Tolkien and the Splintered Heart

I have few splinterings of heart. Most splinters in my life involve the soul (sin vs. righteousness) or the mind (too many to name here). But my heart, usually, is unified. Where I love, I love completely, and likewise for hate, and likewise for aversion, disgust, admiration, etc.

There are two matters, however, concerning which my heart is split right down the middle. One is Spanish, and we won't go there in this post (it all has to do with one wonderful and one traumatic childhood experience, which between them have left me simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the language). The other is Tolkien.

My relationship with Tolkien began late, which is perhaps part of the problem. My brothers, of course, being my father's sons, had all read the entire tetralogy and the Silmarillion by the time they were each thirteen or fourteen. I, being averse to reading things "just because all Christian kids are supposed to love them," and deeming them moreover "boys' books," and finally being quite content with Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, didn't pick up Tolkien until I was sixteen.

At which point, of course, I promptly fell in love with them. How could I not? I devoured the tetralogy in two or three weeks of every-spare-minute reading, though I could never quite bring myself to read the Silmarillion. I distinctly recall sitting on the family staircase one day, crying over the end of The Return of the King. I was completely hooked. Tolkien had my whole heart. Later, when I was eighteen, I even learned the Tengwar script that my brothers had long since mastered (Nate also knows dwarvish) and modified it for my own purpose. I can still write fluently in that alphabet, given an hour or two of practice to get back in shape.

But then I went to COLLEGE. Doom. The problem was, you see, that everybody around me revered Tolkien. They didn't love him; they practically worshiped him, and it didn't help at all that the movies were coming out at the time. To me, all this was a huge turn-off. So for three or four years I turned an increasingly deaf ear to the Tolkien rhapsodies, discussions, and arguments, discovering at the same time that Tolkien's characters are... well, at the time I called them one-dimensional, though I have since learned to revise that opinion in light of the right and conventional and necessary nature of epic heroes. But at the time they seemed one-dimensional; I branded them "one-dimensional" in my mind; and, believing that I had found a reason to dislike Tolkien, I put him from my admiration.

Unfortunately, in matters such as these (though not in others), I find it difficult to completely disengage my affections once they have been truly won. Also, after more than two years of studying and writing about world literature, I am now in a much better position to understand Tolkien's goals, the magnificence of his achievement, and the proper way to understand his characters (that is, from an epic perspective). My heart has been wistful about Tolkien for some time, sternly though I have admonished it to forget, and now I find all at once that I have no good reasons any more to turn away from loving him. No college mates now din his wonders into my ears; I am better trained and therefore more alive than ever to those same wonders; and, truth have it, I never did fully disentangle him from my affections.

BUT, I have in the interim acquired a solid four-years habit, a mental wall between myself and the tetralogy, which splinters my heart right down the middle. And thus I don't know whether the half that belongs to Tolkien will ever be able to reunite with the half that has turned from him...