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Please help me. I've got an allergy to Tolkien

I've tried reading Tolkien as often as I've tried to give up smoking and failed dismally on both counts

Sue Arnold
Saturday 13 December 2003 01:00 GMT
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Christmas, they say, comes fourth in the National Stress List after death, divorce and moving house. Holidays and shopping come next followed variously by forgetting one's keys, losing one's glasses, finding a parking space and getting to Stansted.

Everyone, of course, has their own personal stress agenda - mine is currently topped by Tolkien. I appear to be the only person on the planet who doesn't like Tolkien. I wish I did, I really do, because admitting you don't like Tolkien invites the same incredulous response from people as saying you don't like Shakespeare or puppies or the smell of freshly baked bread.

Any minute now The Big Read is going to nominate The Lord of the Rings as the nation's favourite book, and a review of Peter Jackson's concluding film in the Rings trilogy, which had its premiere in London this week, described The Return of the King as the all-time great movie epic against which all future epics will have to be measured. Heavy stuff.

Though why don't I like Tolkien when I'm perfectly happy to read about battles and monsters and little people in Greek mythology, Icelandic sagas, Irish legends and Scottish folk tales knee deep in Kelpies and Celkies? Because it's so damn serious, that's why. A few jokes, a touch of humour, a bit of Morecambe and Wise knockabout between Sauron and Gandalf and I might easily have joined my local Hobbit club in my Bilbo Baggins baseball cap and T-shirt, but all that questing and enduring and sacrificing and overthrowing leaves me cold. I reckon I've tried reading Tolkien as often as I've tried to give up smoking and have failed dismally on both counts.

A sympathetic friend with 11 godchildren all clamouring for Frodo merchandise this Christmas said she had overcome her aversion to Tolkien by rereading him at night in her tent on a three-week trek in the Himalayan foothills. It works better in a dramatic setting, she advised, I should try it. We have no plans to visit Nepal in the near future but I'd certainly give it a whirl as we drive through Godalming, jewel of the Surrey Tyrol, on our way to Killinghurst for Christmas.

For some time now I have suspected that the milk of human kindness has been ebbing from my veins, but this Tolkien allergy positively marks me out as a terminal curmudgeon. There's no doubt that Frodo and Harry Potter have changed the image of books as far as kids are concerned. Books are fun; reading is cool. Instead of slumping in front of The Weakest Link and The Simpsons when he gets home from school, the 14-year-old actually chooses to go to his room and read The Lord of the Rings.

"Does he really? How wonderful. At least I know what to get him for his birthday this year instead of those dreadful video games," said his aunt indulgently when she came round last week. "I'll just pop my head round the door and say hello."

She returned looking less indulgent and more as if she had sucked on a lemon. "He wasn't reading The Two Towers," she reported. "He was reading a book called Doing It with a picture of a condom on the cover." I reminded her swiftly that Libby Purves in The Learning Curve on Radio 4 always maintains that it doesn't matter what adolescent boys read, just as long as they read something.

When the last Rings film came out, the daughter, who put Aragorn up there beside Michelangelo and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as role models, took the whole family to see it. Epics are not my forte. I was seasick in Titanic, shell-shocked in Saving Private Ryan and tigered-out in Gladiator. Driving Miss Daisy, now that's what I call a good film, but surrounded by Tolkien fans breaking into spontaneous applause, I gave it my best shot.

Trouble is, if you never finished the book it's confusing. "I don't understand," I whispered to my daughter. "If the Uruk-Hai and the Orcs are both henchmen of Saruman, why do they keep fighting each other?"

"I knew you'd be like this," she hissed back. "Just because you don't like Tolkien you're going to spoil it for everyone by interrupting all the time. If you'd read the book you'd realise how absolutely brilliant the film is, especially the graphics."

She's right. A man who is tired of London is tired of life, opined Dr Johnson. He might have added that a woman who cannot relate to a Hobbit is a joyless, unnatural old bat. Forgive me Lord Frodo. I have sinned but I see the light. I come, I come.

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