It was Summer of 1975 and I was walking about with my neighbor one night. As we shared some pipeweed all rolled up in a ZigZag, he told me about this book he just read and enjoyed very much called The Hobbit. I asked what a Hobbit was, and he told me they were a fantasy care-free folk who like eating, drinking, & smoking! He loaned me the paperback while he started on the Fellowship.
Read through it and loved it, then read Fellowship as he had finished it. I then read Two Towers as he had finished it. By this time I was eating the tale up, and I finished Two Towers while he had stalled a third of the way into Return of the King. After a couple weeks of bugging him about whether he finished it yet and he getting annoyed at me, I checked out an old 1957 copyright hardback out of the library and read on through. Loved that big fold-out map that was in the back of that hardback edition, so when I returned it I checked out Fellowship and Two Towers hardbacks and started reading the Trilogy all over again! When I checked out Return of the King the second time and finished it, I delved into the appendices and all they had to offer.
It was early 1976 when I started teaching myself the Tengwar from the Appendex. I was a senior in high school and I was doodling on my notebook in study hall when the girl sitting next to me saw it. I met a Tolkien geek babe! We would hang out and practice our scripting and pass notes to each other, and would sit by the flag pole at lunch telling Middle earth tales to each other. Later that year not long before graduation, they started doing some renovation work on the bus-loading zone near the flag pole. We saw they had just poured fresh cement curbing, so we decided to cut the class after lunch and imprint 'Friends' in Tengwar into the curb. We made a couple mistakes, but it remained in that curb until 2005 when they totally renovated the school and dug up all the curbs and the flagpole.
So yeah, I was a Tolkien geek since the summer of 1975. When word got out that the Silmarillion was going to be published, we geeks were overjoyed! Went to a book release line party in 1977 and got my copy! Tried to read it, and couldn't get into it at all. I finally skipped the biblic creation beginning and got into the meat of the book. It never did that much for me other than give a rich history of Middle Earth.
In 1982 I found The Unfinished Tales paperback on a book-rack by the checkout at a grocery store and I bought it. It was a great background and filled in some gaps in Lord of the Rings. Loved that book.
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