A History of Falling in Love

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting a reflection on three of my favorite things: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Switzerland, and Collin. I’ll take you on a little time traveling story as I recount how these three things came to be interwoven and turned into the vacation/anniversary trip of a lifetime. The first two installments I’m posting are a history of falling in love with each, and the final will be about our recent trip to Switzerland that was a celebration of all three of these favorites.

Today, I’ll start with falling in love with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Prologue: Concerning Tolkien Fans

I was 20, and a junior in college when the Lord of the Rings movie premiered. I knew nothing about Tolkien or the story; Darby and Jason (my sister and brother-in-law) asked Collin and me if we wanted to all go see it together at the Newark Movie theatre—a cheap theatre in Delaware so sketchy that you sometimes wondered if your shoes were going to get stolen off your feet if you got a little too lost in the movie. Nevertheless, I did get lost in the movie. I was riveted. I also had no idea how intense it was going to be, and I was on the edge of my seat the entire movie. Back in those days, (I just aged at least 10 years as I typed that), they released the movies one year at a time. And this was before the internet was ubiquitous or streamlined (I aged another decade) and way before smartphones (maybe you can attend my funeral at the end of this blog since at this rate I will have died of old age). So I waited a full year to know the next installment of the story with The Two Towers. After that, I waited another full year for the Return of the King. I could’ve read the books or asked any nerd who already had read it, but I loved living in just the portion of the story that I knew at the time for each of those years. The deep truths of the storyline and the relatable, universal themes went deep into my psyche over the course of those three years.  

Then, one of the first Christmases we were married, Collin bought me a beautiful hardcover copy of the complete novel. I was so excited, and I couldn’t wait to read it. I cracked open the gorgeous elvish-designed cover, and there within lay the story that would live on within my soul forever. Soon into reading Tolkien’s eloquent literary style, I discovered that Tolkien’s love of descriptive, poetic details is a far departure from the pace of a movie directed by Peter Jackson. So I stalled out somewhere before Frodo even left the Shire, honestly. I was still a bit burnt out from undergraduate school (remember Collin and I got married a week after I graduated, so the experience of undergrad was very recent) and the fact that the anthropology major is second only to the literature major in terms of how much reading is assigned. So, I took a hiatus from any reading that took intellectual work. 

But then, one winter, many years later, I found myself living in a beautiful home in Vermont with a large, welcoming, stone hearth that held our woodstove which was ablaze with the coziest of roaring fires from late October through April. I had two snuggly little buddies at the time—much like hobbits at those ages—who loved nothing more than a cup of tea, good homemade bread and butter, and a snuggly read aloud session by the fire. I knew just the story I wanted to impart into their souls; and so we began on a literary journey that affected us all profoundly. 

We read through my beautiful hardbound copy cover to cover—the entire novel consisting of all 6 books in one binding—and I have never worked so hard to not cry as I did at the end. I managed in the end, somehow, to withhold my tears because I didn’t want to subtract from the story and interject my own feelings into it. I wanted for them to have their own feelings, their own impressions, their own experience of how the story landed for them. 

Within the next few days—possibly over a week or so—we all talked about the characters as we missed spending time with them. We digested the story together in bits and pieces as reflections and memories would arise. “Remember when Sam…?” Or “One of my favorite parts was when…” We were divided on our opinions about Gollum; I tend to take the Samwise view of Gollum, and Juniper is one hundred percent aligned with Frodo. 

And then, before too long, we all agreed: let’s read it again. After all, winters in Vermont are long, and we had nothing else demanding our time in those glorious days when they were 5 and 8. One of the best decisions I have ever made was to let go of the worry that we should be “doing more” as homeschoolers or an American family. The months we spent all cozied up reading Lord of the Rings by the fireside will live on as one of my greatest treasures in life. I know its one of Senya and Juniper’s greatest and most significant experiences of childhood too, whether consciously or subconsciously. It’s woven deep into the fabric of their beings.

So, you’d think that was where the story of our love for Lord of the Rings ends—and it could! And it would still be worthy of cherishing and planning a trip around Switzerland, retracing the journey that inspired Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But no, that is never where the experience ends with a soul that likes to live life on a mythological scale. 

Chapter 1: A Long Expected Hobbit Day

As homeschoolers, when you decide to make your life about learning and leaning into literature (or any subject, really) in an embodied way, you may find yourself inviting your fellow homeschooling friends who are equally obsessed with Tolkien’s Hobbit and LOTR books out from California to have a Hobbit Day in Vermont. And because you’re all homeschooling nerds, you may extend the idea from a day of celebration into a week-long, immersive experience living into the stories.

This meant that each day we all participated in a Waldorf-style Circle Time that my friend Jessamyn created. Jessamyn went through a Waldorf Training program to become a professional Waldorf teacher at a reputable Waldorf school in Los Angeles. When she graduated, however, she decided to homeschool her twins and apply all that mastery to homeschooling instead. So, for years we (all those of us who were lucky enough to homeschool with her) got to benefit from her expertise and gifts. When we moved away from that group in California to relocate to our mountain dream land in Vermont, we were very sad to leave her, her kids, and the group. Little did I know during our tearful goodbye that my personal favorite expression of her mastery as a Waldorf instructor would take place a year later in the gorgeous setting of our special piece of the Vermont forest during the most spectacular autumn display of foliage.  

For those of you who don’t know what a Waldorf Circle Time is (I definitely didn’t until I stumbled into that homeschool group), it involves a group of kids and adults standing in a circle, and together you go through a predetermined set of songs, verses (like poetry or rhymes), and movement (this can be a range of things but when kids are on the younger side involves acting out the actions in the songs and verses) and activities (it’s foggy now that I’m years away from it, but this is when bean bags and silk scarves usually come out)—all sneakily accomplishing all kinds of learning and motor skill development in a creative and fun way. You repeat the same Circle Time each time you get together (daily in Waldorf schools, weekly when we were doing a homeschool co-op), so that by the end of the learning block, you’ve deeply internalized the material from that particular Circle Time.

After about a week or so of daily Tolkien Circle Time, we had our big culminating event: Hobbit Day. We had an extensive repertoire of all the Hobbit Meals (Breakfast, Second Breakfast, Elevenses, Luncheon, Afternoon Tea, Dinner, and Supper). I was lead cook for the day. We had delicious menu items throughout the day, thematically named such as “Goldberry’s pie”, “Tater’s Precious”, and “Aragorn’s Athelas Tea”. There were crafts; the kids each hand sewed satchels for their quest, and they also wood-burned their names in Elvish into pieces of fallen wood that Collin harvested from our forest. Jessamyn brought these crafts from concept to reality with all four kids (including getting them all to learn to spell their names in Elvish). And then there was the quest: Collin planned a riddle-driven treasure hunt—covering a lot of our 64 acres—that led to a treasure chest of coins from Middle Earth among other things. He created all the riddles (there were many!), and he hid them all through the woods at the different spots where they would arrive as they solved each riddle. Somewhere in there we also made lanterns and went on a lantern walk at night to our secret bonfire spot deep in the woods. 

Ah, this is why it’s hard for some of us when our kids grow up and go to school, have iPhones, and want to hang out without us, not dressed as an LOTR character. But it’s all good. It truly does all have a place in the developmental richness that makes these humans into their own, rich beings. We had our Hobbit Day when we could, and it was glorious.