Tolkien Monthly — December 2020
Where there’s an ending, there’s a beginning.
The last month of this year. Can you believe it?
This was certainly the most unexpected of years, and I hope you’ve journeyed safely so far. We still have long winter months before us, but I hope we’ll make it.
I started the year reading The Lord of the Rings with my usual Tolkien reading group. The first time in English. It was such a fantastic experience. Tolkien was a wizard with words, and there’s no translation that can reproduce his love and knowledge of them. I discovered so many things I didn’t even imagine.
I was in lockdown when I read the Siege of Minas Tirith. Boy, was that an experience in itself! That sense of being enclosed, with a terrible danger outside, the sense of waiting and waiting while nothing happens. And all the while I thought that Tolkien experienced the same thing too, in the trenches of WWI, so long ago. I don’t think I’ll ever read that part of story in the same way after that read during lockdown.
I will be closing the year reading The Lord of the Rings once more. There’s a new translation here in Italy, and of…
