My 10Kth post - Tolkien and a California Girl

[Rían]

Here it is – hard to believe, but true – 10k posts for RÃ*an, the California girl who types like the wind!

I always wanted to make my 10k post about Tolkien and the people here who love his works, but then some people suggested something on California, so I decided to kind of blend the two.

SO – here’s a short history of this California girl who discovered Tolkien 28 years ago at a university in California.

As far as I can remember, I had some vague inkling of this Tolkien guy and the silly sci-fi/fantasy thing called Lord of the Rings before I went to college, but I had never read it, and I thought the people that read that type of thing were rather odd. I mean, “Frodo�? What kind of a name was that?!

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, near Los Angeles, loving math and science and horses and sports and reading. In my senior year in high school, I decided I wanted to go away to college, and picked California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo – far enough to be away from home (3 ½ hour drive) but close enough to come home for weekends, if I wanted to (like when the laundry piled up!)

I’ve been fortunate enough to have traveled a bit, and I still think San Luis Obispo is one of the prettiest places around. The college campus is set in some beautiful green hills, just a few minutes’ drive from a lovely, quiet beach, and has a quaint little town with a lovely mission when you want to get off campus.

My freshman year, I met a nice guy and started dating him. It got pretty serious, and since he was the poem-writing type, he wrote me a poem, saying I must have been a princess of Middle Earth, and that I had some Took blood in me. Well, I thought maybe I should check out this Tolkien guy, so I wandered over to the bookstore and bought LOTR. I was really surprised at how good it was! I especially loved Eowyn’s defiance of the Witch King, which is still one of my favorite parts. It was so beautiful! The writing was so strong, and passionate, and – I don’t know, I just thought it was a great book.

Well, that guy and I broke up, but I kept my LOTR books, and read them every few years. I even heard about this Silmarillion thing, and bought it, but couldn’t get into it very much – too many confusing names! But I would pull out LOTR every few years, and every time I read it, I would just be re-amazed at the depth and beauty of the writing. And I could never read the Eowyn part and the charge of Rohan without tears coming in to my eyes, much to my annoyance (I thought tears were a sign of weakness back then).

I graduated and moved back home, and went to work at a radar company as a software engineer in research/new product development. I met a wonderful guy and was fortunate enough to have him love me back, and we married, and started our family a few years later, and I quit my job to stay home with the kids.

Then came the movies. Yes, there are many parts that are horrible!! Yes, they really foul up some of the characters!! Yes, there are many wonderful parts that are left out. But … they got some things right, and after watching FOTR in the theater, it was like someone had punched me in the stomach and knocked the breath out of my body. I literally physically ached from the beauty that Tolkien had created, and that had come through visually, at least in part, on the big screen.

I started searching the Internet for all things Tolkien, and came across Michael Martinez’s informative and interesting articles, which I devoured. Then one day, I looked at the Tolkien links he listed, and noticed this Entmoot thing …

I just lurked and read posts for a while, then agonized over choosing my user name (I wanted Idril, but it was taken, so RÃ*an was my next choice). Then I made my first post – and the rest, as they say, is history!

I met so many wonderful, interesting, intelligent, friendly people through Entmoot. I read the Sil and just fell in love with it. I learned about the books beyond LOTR and the Hobbit, and started buying them and enjoying them, too. Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales (where I fell in love with Tuor!), Letters of JRRT, Morgoth’s Ring, etc. etc. I taught myself to write in Tengwar and had great fun with it. I enjoyed discovering, and then taking sides in, the various “unsolved mysteries� (do elves have pointed ears? Do balrogs have wings?) I discovered the Quote game, and am still amazed at how we Tolkien geeks can figure out these quotes without referring to the books! It was just so wonderful to talk with people that knew and loved Tolkien’s works, and loved discussing the various nuances and back stories and histories and things like that. A place where you could say “don’t be so hasty!� and everyone knew you were referring to Ents! A place where you could talk about the Athrabeth and actually find people who knew what it was! It was like I had a pent-up flood in me that finally found an outlet, and I posted like crazy!

After about a year and a half, my Tolkien flood finally slowed down, and I started to discover the General Messages forum, where I was intellectually stimulated and challenged by people with radically different viewpoints than I had. And I enjoyed how we could hold a no-holds-barred (except no rudeness allowed!) intellectual discussion on things like evolution/creationism in GMs, then go over to the ME forum and laugh over a quote, or the Sil forum and discuss the question of why Tolkien used singing in the Ainulindale creation story.

So this California girl is really looking forward to finally meeting the great Professor one day, and thanking him from the bottom of her heart for keeping up the fight and getting such a great work to publication so others could be blessed by it, and how through his work, she got to know some absolutely wonderful people from all around the world. When I see the beautiful ocean off the coasts of California, I think of Eärendil and the Silmaril, and I always mentally wave across the miles to my friends over the water. When I see the lovely rolling hills around San Luis Obispo, I think of the Shire, and remember the bookstore where I first picked up those funny books, and how I though the author’s name was “Irr Tolkien� for years because the “J� was written rather stylistically and I didn’t realize it was the initials “J.R.R.�. When I see the stars at night camping in the mountains of California, I think of Varda and the Elves, the people of the stars. When I see the waterfalls in Yosemite National Park in California, I think of the beauties of Middle Earth. And I love the same God that Tolkien does, even though California is many thousands of miles from England, and I feel a fellowship with him in that area of life that is so special to both of us.

SO – thank you, God, for making such an awesome universe and such amazing, wonderful people; thank you, Professor Tolkien, for creating and sharing your beautiful stories with us; thank you, Ben, for making Entmoot; thank you, mods and admins, for keeping it in shape; and thank you, Mooters all, for making such a special experience in my life!

I’d like to try to work through the Entmoot members’ list alphabetically, through the next few weeks, and write a line or two about all the Mooters I know and special memories I have of each of you. You guys are so awesome! You are like a handful of shining, sparkling jewels, all different shapes and sizes and colors and cuts and intensities, and I treasure you all.

So Mae govannen - well met! - and I look forward to the next 10k posts!