We saw Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Sunday night, the last show of the evening. It was a mostly empty theatre, just what I hoped for. I was completely happy with the movie, everything looked almost exactly the way I'd pictured it in my head when reading the novel. The casting was brilliant, it truly was. I own very few movies, but I think this is one I'll buy when it comes out on DVD. It captures the essence of what makes the book charming, exciting, and surprising. I am extremely fond of the Harry Potter books.
During the previews we saw a trailer for the live action version of The Fellowship of the Ring. It looked okay, and I will definitely go see it, but I don't have high hopes for it. John is quickly rereading the book in order to be ready for a Lord of the Rings discussion Friday. I confess I'm a little dubious about this, not knowing who's going to lead it or what people feel is worth discussing. I'm thinking of it as a reason to get together with six or eight of our friends the day after Thanksgiving. I'm just being a sport about the rest of it.
It's not that I don't appreciate the books, you understand. The trilogy, and The Hobbit, are seminal works in my life. I lived and breathed Tolkien in early adolescence. My brother and I read our copies over and over, endlessly discussing all that they contained with wonder and envy. I was passionate about the language of the High Kings and Elves. That, I thought, was the way one ought to speak, with portent and mystery and ineffable joy in the world. I had enormous amounts of the text committed to memory, and was completely spellbound by the stories. I was in awe, in love, and a wholehearted believer in Middle-earth.
I reread the books a few years after college. I was surprised to find them less marvelous than I remembered. Alas, education had enabled me to discover they were made things, crafted and deliberated, with plots and subplots and narrative devices drawing heavily on Scandanavian and British mythology. They were no longer sacred texts, pristine moments of perfection and inspiration. The glamour, and my innocence, had worn off.
It is a bittersweet, inevitable sorrow when a child finally discovers there is no Santa Claus coming down the chimney, that it's Papa ringing some jinglebells downstairs, and not that mysterious, jolly creature. For some of us it is difficult to grow up and accept that there is no magic other than what we create in our heads. But eventually one overcomes the indignity of having been misled about the physical reality of the folklore of one's culture, and accepts that it's fun to tell stories. One discovers that storytelling has a potent magic of its own, as life-changing as the waving of a wand.
And if you're a person who loves language and continues to study it carefully it is a particular pleasure to one day find you, too, have learned to write with portent and mystery and ineffable joy. I owe John Ronald Reuel Tolkien an enormous debt for opening my heart to the beauty of language and giving me many years of pure pleasure.
When I reread the books now I sense the faint echoes of that childhood enchantment, the glamour of magic still lingering in the familiar words.
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