29 July 1954: Fellowship of the Ring Is Published. The ‘Lord of the Rings’ Changed My Life.

Fr Zed muses on LotR, how it helped lead him into the Church and how sad it is that the newer generation only knows the Trilogy from the movies.

From Fr Z's Blog

The Lord of the Rings changed my life.

I read it in 7th grade. It coalesced several factors, including foreign languages (by this time German and Russian), playing and listening to Classical instrumental music and opera, chess, etc. (not sure I can include hockey), into a fledgling receptive world view which would, with elements to come later (Latin and Greek and a car that wouldn’t start) lead me into the Catholic Church.

I resent enormously the gratuitous and even malicious changes made by the Peter Jackson crowd in the movies.  While some of the production elements and action were great, some were explicable only because they must have hated the characters and what they stood for.

I feel genuine pity people who saw the movies first, before reading the books, thus spoiling their first impressions… their first “printing”.    I was talking to a young fellow not long ago, who really had no idea of what Tolkien created, knowing only some things through the movieses and video gameses, precious.  He didn’t think it all that important to read the books.    How sad.

I warmly recommend getting a set of the books and, if you have children, reading them aloud before you go anywhere near the movies.

The Hobbit & the Lord of the Rings