The Snowflake Challenge; day 11

I fell behind on the challenge, but I’d like to finish it anyway. But for some reason Day 10 is taking forever for me to get done, so I jump to 11.

Day 11

Share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

When I was eight my father started to read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for me. Both my parents read aloud for me, and before Tolkien my father had read all the Narnia-books for me, which I had loved. LOTR was something else. Before I had often re-enacted favorite stories with my toys, taking care to mimic the book as close as i could. LOTR opened up my imagination in a completely new way. I don’t know why; perhaps it was the sense of an universe which expanded far beyond the books. And there was Strider who at first was so ambiguous and mysterious. Before he and the hobbit’s had reached Rivendell, my imagination was working overtime, and I thought of what I hear din a new way.

For ten years I reread the trilogy over and over again, a well as everything else I could find by Tolkien. And I made up stories. Lots of stories. If I found Tolkien lacking in anything, it was the absence of female characters, so at the beginning I simply made up an extra in the fellowship who could be Legolas sister or a hobbit girl, who basically just followed along. Then they started to get their own storylines. I remember one about a young Dunadan woman who never was directly involved with the fellowship, but still was affected by the events. I’m afraid there was a number of stunningly beautiful elf maidens with silver hair and purple eyes. I distinctly remember one with eyes that changed colour after mood too.

I never wrote any of these stories down, apart from short synopsis, but it was certainly fanfiction. Hopelessly Masry Sue-ish fanfiction, I’m sure. But LOTR was for me the book which made me realise you could take a finished work and create something new out of it. Even if it took me another 20 years, or so, before I actually started to write. And by then i had long left Tolkien behind. I haven’t read the books since I was around twenty. I still know them by heart, though.