The Hobbit

I remember when the trailer for The Return of the King came out.  There was a great deal of jumping around and shrieking.  This was repeated recently when all our cell phones beeped simultaneously and M, N and I all got messages from E to "check Facebook right now!"  She had posted a link to the trailer for The Hobbit, and even as we watched it, she called me - presumably to hear my high-pitched excitement.

I am the opposite of the commenter on the trailer felt that "it  doesn't look very 'Hobbity' to me .... more like a Lord of The Rings spin-off" (NZ Herald, December 22, 2011).  I am glad to see that the story is being treated seriously - I was a little afraid there would be too much focus on the potential slap-stick silliness.  One of my earliest memories of The Hobbit was listening to it on cassette tape when I was about 10 or 11 and sobbing uncontrollably when Thorin Oakenshield lay dying.  When they began the darkly beautiful rendition of "Under the Misty Mountains," I was relieved that there seemed to be adequate restraint in the balance of serious and silly with the dwarves.

Foundations: My Seminal Fantasy Books

The other day I was re-reading Judith Tarr’s The Hound and the Falcon trilogy, and it got me thinking about what are seminal fantasy books/series for me.  To start off my list, here are three authors that my mother read aloud to my siblings and me, all of which have had an impact on my own imagination.

J. R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  My mother read both of these aloud, but we also had them on cassette tape and listened to them until the tapes were all warped and slurred.  Some of the elements which I am particularly drawn to in these books include the richness and depth of the world, the lyricism of Tolkien’s writing, the nobility of his characters and the simplicity he brings to a complex tale.

Susan Cooper: The Dark is Rising quartet.  This YA series blends the modern day with a mythic world quite seamlessly.  Unlike some of the more recent attempts to do so, there is less of a sense that there is a hidden world of magic, and more of a sense of continuity between the ordinary and the extraordinary.  Cooper draws on Celtic mythology, particularly the Arthurian cycle.   I particularly like the way she reimagines customs and stories of the British isles, weaving together history, myth and her own inventions to create a grand set of adventures.

Ellen Kindt McKenzie: Taash and the Jesters.  This book is exciting, funny and engrossing.  It has many traditional elements: an orphan mysterious origins, a kidnapped prince, a long quest through a Medieval fantasy world, disguises, mistaken identities, wicked witches, good witches, and happy accidents.  One particular reason I have great affection for it is that the author lived in the area of California where I grew up, and I always fancied that the landscape of Taash was influenced by the same landscape that is often at the center of my imagination.