Led Astray

by Jean Roberta

As far as my father was concerned, rock-and-roll was a fad that couldn’t disappear fast enough. My mother had acquired a Master’s degree in English in 1944, and as far as she was concerned, fantasy stories were for children.

Some time in the 1960s, someone gave me The Hobbit for Christmas, and then I discovered The Lord of the Rings novels. And I loved reading with Beatles music as a soundtrack. I read a review of their music by a critic who admired their “Anglo-Saxon melodies” (reminiscent of the Angles and the Saxons who invaded Britannia in the fifth century of the Christian Era?). I convinced myself that their version of rock was medieval enough to accompany a multi-volume quest saga. (See footnote at end.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZzEvqDQflA

Some background: After The Hobbit was published in 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the long sequel which was to become The Lord of the Rings until 1949, but apparently the concept had been brewing in his mind since 1917, when he returned home from the Great War.

After numerous disagreements and negotiations with publishers, the whole saga was published in three volumes between summer 1954 and autumn 1955. The books were hardcover, and they didn’t attract a lot of attention at the time.

In 1965, Ace Publications of the U.S. republished the books in paperback with no legal permission from the author or the British publisher. Ace claimed that the existing copyright did not extend to the U.S., and therefore they were not breaking any laws. Tolkien complained, so Ace gave him some money in compensation. Tolkien then signed a deal with Ballantine to bring out the “legitimate” American paperback version.

I ended up with two paperback volumes with matching cover art, and one that looks like part of a different series, the Ace version. By that time, university students had discovered The Lord of the Rings, and the characters entered the counterculture. Although the convoluted plot could be seen to defend the grim necessity of war (especially if an evil wizard is trying to retrieve a ring that corrupts almost everyone who tries it on), it was somehow interpreted as a disguised protest against American military involvement in Vietnam. (Never mind that none of the political events of the 1960s were thought of in 1917.)

The whole panorama of imaginary races, cultures, cities, countryside, and thrilling battles could be made relevant to the life of any reader. As a high school student, I thought institutional oppression was the bane of my own time, and Tolkien took me away to a milieu in which individual heroism could save the day. And the little people called hobbits could discover their heroic potential.

Speaking of panorama, I had no idea what kind of landscape had originally inspired The Shire, homeland of the hobbits. So I gazed out the window of my family home at the mountains of southern Idaho, and imagined this sagebrush-studded terrain populated by characters from the novels. Chinx Peak, at the other side of a valley that was about two miles wide, could be made to substitute for Mount Doom, especially if I imagined smoke and lava spewing from its top.



[The Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho]

In vain, my parents tried to interest me in “better” reading and listening-matter. My father once asked me to write a book review that would explain why I liked Tolkien’s work, but that sounded like an exercise in frustration, since he could always say I hadn’t convinced him that the books were worth reading. My mother suggested that in due course, I would “mature” enough to prefer realistic fiction.

My father probably would have forbidden me from playing Beatles records if my mother hadn’t liked them too. So he (a die-hard philistine who couldn’t sing a note or play a musical instrument) played Bach, Brahms and Beethoven on the stereo when my Beatles records weren’t offending his ears. He would then ask me pointedly if I liked the symphony du jour. I usually did, and I told him so. I just didn’t see why I had to choose between musical genres

Like other parents of teenagers, mine were clearly afraid that my interest in fantasy could warp my mind so much that I wouldn’t be able to function in the real world. As for what rock music could inspire me to do, that didn’t bear thinking about. The words and the music both seemed like a Ring of Power that my parents wished I hadn’t picked up.

Was I completely corrupted by the culture of my youth? You be the judge.

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This passage is from the Wikipedia article on The Lord of the Rings:

“Following J.R.R. Tolkien’s sale of the film rights for The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1969, rock band The Beatles considered a corresponding film project and approached Stanley Kubrick as a potential director; however, Kubrick turned down the offer, explaining to John Lennon that he thought the novel could not be adapted into a film due to its immensity. The eventual director of the film adaptation, Peter Jackson, further explained that a major hindrance to the project's progression was Tolkien's opposition to the involvement of the Beatles.”

The Haunted Library

by Jean Roberta

Sitting in the room my spouse & I call “the library,” where our computer is surrounded by bookshelves, I see a hodge-podge of books, loosely organized into different categories so we can find them. (This doesn’t always work – read on.)

In what I think of as the spooky/spiritual section on the highest shelf to my left, I see a very thick paperback. The title on the spine is Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond by Hans Holzer. This book is packed with stories and photos from the files of one of the world’s foremost ghosthunters, and it threatens to suck me in again. The last time I read it, I had to stop before reaching the end so I could keep up with my day job.

Next to this is The Complete Prophesies of Nostradamus, several books on modern witchcraft, including three by Starhawk (one bought directly from her when she came to my town on tour), The Tibetan Book of the Dead (a gift from one of my stepsons), a hardcover Bible (originally bought for my six-year-old daughter, in which she drew a picture of a smiling man with a beard, named “God”) and a small, hardcover English translation of The Koran. Strangely enough, this last book is the only one in this section that I inherited from my parents after their deaths in 2009. They were agnostics who never showed a great interest in religion in any form. However, they probably thought (as I do) that as academics, they needed to have some knowledge of the holy books of the world’s major religions.

This library is very eclectic because many of the books were given to me, inherited, or they belonged to my spouse before we joined households. In some sense, it is full of ghosts that constantly threaten to pull me away from more pressing concerns.

After my parents passed away, I let my two sisters take the bulk of their books, since I already had enough of my own. Several of our mother’s books of literary criticism are now neatly arranged on the shelves in my office at the university. A few of our father’s books on political theory are still in the home library, including two by John Raulston Saul: Voltaire’s Bastards and The Unconscious Civilization. I think my father enjoyed Saul’s skeptical look at the long-term political effects of Enlightenment idealism.

I can still hear a conversation I had with my dad when he was still an Economics professor and I was still reeling from four hard months as a student English teacher in a local high school. “Has it ever occurred to you,” I asked him, “that the idea of universal education is a well-intended 18th-century plan that has never worked as it was intended to?”

“Exactly!” he replied with delight.

“But before you propose to tear down the public school system,” I said, “I’d like to know what you would put in its place.” He just laughed.

One of the books I inherited from my father is one that Spouse and I gave to him for Christmas in 2000. It’s An Illustrated History of the Royal Navy by John Winton, in association with the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, England. It’s a big coffee-table book full of full-colour paintings, engravings and photos of ships of the British Empire and the men who sailed them. I knew my dad would like this. Ever since he joined the U.S. Navy as a young man in the Second World War, he loved boats of all kinds.

In the fiction section, I have a well-preserved hardcover copy of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1942 with detailed maps of battle zones and a foreword by eminent critic Clifton Fadiman, who points out the parallels between the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century and the “current European conflict.” I inherited this book from a woman I never knew: a locally-famous hairdresser who had recently passed away, and whose family invited people she knew (including a male hairdresser friend of mine) to browse her shelves and take whatever they wanted. A grown son of the deceased woman assured me that I was welcome to take whatever was left, since the family had already made their choices.

Among Spouse’s books are several about John Lennon and Che Guevara, the two heroes of her youth, and a biography of Lenin. Her oldest books are in Spanish, and these include material on leftist political theory and alternative Christianity (for lack of a clearer term), e.g. a history of the Rosicrucians and Dan Brown-esque investigations of the history of the Catholic Church. The Spanish-language section has its own shelf.

At one time, I had a collection of books by J.R. Tolkien, including The Hobbit and all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, including one unauthorized book that was sold openly in a bookstore in small-town Idaho. (No one seems to remember any more that in the 1960s, an American publisher brought out a pirated edition, and Tolkien sued.) When I looked for The Hobbit to skim through it before going to the second-installment movie (The Desolation of Smaug), I couldn’t find it. This isn’t surprising. It could have left my house with my grown daughter or either of my grown stepsons. If so, I won’t demand it back. I’ll just have to buy a replacement copy before the third-installment movie comes out.

Of course, there is an erotic section in my library. It’s on two bottom shelves which can be camouflaged by other objects if necessary. That section deserves a post unto itself, but I'm coming to the end of this one.

A lot of memories are in this room.

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