The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is the third book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the fourth of the books set in Middle Earth.

Once again, I was drawn into Middle Earth as if it were a real place, one that is now part of my personal and historical past. It is as compelling as Camelot or Shangri-la, and other "lost time" fantasies. And much more.

There is such a gritty reality to the Rings trilogy. Nothing is clean in this book--all are tainted by the bitter fumes of the dark lord. Light is fading in almost every regard: the sky is darkening; people move through foul caves and tunnels; people subsume their identities in disguises; in this book, all are moving toward the final war against the Eye. Frodo can no longer see the Shire, can no longer remember the taste of bread or the smell of new-mown grass in the fields.

The lost city of Shangri-la

Frodo and Sam face gruesome, soul-wrenching ordeals as they stagger toward Mordor bearing the weight of the ring--Shelob the spider, orcs, the creature Gollum, Nazgul, heat,  starvation, molten rock, and the utter hopelessness of their quest. Pippen waits with Gandalf at the doomed city of Gondor, watching insanity spread as the enemy gathers its forces. Merry rides with the Rohirrim, but disguised and in secret with Eowyn, riding toward war and certain doom. All of his friends are fighting. He must fight for them. Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas take the pathways of the dead…Aragorn’s faith in himself is tested; he is royal or he is dead. And, if the dead do not follow him, the war against evil is lost.

The most moving part of the book, to me, comes after the battle of Peleanor, when it is clear that the titanic battle that was a grueling victory for the West was a mere skirmish for the Eye. His forces are vast and he will defeat the good, if battle is the method of attack. The forces gather in council. Should they strengthen defenses and die in a few months, or ride out to the attack now and die quickly, Aragorn asks. In this state of hopelessness, the council decides to have faith in Frodo and Sam. If men will be wiped out, they will be wiped out creating a distraction that takes the Eye away from Frodo and the ring, which are secretly in Sauron's very stronghold. Aragorn's men agree to sacrifice their own lives for the future of all. This is a decision of great beauty.

An image of Camelot

This book was full of fear and battle, wounding and battle. The way Tolkien sets up the victory at Pelannor and then snatches it away made the doom so much more real. I felt a glissando of sheer terror at that moment, horror and loss. And I felt all the more resolute when Aragorn led his army into action and into certain death. I was right with them.

Yes, the Rings books are more in the endless procession of guy-bonding books that so fill the fantasy and science fiction genre. In this book, Eowyn is the only woman who has any role whatsoever--but her character is fully developed--more so even than in the movie. She channels her heartbreak over Aragorn’s dismissal of her love into valor. And her role is essential to the victory—her killing of King Angmar of the Dark Riders is marvelous symbolism and drama. And then she gets a wonderful gentle romance with Faramir in the Houses of Healing. I loved that. She must come into her true power before love can enter her life.

Middle Earth

But the Halflings are the true heroes of the story. Their courage, loyalty, wit, and charm are terrific. They are more fully developed for me now that I have such a familiarity with both the movies and books. They show that danger, fear, hunger (and the unknown in general) only strengthen the pure in heart. In fact, that is the hero journey for most of the principal characters--good and bad. How will you respond when the rug is jerked out from under your life, when the feces hits the fan, when you are truly and utterly lost? What will guide you through the dark? What is your light of Elendial? The characters of these books will show you many different strategies for coping. And they demonstrate courage over and over.

I had to include at least one photo of Viggo Mortensen as
Aragorn, the returned king of the title.

I highly recommend Tolkien for junior high school age and up. They are truly beautiful and rich. However, not everyone can read fantasy, so you don't "have" to read them and you don't "have" to see the movies. But, please, at least once, give them a try.

As soon as I finished reading the Tolkien titles on my list, I started reading books by Mark Twain. Switching over to Tom Sawyer has given me mental whiplash. I switched from the sound of ancient sagas being told by candlelight to Twain’s tall-tale-teller voice. I can almost hear him chuckling at his own wry jokes. Still, Tom Sawyer is also a quest story, and holds up well in that genre in its own way. Frodo bearing the ring and Tom bearing the pansy…hmmm.


There's some weird stuff out there. For sermons and essays on LOTR, try:
www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/the-lord-of-the-rings-sermon-series...

http://www.gradesaver.com/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring/study-guide/

Long Arm of Not the Law, Chapter 5

Here is chapter 5 from the book I am writing, called Long Arm of Not the Law. It's long enough now that I can't read through the whole manuscript before I start working on a new chapter. Please excuse this detour from book reviews. Long Arm is about a series of deaths that are considered to be accidents. However, a pattern begins to emerge. Maybe the deaths are not accidents.


CHAPTER 5 THE EMT


This is a book of funerals mainly because of a group of particular deaths—deaths by accident, injury, illness, deaths by surprise. Sometimes you look at the daily details of things and you can’t see patterns. But if you pull way, way back, something interesting may emerge. When you stand by a river, you see width and depth, but when you look at images from a satellite, you can see that your spot on the river is part of an extensive network of related and linked creeks and streams and rivers. Betty Brand was the type of person who would pull way back, would turn off emotional and social filters and just see what’s there. Betty Brand started to see a pattern, started to collect deaths. This book is the story of the deaths she collected and how she made sense of them.


The next death in Betty’s collection was emergency medical technician (EMT) Julia Berne. Julia was rumored to be a lesbian, but because her mom had been so respected in the community in the 1970s, and because she was exceedingly discreet, no one ever said anything out loud about it. Julia’s mother Audrey Willard Berne had been inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame for her work on local history, her book on the history of public health in Ohio, and her Statistical Manual of Outbreaks of Head Lice, which became a standard in health departments throughout the Midwest.


Maybe her mom’s quest to eradicate head lice gave Julia a “head” start in lesbianism, because it meant that her hair, although always nicely styled, was always also short, coiffed, never longer than about two inches, never hitting her shoulders in her whole childhood. Anyway, the haircuts probably didn’t contribute to Julia’s homosexuality, but made it easier to fly under the radar. Yes, I think you can be under the radar but also out of the closet. Actually, most straight people are under the radar. They don’t go around talking about sexual predilections and neither did Julia. As far as the community liked to believe, Julia was totally celibate.


Julia worked regular shifts on the Emergency Medical Squad. She reported to the EMS building at 6:00 every evening and worked till 2:00 a.m. Most nights, after she checked the “truck,” making sure it was well stocked, clean, and gassed up, she dozed or watched cable TV. Usually at least once per evening, she would have a walk-in. Bartie Immel’s common law wife brought him in every few weeks for a blood pressure check, sometimes because his fuse was too short, sometimes because he was so flat as to seem almost dead.


“Everything checks out OK, Bartie,” Julia said, wrapping the blood pressure tubing around the cuff. “One twenty-two over eighty-five. Like always.” She grasped his wrist and felt for his pulse.


“Like always, Lois,” Bartie said. “I tell you every time.” Lois rolled her eyes. “It was just that one time it was high, when I didn’t know what I was drinking. I thought it was beer.” It had been Red Bull.


Julia shushed him, watching the sweep second hand of her Bulova.


Every now and then, Bartie brought in Lois, usually for “sugar.”


“She don’t seem right,” he told Julia. “I think it’s her sugar.”


Lois did a good job managing her “sugar,” but Bartie was easily alarmed. Julia rubbed down Lois’s finger with an alcohol wipe and pricked her with a test strip from the diabetes kit Lois had brought along. Her level was usually close to normal. However, adult onset (type II) diabetes was a scourge in Gerry County. Bartie’s dad lost his leg and then his life to the disease. Lois’s mom, too, had suffered from it, dying from congestive heart failure exacerbated by obesity. No wonder Bartie was nervous.

The carb-heavy diet of the poor was hypothesized to be a contributor to the high prevalence of diabetes—pizza, bread, potatoes, hamburger, bacon—cheap calories, but also deadly.  Fresh vegetables were probably the least-eaten food group in Maple Hills. When she first moved to Gerry County, Elaine Dixon had been amazed at the prevalence of what she called the “yellow-white” meal—chicken and noodles ladled over mashed potatoes, side of canned corn, yeast roll, and butter. Washing it all down with a glass of whole milk made the experience complete. Another version of yellow-white was pounded and breaded pork tenderloin (called “Gerry County Veal”) on a white bun with mayo and pickles and with French fries on the side, often glopped with melty yellowy cheese. This delectation was often consumed at the Eat-n-Time Dairy Bar, and accompanied with white (of course) ice cream.


Julia could gather the data, but she could not treat. All she could do was offer to transport if the data indicated a serious problem. She also changed dressings and checked bee stings (if the person who was stung made it all the way to the EMS building, that alone indicated a lack of anaphylactic shock). But every few nights, there was a transport, a car wreck, someone with chest pains, a bad fall with a broken bone, or, worst of all, a beating or gunshot wound. Julia and her shift partner received a page similar to the one Cody Miller got, swung their gear into the cab of the ambulance (or “squad” as it was more commonly referred to) and took off with the siren blaring and the lights flashing. Julia had trained herself not to react. Just don’t react, she repeated over and over through the years until it became a part of her, something she took to every injury scene.


One evening, on Route 17 North not far from where Police Chief Duncan Smith had crashed, Julia and her partner pulled up to a grisly scene. A Ford Explorer was off the road—far enough off that it had probably rolled a few times. One tire was blown. Julia could see a body out among the broken corn stalks; she could see that it was not in a normal posture for a living human. It was her job to walk on out there, through the stubble of this season’s harvest, keeping between the rows, watching the shiny black tops of her steel-toed boots, seeing the boots advance, seeing her medical box lower onto the soil. Just don’t react, she said to herself.


It was a white female, or had been. Julia bent over the still warm form, placed her fingers on the neck, on the carotid, the former carotid. Nothing. She gently turned the shoulders to lift the body. She unsnapped the lid of the med box, extracted the stethoscope. Cradling the woman’s chest against her own, she pulled up the shirt to put the stethoscope against the flesh of the back. No breath sounds. Nothing. She moved the woman onto her back. The head fell loosely to the side. Just don’t react. In the Explorer, children were screaming. Just don’t react. She closed the eyes and shook out a folded up yellow poncho from its tiny carry bag. She placed the poncho over the body. It was just a body now. She knew the woman though. She had recognized the Explorer right from the start.


A few months later, Bartie brought Lois in, toting along her insulin kit as usual. Julia looked for a long time at the insulin. “This stuff is expired, Lois. I’m going to confiscate it.”


In the morning, Julia was found dead, a syringe in her hand, an empty vial of insulin at her side. It was the accident, that’s what the EMS director said. It was all the accidents. She never cried. She should have cried.


Carl Wallingford was sympathetic, introducing many Maple Hills residents to the illness called post-traumatic stress disorder. He could discuss its signs and symptoms in detail. He knew Julia. She had transported him once after a storm when he had fallen and broken his leg trying to move a downed tree in the street next to his house. He hadn’t seen and wasn’t injured by the live power line under the tree, but that was all Julia could talk about as the ambulance hurtled toward the hospital. Accidental death.


And now she was dead. Her funeral was not ritualized—an EMT didn’t rank with a police chief or a young fire fighter—and Julia had always been private. Still, the uniformed members of the squad kept guard over Julia’s body, rotating every two hours. The visiting hours and services were held at the local funeral home, where Julia’s mom and dad received mourners, hugs, tears, shared memories. During the services, conducted by a woman minister from the city, a stranger sat with Julia’s mother, a stocky woman who kept her head down. Tears dropped into her lap. She was listed in the obituary as a “special friend.” She would miss Julia in a way none of the others would ever understand.

Welcome, Worldwide Readers

New year's resolution: to have blog hits by at least 25 different countries before January 1, 2013.


My thanks to all who have read my blog, but a special thanks to readers from outside the United States. I am gratified that you want to read an entry on this blog written by a rich (in world terms) white woman from (in world terms) the middle of nowhere . I see you, Russia, Romania, India, Taiwan Thailand, and especially Peru. South America is sort of a forgotten continent in the U.S., but not to me.


Next post: A chapter from the book I am trying to write, called The Long Arm of Not the Law.

The Adventures of Tintin, by Herge

The Adventures of Tintin follow the life and times of Belgian boy-reporter Tintin, whose profession throws him in the path of of one fantastical adventure after another. He hangs out with his wonderfully-drawn dog Snowy, his friend Captain Haddock, who struggles with his sobriety, and Professor Calculus, who is partially deaf. Lots of slapstick involves tripping, falling, hitting each other, misunderstood speech, and so on, on a Three Stooges sort of level.

Here's a typical page from the graphic novels.

The Tintin stories are comic books—bound in groups of three. Truly, they are graphic novels, each story running about 60 pages, combining words and color images. Often, the frames were so crammed with words that I wondered about the appropriateness of the graphic novel format--each square was more words than image. I also found it jarring to move from narrative reading to the graphic novel. I was so used to reading words only and had a hard time making myself take time for the pictures. (See sample page, left.)

Tintin's adventures are grand—saving sovereign nations, going to the moon, stopping pirates. The books have a geopolitical slant totally lacking in American children’s literature. The friends go all over the world—the third world, not Europe. The books were written in France—Europe is too much like staying home. Truly, the stories reflect a disdain for anything non-European and are scathing in their stereotypes of almost every ethnic group other than whites. You must leave many sensitivities at the door when you enter these books.

[Go to the website for Tintinologists at http://www.tintinologist.org/ to delve deeper into the Tintin world.]

The Opera Singer--she and her maid were the
only female characters in all the books I read.

The earlier books, in particular, are entirely politically incorrect. The stereotypes are quite ugly. Hergé seems to have a learning curve, though, as later books are more generous in assigning human characteristics to those other than whites. There is one female character in the whole series (well, she has a maid, so that makes two)—an opera singer who recurs. Otherwise, this is a totally male world. Totally. A comment on racism appears in this Wikipedia entry.

Following on from the success of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929–30), Tintin in the Congo also proved popular with the Belgian public, allowing Hergé to continue the series with a third installment, Tintin in America (1931–32). The book was also hugely popular in the Congo, and retained its popularity there throughout the 20th century. Since the late 20th century, however, the book has came under criticism from some for its portrayal of the Congolese people, which several critics have called racist. The book has also been criticised for its portrayal of big game hunting and the mass slaughter of African wildlife. Hergé himself was embarrassed by the work because of these elements, for which he expressed regret in later life, referring to the book as an error of his youth. It is because of its controversial nature that its publication in English was delayed until 1991.

All analysis aside, the Tintin adventures have an amazing following among tween-age boys. My nephew Jake Shapiro said that he loved these books when he was younger—read them all over and over again. Others who have commented (via a Facebook query) share Jake’s international background—my sister, kid's lit aficionado Robin Dickerson, said that the books were extremely popular at the British School library where she worked for awhile when living in South America. Interesting.

I ended up liking these. Marvelous flights of fancy in exotic locations—and lots of fighting, guns, and mystery.The action rocks, the humor is moronic, one character is a dog. What more can you want? I wish I could find these books in full-size format. The squinched type and tiny drawings were a barrier to my enjoyment.

Movie Note

[For a great discussion of racism in the books and lack thereof in the movie, go to the article in the Atlantic on this very topic: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/12/how-spielberg-handles-the-racial-problems-of-the-tintin-books/250382/]

The Tintin books were on my children's reading list. When I read them I had no idea that a Tintin movie was in the works--much less that Peter Jackson would be involved with the production. As of this writing, I have not seen the movie, but the trailer looks gorgeous, fulfilling the visual potential in the graphic novels. I assume that the politically incorrect material will be eliminated or soft-soaped; I am more interested in the role of humor in the film. It was only by viewing the stories through a slapstick lens that I could enjoy these books. Without the humor, the books would not hold up. I wonder how the filmmakers balanced the adventure with the humor. Please feel free to comment on this blog or on my Facebook page. I'd especially like to hear from you if you have read the books and seen the movie.

[View one of the trailers at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op3w_ICK4us]

Titles Read

I haven't yet been able to locate volumes 1 and 2 of The Adventures of Tintin (maybe because they have been withdrawn for inappropriate content??). Whoever has them checked out from Vinton County's Herbie Wescoat Library in Ohio, please return them! I read volume 3 (The Crab with the Golden Claws; The Shooting Star; and The Secret of The Unicorn); volume 4 (The Broken Ear, The Black Island, and King Ottokar's Sceptre); volume 5 (Land of Black Gold; Destination Moon; and Explorers on the Moon); volume 6 (The Calculus Affair; The Red Sea Sharks; and Tintin in Tibet); and volume 7 (The Castafiore Emerald; Flight 714; and Tintin and the Picaros).