Homage to Tolkien

I first read The Hobbit when I was fifteen.

Even though I was a reader, I had avoided Tolkien because the kids at Sequoia High School who liked him were hippies who danced around in the woods.

A friend of my brother, Conrad Praetzel, whom I greatly admired because he was older and played the guitar way better than me, suggested I just look at the table of contents, so I did, and those titles looked good. I absolutely loved that novel.

Then I started The Lord of the Rings and was completely undone. I so wanted Tolkien’s world to be true.

Later, I paid homage to Tolkien by writing my English Literature MA thesis on “Tolkien’s Moral Vision in The Lord of the Rings.” Even later, I addressed the C.S. Lewis Society of Oxford on “The Sense of Time in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” This talk was published first in Mythlore and later included in Joseph Pearce’s, Tolkien—a celebration.

When I was just beginning my thesis, I bumped into one of my San Francisco State University professors as we were both crossing 19^th Avenue, and when I told her what I was writing about, she said, “Why are you wasting your time on that?”