“Samwise the Stouthearted” by Marko Manevįor many, reading The Lord of the Rings is a daunting task, promising to demand too much time and too much patience (and even in film form, director Peter Jackson asks three hours of our time thrice over for even the shorter theatrical cuts of the films!). Sometimes he’ll go on for quite a long time, and our passage through the roughly 480,000 words that is The Lord of the Rings will begin to seem impossible without a dear friend to carry us through. He’ll regale us with descriptions of flora and fauna and history, hoping that we’ll come to love this world as he does, so that we later feel the stakes of the adventure as he must. And then we’ll again exhale, and Tolkien will ask us to stop and “smell the roses,” literarily, if not literally. Tolkien’s words weave an atmosphere of tension and mystery, moving from the petty, parochial concerns of the Shirefolk to the broader drama of Bilbo’s mysterious ring and the journey unto which Frodo is about to be called. One hundred and forty-four flabbergasted hobbits sat back speechless…” When they opened their eyes Bilbo was nowhere to be seen. and continue, “He stepped down and vanished. I feel wistful tears well up as my son’s protests tell me that the story has captured him like it captured me so many years ago.
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