Pratchett Discovers THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1961-62)

So, Pratchett had been a great admirer of Tolkien's work long before he had written him the fan letter quoted in my previous post. It's been my experience that everyone who falls for Tolkien remembers v. clearly just how he or she first came to read Tolkien-- an origin story, if you will* Here is his.

*Marquette's Special Collection in fact has an ongoing program in which they ask visitors who are interested to briefly describe how they came to discover Tolkien and what most draws them to his work.

Pratchett Discovers Tolkien

. . . late in 1961, when Terry was thirteen, one of the Beaconsfield librarians pushed across the table . . . three volumes, and said something to the effect of 'I think this might be of interest to you.'

 

'That damn book was a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of my life,' Terry said later of The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien's great work wasn't exactly hot off the press at this point: those three volumes had been published across a year, from 1954 to 1955, and completed even earlier, in 1949. Other kids at school had already been there and the book had already been a topic of conversation. So, no particular urgency, then.  Terry set it aside for a couple of weeks -- until New Year's Eve, in fact, when he had the task of babysitting for some friends of his parents. And then, alone in the sitting room of someone else's house, he opened up volume one.

 

The presence of a map in the endpapers instantly struck the young Terry as a good sign. A map at the front of a book was often an indication of quality in the product, wasn't it? It promised you were going places. He wasn't to be disappointed. Years later he could still recall the sixties sofa he was sitting on, the bareness of a slightly chilly front room (the heating eventually went off -- a notorious babysitting hazard), and the sense, as he read, that 'at the edges of the carpet, the forest began. I remember the light as green, coming through the trees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside a story.'

 

He read through the evening. Midnight arrived, followed by 1962, but Terry was still reading. Then, when the parents returned from their party, he went home and continued to read in bed until 3.00 a.m. He woke up on New Year's Day with the book on his chest, refound his place and carried on reading. And later that night, somewhere between, by Terry's calculations, 23 and 25 hours after starting, he had finished all three volumes. And when he reached the end of volume three, he turned back to the beginning of volume one and started again.

 

--That feeling of being caught up in a fictional world shows secondary belief to have come into play. And the looping ouroboros of starting all over again is a hallmark we find over and over among first-time LotR, myself among them. In short, at that moment back in 1961-62, without even knowing it Pratchett became One of Us.

--John R.