I grew up in an artistic secular household, my father followed his Maori root and became an artist in the Maori renaissance of the 1960s & 70s, he also left home when I was 9, but he had liked the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and had read the Hobbit to my older brother as I read it to my nephews later. Aged 10 or 11 the Hobbit was read to my class by my form teacher and I enjoyed it, but it wasn't a revelatory experience. I read a couple of novels required of me for school, I was not much of a reader although I did read Asterix, Tin Tin and Lucky Luke comics for pleasure. But I think everyone in my family, I being the youngest had read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and for some reason, I think there may have been some expectation of novel reading in my English class, that might have sparked it, I had a sense that I should read these even if the notion of reading a novel was a foreign notion to me.
But reading the Hobbit something new happened to me, I became absorbed in it, reading this was a revelation, I wanted to keep reading and not go to sleep, I just wanted to read this book it was suddenly the most important thing to me. Gandalf, Bilbo, Dwarves, Trolls, Goblins, Gollum, Wolves, Beorn, a dragon and a treasure. I lived in this imaginary world with an inner intensity previously not experienced, something opened up in my that all these decades later I am still exploring and discovering.
I immediately followed this by reading the Lord of the Rings and this world I had found I discovered to be deeper broader and more profound. I felt I was discovering my own inner life although many others had read this before, it felt very personal to me and I felt connected to it, I was stealthy and small like a Hobbit, I was at home in the Shire, I loved and experienced the wonder of the Elves.
Reading Tolkien made me realise there was a joy in books and I started reading a variety of books. It wouldn't have been until I entered my 20s that I read any C S Lewis around this time I read a number of classic English Children's stories: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Also Sylvie and Bruno), Winnie the Pooh & the Narnia Books, I also read some science fiction including Lewis Space Trilogy although I think I only read the first two books. I enjoyed Lewis' books they had a certain visionary quality of imagination that appealed to me, but they also had a lot of didactic Christian teaching that did not, I being somewhat antithetical to Christianity at the time.
I also discovered Lewis "master" George MacDonald around this time and his fantasy book "Lilith" struck me as simply great as it still does, this had the elements of Lewis' visionary imagination in their pure form, I also read the Curdie books but strangely yet I didn't explore MacDonald's works more fully at that time.
Appreciation goes through cycles and I am now at a time when I appreciate Tolkien, Lewis, MacDonald (and Owen Barfield and Charles Williams) even more and that has come about rather paradoxically through an awakening of Religion and Spirituality largely through the Hindu tradition. And I now see these writers as "Christian Romantics" an important part of and development of Western Christian culture and their wider corpus needs to be experienced.
The Lord of the Rings movies were created here in New Zealand and were released in the final years of my Father's life, it was great to talk to him about them, we both enjoyed them and had some reservations, but it was great to be reminded that we both loved the Lord of the Rings.
I will always be grateful for Tolkien opening that door into a larger world and I wonder how many people he has done that for.
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