My father was a World War II guy, a combat veteran of the Pacific theatre. He experienced great loss as a direct result of the war, and though he barely had attended high school as a teen, he came home and read thick and extensive narratives – works by writers like Wouk and Michener — that I think were his way of trying to sort out the unspeakable.
Years after his death, I met a war buddy of his who gave me a sense of what they saw, images that stay with me at night and make me wish I could say to my dad: Now I see. It also helps me to appreciate — when I think back on the time maybe 60 years ago when my late brother, Dennis, brought home JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy from college — why my father picked up those books and started doing what so many of us still do to this day:
He read them and reread them, again and again, over the years – always finding something new he didn’t notice there before.
Scholars of far more academic knowledge than what I bring to the table can debate all of this on a much deeper level, but it has always been my belief that LOTR is, in a way, an act of staggering and beautiful madness… and that Tolkien, who lost his father in early childhood and then as a young man was thrown into a war of numbing and impersonal industrial slaughter, spent his adult life mapping out a vast mythology involving its own widespread bloodshed, cruelty and despair.
Within those borders, he tried to provide fiercely intimate embers of burning hope as one small remedy to the most sickening and cynical examples of human nature.
One of those embers, certainly, is Samwise Gamgee.
The hobbit in the shapeless hat will be the focus – the star, if you will — of our annual Tolkien Reading Day in Syracuse, global birthplace of the event. It’s set for Saturday at 2:30 pm at the Betts Branch Library, at 4862 S. Salina St. With my friend John Mariani — a gifted artist, a fine journalist and an extraordinary human being who annually creates stunning posters for the event — we’ve been organizing this reading enclave every March for many years, bolstered by a crew of steadfast and soulful regulars, though this one has taken on a special meaning.
For the first time, the Onondaga Public Libraries, Friends of the Central Library and my new journalistic home, The Central Current, have combined forces to support and promote our where-it-all-began Tolkien Reading Day. Among the benefits of that alliance will be coffee and cookies for whoever shows up, and I suspect this coalition will continue into the future for as long as our Reading Day goes on.
In short: If you love Tolkien, you’re invited — and it’s free.
How our little tradition came to represent the absolute birth of Tolkien Reading Day is a tale that still, well, blows my mind. Decades ago, I was one of the readers invited to take part in a gathering at Le Moyne College for “Bloomsday” — a celebration of James Joyce and “Ulysses,” a literary masterwork.
Once I went home, as a guy whose life was deeply affected by “The Lord of the Rings,” I had this thought. I emailed the international Tolkien Society in England, wondering if the officers there had ever discussed creating a “Tolkien Reading Day,” considering how many people around the world revere Tolkien and his books.
A while later, when I saw an Associated Press story on how the Tolkien Society was putting together a global Reading Day event – based around, no spoilers here, the March 25 date of the trilogy’s culminating sequence — I was pleased and thought:
A lot of people must have made a similar suggestion.
Not long afterward, I received an email directly from Tolkien Society officials, saying they wanted to credit me as the founder of Reading Day.
This was something I didn’t expect.
My immediate response: If I’m the founder, pretty clearly we needed to do one in Syracuse.
The global theme of this year’s Reading Day is “unlikely heroes.” The way we see it, that suggestion arrives in a world in which qualities like mercy and empathy and kindness are increasingly discarded as weakness, rather than held up as the bedrock elements of shared humanity — which certainly parallels the emotional landscape in Middle-Earth at the time of the quest, as epitomized by, oh, Saruman or Denethor.
The book, then, is about warring ideals, and one can argue forcefully that Sam — in the end — becomes the pivot for everything a lot of us believe. So here’s the way we’ll do it, following long tradition: We’ll have an open discussion at the start about Sam and his role and what he means to people in the room, and then we’ll read “The Choices of Master Samwise” and “The Tower of Cirith Ungol” … two great, great chapters about Sam … and if we have time we’ll skip ahead a bit and read the climactic chapter in all of it, “Mount Doom.”
When we read, we go around the circle — each person reading exactly one page at a time — and there’s a kind of quiet throwback beauty to it all. It is, above all else, a reading event, held at a time when reading itself is a threatened quality, and our Tolkien Reading Day is hopefully a quiet reminder of why it matters.
If you can’t make it, you’ll be able to Zoom in and read along by following this link, though for practicality’s sake we have to keep actual participation to the readers in the room.
As for me, I will — as I do each year — be thinking of my dad. In October 1988, not long after my mother’s death, he was admitted to the hospital in my hometown, Dunkirk. He initially seemed fine but went into a swift decline, and my siblings called — I was working then in Oswego — and told me I had better get home and fast.
By the time I arrived, he wasn’t really conscious. He died a few days later, at 70.
On his hospital bedstand, open to the middle, was “The Two Towers,” the last book he ever read. I didn’t, as I should have done, check the page. But I still have that copy, and will bring it — as I always do — to Reading Day.
I don’t know exactly where my father was in that book, but there is a powerful chance that his last waking thought on Earth was alongside Frodo and Sam, standing with them as they recoiled from the nauseating smell of the dead marshes on a ledge along the Emyn Muil, where Sam said:
“Well, master, we’re in a fix, and no mistake.”
It’s a thought that suits the theme this year, on Tolkien Reading Day.
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