"'Well, now we're off at last!' said Frodo. They shouldered their packs and took up their sticks, and walked round the corner to the west side of Bag End. 'Good-bye!' said Frodo, looking at the dark blank windows. He waved his hand, and then turned and (following Bilbo, if he had known it) hurried after Peregrin down the garden-path.They jumped over the low place in the hedge at the bottom and took to the fields, passing into the darkness like a rustle in the grasses."
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 3: Three Is Company

Cleaning the attic was the foremost item on the agenda over Thanksgiving, and I ran across the traces of many childhood amusements and escapes… decks of tarot cards, old comic books, photographs of best friends and first loves. The whole effort was sustained by our nostalgia, our sense of personal history in watching these things pass before us to go to other storage, or thrift stores or trash cans. Every time you handle an object that you haven’t touched in a decade, you feel the texture and permanence of your past, vibrating up through your fingers.

I think the calendars are the most personally poignant of these artifacts. There is a great history of wall calendars illustrated with scenes from Tolkien’s works, which I was collecting long before Peter Jackson’s three films came around to infect Tolkienism with the faces of celebrities. There was John Howe’s 2001 calendar, and 2002’s calendar illustrated by Ted Nasmith, both of which were engorged with rich, intense paintings… but these calendars already had a sort of concept-art feeling to them, with theatrically-staged, dramatically-lit images that seemed to gesture toward the films that were coming out around the same time.


Strange, isn't it, how a little encounter like that, a chance meeting with a few emotionally-charged artifacts, can cause sudden swerves and turbulence in the inertia of everyday life?
The other Tolkien artifact I found that struck me was a map of Middle Earth I had bought at some point, a big glossy spread folded like a highway map and tucked in a card-stock cover. It certainly wasn't as beautiful as Michael Kaluta's calendar, looking more like standard decorative art assembled to indulge a consumer fan base, but it's full of information -- exactly the thing to hook us fanboys -- and this is what drove me to stick it in my suitcase to take back with me to Brooklyn. This map had an interior, a network of references and entry points, constellations of associations and emotions encoded into place names. It made me want to go back to that world.
I'm very lucky, in this regard, that Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is coming out in fourteen days. I might have picked up the books anyway, but with this film coming into view on the horizon, it's like Middle Earth is beckoning me back, promising a festival in my honor. Jackson did an exceptional job of giving life to that world, better than any of us expected, and when I saw his Fellowship of the Ring back in 2001, I felt like I had already met the characters on the screen and already visited those places he had brought to life.
It's hard to believe it was that long ago. As Frodo left Bag End with the Ring in Jackson's adaptation, so I was leaving that home in Collegeville -- the same home that my mom's finally moving out of -- for my first year in college. Like Frodo, that was the end of my time as a steady resident of that particular household. For the past 11 years, I've been making new homes in new cities, carrying the wisdom of that old house with me into each new community. And mom is finally leaving that house, too, just as Bilbo is leaving The Shire in another Tolkien adaptation. It's uncanny how our lives and our stories echo one another.

It's great that I can go back to the world of Middle Earth so easily. That's one of the great comforts of an imaginary universe... you can pick up the book, and you'll go right back there, to whatever degree you can abandon yourself to the story. My real childhood home, that house in Collegeville, won't be so easy to return to once somebody else owns it. As with Bilbo and Frodo when they left the Shire, I'll always hereafter be a stranger there. That home isn't an open door, eternally waiting for me in case I need to go back to being a sheltered 12-year-old fantasy nerd again. Rather, it's the bank of a river that I've had to cross on the way to kingdoms where I've had larger parts to play.
So, instead of counting on that home being there, a site for escape and nostalgia, it's up to me to carry it with me into the new homes that I create... my encampments and conquests in the strange land of adulthood, this new fantasy where I've lost myself once again.