"The English speaking world is divided in those who have read The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings and those who are going to read them" (Sunday Times)
I have always had a pretty strange relation with "The Lord of the Rings", basely founded upon an earlier mistrust and a later (unbridled) passion. It has to be sincerely said that I started reading Tolkien after reading other (and much inferior) fantasy novels; the reason may seem stupid, but I had refused buying and reading "The Lord of the Rings" until I was sixteen just because the "title didn't inspire me". Aye, because of some kind of infancy alchemy I have always imagined something completely different, just like the "Lord of Flies" (what's the link, I guess? Mind's mystery!!!) but stuffed with a lot of horror scenes (the notorious Black Riders). Moreover, the cartoon-film really impressed me when I was a child, singling out "The Lord of the Rings" as an undesirable book to be read.
But fate decided that one fine day (a long ago) I was in the right place, at the right time. I was at the supermarket, in the book selling sector, when I saw on a shelf the nth reissue of the Masterpiece: the famous (at least for me) Rusconi's twenty-fourth issue of November 1991, rigorously paperback (it means popular issue, 13 pounds for a 1400 page tome!).
Maybe because of the type, maybe because of the front-cover picture, maybe because of its weight (I've always loved heavy books), in the end: something clicked inside me and I said to myself: "This book has to be read!". After only two hours I was barricaded into my bedroom, ready to plunge into the Unknown, hopeful but still frightened. I avoided the Introduction, just like any other respectable sixteen-year-old reader, and so I found myself before the first page, the white one with the writing "The Lord of the Rings" and below, in italic type, the famous lyrics:
Three rings for the Elven-Kings under the sky
Seven to the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone
Nine to Mortal Men doomed to die
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
I spent five minutes at least in reading and re-reading those eight lines without understanding them, but Mordor's gate had already been crossed: "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them". And I was there too, chained into the Darkness. I had been found and the Lidless Eye (you will understand it by reading) would never let me run away anymore. A kind of magic? Maybe. But a subtle and impenetrable one, a spell which needs a long, very long formula to be cast; and this formula is the whole book itself. This magic slowly captures you, without hurry; it is a slowly taming rhythm, if you let it drift you away, or it will throw you apart if you don't accept it. "The Lord of the Rings" is simple at reading, or at least it seems so, but one does not have to count the pages left to get at the end of it. It is not a book like others: it is a rich, complex, multiform work, but thanks to its extraordinary suppleness, it can be read even as a normal fantasy novel, to amuse oneself during a boring summer or a rainy winter.
Therefore, this invitation is addressed to everyone, from the most simpleton student up to university teachers, from youths to less youths; and it is also addressed even to the people who have already read it, because while reading it again they will find thousands of little unnoticed details, they will appreciate unexpected symmetries, they will better understand the meaning of Tolkien's world, besides having the possibility to spend many pleasant hours in the company of his little, but still great, characters.