Something Tookish woke up inside him

Throughout The Hobbit, Bilbo’s two halves—Baggins and Took—continue to clash. His Tookish half, representing adventure, curiosity, and a bit of wildness, has lain dormant for many, many years until the dwarves arrive on his doorstep and begin singing of the Lonely Mountain far away. Then, Tolkien writes, “Something Tookish woke up inside him.”

This conversion experience, if you will, lies dormant within all of us. As a first post on this new blog, I want to briefly describe when something “Tookish” woke up inside of me—put another more mundane way, this is how I came to be a fan of these books.

In my senior year of high school, my best friend dragged me along to watch a movie with him. I enjoyed video game RPGs but somehow and for some reason I had never come across Tolkien’s books. To be fair, I was not much of a reader as a teenager, though when I was younger I had been an avid fan of King Arthur and medieval history.

I was not particularly excited to watch this Fellowship of the Ring movie, not at three hours long at any rate, but to say that my life changed in the course of those three hours would be an understatement.

Prior to January 2002, I wanted nothing more than to be an accountant. I was an odd kid, in love with numbers, and I was enrolled in a correspondence course on accounting in my free time. But by the time I graduated high school, that dream was over.

From January until the end of May, I read everything by Tolkien that I could get my hands on. I was insatiable. Something had woken up inside of me, rekindling that same Tookish part that used to chase down stories of King Arthur or read about obscure Anglo-Saxon kings.

The only books I had enjoyed reading as part of my school experience had been Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales.

As a ten-year-old, I had sat in the public library for a few hours, paging through Encyclopaedia Britannica and making a list of all the pre-Norman English kings. My mom could tell me about William the Conqueror but nothing before that.

These parts of me burst into new life as I read and read and read.

Around April that year, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, who would go on to become the Valedictorian of our graduating class. He could not understand why I would waste my time reading Unfinished Tales. What was the point of reading a story that had no ending?

When I read The Silmarillion, I felt like I was reading something truly ancient, something biblical even, and perhaps even more than The Lord of the Rings, this collection of mythic stories called to me. Now, twenty-two years later, I have read The Silmarillion twice as many times as LotR.

The most important transformation, however, is that I abandoned all desire of becoming an accountant. I began writing stories and wanted to study literature and history. There were no concerns of practicality, of getting a job. I just wanted to dig more into the kinds of stories that had inspired Tolkien’s own writing.

When I read Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in college, I knew I wanted to be a historian. I never quite made it, but I did lecture literature in the California State University system for a few years before settling on teaching high school.

Every year for the past couple of years I have ended the year be reading The Hobbit with my students. I say “with” because I try to make it a communal experience. We listen to an audiobook. Make a book club of it. I begin by telling students–these are seniors about to graduate high school–that I want to share a book that is part of the reason I became a teacher. I do this to illustrate that literature truly can be a transformative experience. I do not require long essays or deep analysis from students. It is the end of the year, after all.

Instead, I try to share my passion and love for these stories with the idea that students should find something similar in their own lives, something to drive them, something to inspire them, something they can turn to again and again to be refreshed on life’s long road.

I try to inspire them to listen a bit more often to their Tookish sides.