All of this later fame, however, occurred long after my parents, on the advice of Mr. Athonas, purchased the unwieldy boxed set of the trilogy from a Guildford bookshop for the hefty price of three guineas in 1963, shortly before we emigrated to Canada. There was then no paperback edition, and no American edition, either. The trilogy had had slow sales, and had been dismissed by the literary elite in Britain as the eccentric and long-winded indulgence of an old-fashioned pedant. It was to be some time before the walls of Carleton University’s tunnels were decked with student slogans such as ‘Frodo Lives!’ and ‘Beware the Nazgul!’ My parents bought the trilogy for their three sons as a vote of confidence in the good judgement of Mr. Athonas, and their faith has been amply justified. I was the first to read it over a long Ottawa winter, overwhelmed by the all-encompassing scope of Tolkien’s imaginativeness, his comprehensive understanding of human psychology and his command of language to evoke strong emotion. I was enthralled by the atmosphere of brooding evil that emanated from Mordor across all of Middle Earth, and became a fearful companion with Frodo and his faithful friend Sam on their last journey together, on their via dolorosa into the heart of darkness that awaited them there…
Tolkien’s gravestone and that of his wife bears mute testimony to the power of fiction to assume a reality greater than that of the mundaneity of everyday life. Beneath his wife Edith’s name is the simple word ‘Luthien.’ Under Tolkien’s is ‘Beren.’ Both are mentioned in The Lord of the Rings. Beren was a warrior and Luthien Tinuviel (‘nightingale’) an elf-maiden, passionate lovers separated for years but reunited near the end of their lives. The Oxford scholar and his wife: warrior and elf-maiden, together in death, as in life. Art transcends—and transforms—life, and finally, validates it, in a lasting tribute to the power of the imagination.
Other favourites of mine of this period include the strange Gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books, John Buchan’s Richard Hannay stories, and the exotic adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard, She and King Solomon’s Mines. More importantly, I first read Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, deeply moved by the fate of a man who was his own worst enemy. Hardy’s fiction and his poetry, which have retained their fascination for me decades later, typically portray a world in which the rural poor of pre-industrial ‘Wessex’ suffer stoically the tragic consequences of doomed unsuitable relationships, a world in which coincidence bears the heavy hand of its author’s view that Fate is the arbiter of human choice.
