One evening, at the end of June...
"He wanted to savour as much as he could of his last summer in the Shire."
If I'm doing this properly, it would be remiss of me not to read the beginning of 'Three Is Company' on "one summer's evening".
The edition I'm reading today is, by necessity, the Kindle edition.
I'm not a fan of ebooks - but there are a few things I like. Constantly having a copy of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion in my pocket is one of them. Cause, you never know! Another is being able to search the text. (Just how many times *do* guls circle ominously overhead?)
I digress! I don't have a hard copy with me because I'm writing this at Glastonbury. It feels right to be reading this excerpt here. There is something very Middle-earth about The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. It's a bit Shire in that its very green and days are structured around eating, dancing, and excessive consumption of ales and ciders, and Gandalf's fireworks at the opening ceremony. It's a bit Rivendell with its fairy-lit woodland glades, lanterns, woodwind instruments and singing. And, of course, it's a bit Mordor when you're trudging through knee deep mud with a heavy pack on your back. Also, there's not much tech. You'll likely be consulting paper maps and asking strangers for news of the outside world in taverns with strange names.
I saw The Fellowship of the Ring on the day it came out in December 2001. The wait for the VHS release (yes, VHS, it was the past!) was interminable. There were MONTHS between it leaving cinemas and arriving on home video. Fortunately, June 2002 was my first Glastonbury. And there was a cinema field. And they were screening The Fellowship of the Ring! It's hard now to put into words what a big deal that was. There was a magic about watching that film in what was, essentially, the party field. And knowing that some people there were seeing it for the first time. You can imagine the roaring cheer from a field full of hippies when Pippin announced that they had found a shortcut "to Mushrooms!" and Biblo's "finest weed in the South Farthing!"*
Speaking of the film, I watched the first disc of Fellowship the night before I set off. Perhaps it's because of this read through (I read the last chapter in April!), but it suddenly struck me how breakneck its pace is. Even the extended edition! It's also amazing to realise what I projected onto the movie version because I knew what happened in the book. (No selling of Bag End, no Conspiracy Unmasked...)
Tolkien probably would have hated Glastonbury. He was famously horrified that The Lord of the Rings had become a cult book for hippies. And yet, for all its Anglo Saxonish Mead Halls and references to Christianity, The Lord of thr Rings IS a hippy book, whether you like it or not. Whilst I can't see JRRT sitting barefoot in a chai tent, you can't deny that he would wholeheartedly approved of the festival's overall message of environmentalism. And Tom Bombadil and would be having the time of his life in the stone circle.
Anyway, that's those few June pages done before things get serious in September. But in the meantime, "His uneasiness wore off, and in the fine weather he forgot his troubles for a while."
* Yes, yes, I know. Tolkien is turning in his grave. I have one word for you: applicability.
If I'm doing this properly, it would be remiss of me not to read the beginning of 'Three Is Company' on "one summer's evening".
The edition I'm reading today is, by necessity, the Kindle edition.
I'm not a fan of ebooks - but there are a few things I like. Constantly having a copy of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion in my pocket is one of them. Cause, you never know! Another is being able to search the text. (Just how many times *do* guls circle ominously overhead?)
I digress! I don't have a hard copy with me because I'm writing this at Glastonbury. It feels right to be reading this excerpt here. There is something very Middle-earth about The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. It's a bit Shire in that its very green and days are structured around eating, dancing, and excessive consumption of ales and ciders, and Gandalf's fireworks at the opening ceremony. It's a bit Rivendell with its fairy-lit woodland glades, lanterns, woodwind instruments and singing. And, of course, it's a bit Mordor when you're trudging through knee deep mud with a heavy pack on your back. Also, there's not much tech. You'll likely be consulting paper maps and asking strangers for news of the outside world in taverns with strange names.
I saw The Fellowship of the Ring on the day it came out in December 2001. The wait for the VHS release (yes, VHS, it was the past!) was interminable. There were MONTHS between it leaving cinemas and arriving on home video. Fortunately, June 2002 was my first Glastonbury. And there was a cinema field. And they were screening The Fellowship of the Ring! It's hard now to put into words what a big deal that was. There was a magic about watching that film in what was, essentially, the party field. And knowing that some people there were seeing it for the first time. You can imagine the roaring cheer from a field full of hippies when Pippin announced that they had found a shortcut "to Mushrooms!" and Biblo's "finest weed in the South Farthing!"*
Speaking of the film, I watched the first disc of Fellowship the night before I set off. Perhaps it's because of this read through (I read the last chapter in April!), but it suddenly struck me how breakneck its pace is. Even the extended edition! It's also amazing to realise what I projected onto the movie version because I knew what happened in the book. (No selling of Bag End, no Conspiracy Unmasked...)
Tolkien probably would have hated Glastonbury. He was famously horrified that The Lord of the Rings had become a cult book for hippies. And yet, for all its Anglo Saxonish Mead Halls and references to Christianity, The Lord of thr Rings IS a hippy book, whether you like it or not. Whilst I can't see JRRT sitting barefoot in a chai tent, you can't deny that he would wholeheartedly approved of the festival's overall message of environmentalism. And Tom Bombadil and would be having the time of his life in the stone circle.
Anyway, that's those few June pages done before things get serious in September. But in the meantime, "His uneasiness wore off, and in the fine weather he forgot his troubles for a while."
* Yes, yes, I know. Tolkien is turning in his grave. I have one word for you: applicability.
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