Life of Lydia

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all who wonder are lost
The old that is strong does not wither
Deep roots are not reached by the frost
From the ashes a fire shall be woken
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken
The crownless again shall be king.”

My mother decided that our family was going to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy this summer. In reality we only read book one. Everything takes longer than predicted.

When I was in fifth grade our family read The Hobbit together. I liked it, and someone told me that the Lord of the Rings was a sequel. I decided that I wanted to listen to the audiobooks of it as this was in the days before I could read fluently. I didn’t quite realize how long the books were, or that they were quite a bit harder to follow than The Hobbit. I understood about 35% of what was going on and the Lord of the Rings went down in my memory as a series that was practically impossible to fully comprehend and I thought maybe I would try again in my forties.

Fast forward to last spring. My mom told me she was thinking about reading the Lord of the Rings as a family. I felt like I needed to warn her about how hard to understand it was, but she said it would be fine. As we got into the book, I was surprised at how well I was tracking with things. I guess being sixteen instead of eleven really makes a difference. (And for real, surely anyone who can read and understand A Tale of Two Cities can handle Lord of the Rings.)

After we finished the Fellowship of the Ring, we watched the movie adaptation together on my mom’s laptop. When I had listened to the books before, my dad had told me he didn’t want me to watch the movies because they were too intense, and I wasn’t old enough. Now that I apparently am old enough, I have discovered that I don’t really enjoy watching depictions of orcs fighting.

I very much enjoyed The Fellowship of the Ring, and am excited to get into The Two Towers.