Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber

all fantasy trilogies, but don’t bother bringing that up; no one’s going to listen.)

 
    THE BLACK RIDER
    The Fellowship of the Ring
    Chapter IV: “A Short Gut to Mushrooms”
    Children, before we go on with this tale, let me remind you that all this took place in prehistoric times, before the Internet, before mega-malls, before the inexorable spread of the mammoth “chain” bookstores across the land. Why, in those days, if you wanted a cup of coffee, you could not walk to the corner Starbucks because there was no corner Starbucks, and all we had were woodburning corners that could only be reached uphill both ways in the snow! Dark times indeed.
    Of course there were bookstores, just not in my neighborhood. This meant that when I wanted to get my grubby paws on the trilogy, I had no option but to check it out of the library. The trouble was, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to read it. Someone else had checked out The Fellowship of the Ring , leaving the other two volumes behind.
    I suppose I could have waited for The Fellowship to be returned. A rational person would have waited. But I was a woman possessed, for whom patience was just the name of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. I checked out The Two Towers and started reading the trilogy from the middle outward. I admit that this left me a little bewildered to start with. (“Who is this guy they’re giving the Viking funeral for, and how did he die, and oh wow, is it just me or is that elf Legolas really hot?”) But then, I’d had lots of practice being bewildered by all of those “Modess . . . Because” ads, so poor old Boromir’s launch party was small potatoes as far as maximum total reader ferhoodlement went.
    To make a long story short, I read the trilogy in two-three-one order, and came away from it a changed woman. The next thing I knew I was reading other fantasy novels. I no longer cared whether or not the boys found out about my shameful solitary vice. Who needs boys when you’ve got elves, man?! (Given that I was then attending an all-girls school, my chances of getting an honest-to-Seventeen date with a boy were about equal with the odds of being swept away to Galadriel’s grove by someone tall, dark, and pointy-eared. And since the chances of finding a nice, Jewish elf were about what you’d expect, this was also the first time I even vaguely considered the possibility of falling for someone Different.)
    The stage was set for the final degradation.
    One evening, having declined Lord Ruthven’s invitation to the ball, choosing instead to lounge about the family manor in my peignoir and bunny slippers, I turned on the television. There he was. Him. My him: Legolas the hottie elf. I could tell it was Legolas because he had pointy ears and, as everyone knows, all elves have pointy ears.
    Previous to beholding him I had not realized that all elves likewise had pointy sideburns, puddingbowl hair-styles, upswept slanty eyebrows, and blue velour shirts, but I was willing to learn. By the time I finally came to comprehend that what I was watching/drooling over was not a televised version of the trilogy (William Shatner would not make a good hobbit in this or any other universe) it was too late: I’d become hooked on Star Trek . I was doomed.
    You might think that once you are wallowing in the fantasy/science-fictional gutter there is nowhere lower for you to sink. Shows what you know, bucko.
    Let us move the clock forward a tick or two, bringing us to my bright college years at Vassar. At that time, Vassar was not yet coeducational, so we are still talking about a heavy concentration of female hormones all dressed up and nowhere to go but the dorm TV room. We attended scheduled airtimes for Star Trek and Dark Shadows with a zealous regularity that left enclosed orders of Carmelite nuns looking like flibbertigibbets. But all of our merry schoolgirl crushes on emotionless Vulcans and haughty vampires did not mean we were averse to dating real men.