Tolkien and Borders

On September second, 1973, the day J.R.R. Tolkien died, I was "sitting here on a mountain top in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I can hear the wind sighing through the trees, sounding like the distant ocean as it breaks upon a sandy beach. The clouds are red with the light of the sun, which has not risen above them yet, and the carpet of green trees spreads out in a rolling expanse that looks like an endless sea of forest. The light fog has lifted just enough to show the blue streak of distant mountains on the southwestern horizon. This lichen-covered rock on a half-bluff rising from the Ontonagon River is part of a large grey rock face that stretches brokenly from east to west. The ferns, grasses and delicate purple blossoms wave gently in the breeze, giving the impression of the last wavelets of a breaking sea of forest foliage which has dashed itself against this lonely outcropping of rock. I feel insignificant here, but I feel good."

I was beginning my freshman year of college, on the seventh day of an ultimately-16-day Outward Bound style experience. I'd been introduced to The Hobbit as a fourth-grader, when an otherwise-hated teacher read the story aloud; I must have been taken with the story, since my mother has saved a picture I drew at the time, of the dwarves and hobbit being led in chains by goblins. In 1970, a friend introduced 9th-grade me to The Lord of the Rings. By the time of this program, I'd probably read the trilogy through four times, en route to the more than 20 times I must have read it through now. Eight or nine years later (1980 or 81, I can't remember which), I taught Tolkien to undergraduates for the first time, as a teaching assistant in a large class led by a linguistics professor at the University of Michigan. In it I met people more immersed in Tolkien than I was--I received essays written in Elvish, and got a glimpse into the (then new) world of Dungeons and Dragons.

In the meantime, during my undergraduate experience, I would meet Clyde Kilby, who had attempted to help Tolkien arrange his Silmarillion material close to the end of his life, and who would help establish the Wade Collection at Wheaton College.

I'm not sure where this is going, except to say that I'm teaching the works of Tolkien again, and am now reading up on Tolkien and the Inklings, having just finished Colin Duriez's Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. It's a nice, readable piece of popular literary history and criticism, with some interesting insights about influence and the importance of literary groups. It's also got me thinking about my connections (indirect) with Tolkien the human being.

I remember when we hiked out of the woods after 16 days away from any media but print and handwriting. At some point almost immediately upon reaching civilization, I heard of Tolkien's death. I (with apparently every other hippie in the world) had been eagerly awaiting the Silmarillion. Now it would never appear (I thought). The disappointment of that realization is one that has been mirrored a number of times since, in much the same way--whenever one hears of the death of a favorite author (one that a person reads over more than once), the first thought is--"Now there's no more about . . ." (The death of Tony Hillerman also hit me this way.) But I reckoned not with Christopher Tolkien, and now we have a plethora of continuing Tolkien material. The flow has almost stopped now, 10 volumes into the history of Middle earth, and The Children of Hurin later. This will be a literary conundrum for the next century: how to deal with this close posthumous collaboration of father and son.

Also today (and somewhat related), in the Arizona Republic, Laura Trujillo published a poignant look back at Borders Bookstore, most locations of which are closing soon. She remembers it as a gathering place, though a huge chain. During my time in Arizona, I also remember it this way (Chris and I being the bookworms we are), but I remember it as something more.

When I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1979, Borders had maybe three total locations in the Detroit metro area, the flagship being on State Street in Ann Arbor. At the time, it was unique--a spacious bookstore, with a good booklist inventory in almost every area, and benches. At the time, expresso drinks were just catching on (Cafe Expresso was just opening [early 1980s] on State Street just south of Borders), and I remember thinking that the pairing of books and coffee would be perfect--prescience without action. But I'm certain to have spent several thousand graduate-student dollars and weeks of hours in that store, just perusing books over lunch hours, and in the intervals between and after classes. When I got to Tempe, AZ in 1990, Changing Hands bookstore was still on Mill Avenue, and still collecting bookmarks from specialty bookstores, which they mounted on their walls. There was an Ann Arbor Borders one up.

But that counter-cultural graduate school version of literary bliss was gone by 1995, after Borders went corporate. That booklist and inventory-shipping system served them well for as long as distribution remained physical, but I heard the death knell when I bought my first book on Amazon in the late 1990s. Amazon always had any book in stock, and even had a rare and used volume search. My book-buying habits changed. Now, my reading and buying habits look to change again--as soon as there's a color screen I can read in daylight (and there is--Pixel Qi) on a tablet, I'm reading electronically. But there are still yards and yards of bookshelves in my home.