I just finished my twice-in-a-lifetime re-read of The Lord of The Rings yesterday evening. Twice in a lifetime seems like enough. First time was in high school, so that was, what, about forty years ago? And so I didn’t remember many of the details. I remembered the names of the principle characters, and there was a ring that was literally intrinsically evil, so it had to be destroyed, but the only way to destroy it was to take it to the most evil country in the whole world where the most evil person in the whole world lived. Naturally he wanted the evil ring, and he really wanted to stop the good guys from destroying it, so the good guys were constantly in peril right up to the very end when — spoilers! — they finally threw the ring in a volcano, the only place hot enough and evil enough to destroy it.

It takes the author something like eleventy million pages to tell this story. Why? Because it’s the mother of all fantasy stories, I suppose — no, I’m sure that’s not right. I seem to recall that Beowulf is the mother of all fantasy, but who reads that nowadays? Practicallly nobody. I couldn’t tell you who wrote it, or where it comes from, and I have only the dimmest idea of the story. But I’ve read Tolkein, not once but twice, and I can tell you I don’t believe I’ll ever want to do that again. I’m good now.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the experience. I did. But I don’t believe I’ll ever feel the need to read another fantasy with that much purple prose, honestly. I get that Tolkein was setting the mood, but after twelve hundred pages of “Verily verily, I say unto thee …” I rolled my eyes every time Aragorn rose to speak, and I have to believe that’s probably not what the author was shooting for.