reading Hobbit 5-6 years ago,when I was only 7,
because I was so happy that I could finally read words,that
my mom gave it to me. A year later I started reading LOTR,
and ever since, I read it once,twice a year,when I have forgotten a bit of the details,so it becomes interesting again.

just sending this up. i love this thread and i guess some of the new Saplings and Hobbits may want to share his story with us

I first read the hobbit when I was pretty small, but stopped at the chapter about Mirkwood because the spiders scared me (they still do). I read it again when I was about 10, then 2 years ago, when I was 13, my family read LOTR out loud. We had listened to Fellowship on tape on a long car trip (I still envision Rivendell as somehow resembling Chincoteage Island), and were hooked. We then read the next two books out loud, each person taking a chapter. My parents were rather bemused by the fact that I could put a tune to all of the songs, even having never heard them before. In school, the computers have TELNET, so a friend got me hooked on T2T MUD.

Well, I was never much interested in Tolkien until this year(I'm 17), and bought LotR and The Hobbit at a Troll Books warehouse in June. They just sat on my bookshelf for a while, until I'd read a few more books, and then I read them, starting with The Hobbit, and then going through LotR over the next week or so.

I feel a little dumb with all these people reading LotR and The Hobbit in like 3rd/4th grade and me not reading it until I was 17 and going into my Junior year in High Schoo. It's probably the result of me being one of the few people in my school system who reads much at all(I'll put it this way: last year, there were 20 people in my English class, I was the ONLY one who finshed reading A Tale of Two Cities).

I saw that annoying Bakshi's cartoon. :|