Eleventy-one: Re-reading The Lord of the Rings 50 years on -- part two

Book One, Chapter One: A Long-expected Party

 

 

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

I loved this from the start. I hadn't read The Hobbit, didn't know Bilbo, and I had come to read The Lord of the Rings from reading Robert E. Howard. So I must have been expecting something very different. Conan never had birthday parties.

But I remember reading this first sentence and a smile creeping onto my face. There was just something about it that was so promising of a good story. Looking back it reminds me of the way the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice opens wide a door to a world. Both sentences are steeped in a similar wry and parenthetical humor. 

I had always loved words, and eleventy-first was a fine new one to me, funny and wrong of course, but perfectly clear in its meaning. Perhaps it was especially amusing because I was eleven myself. Another word that soon popped up was queer, as in strange or outlandish and so not quite right, but I knew that one. My Irish grandmother used it in the same way the hobbits did, and she used grand just as they did, too, to describe something wonderful rather than large. She would also tell me stories about fairies and fairy mounds in the Ireland of her youth. Being the same age as Tolkien's wife, she knew a world far more like the one he knew than the one I was growing up in.* I begin to think that my images of the Shire and County Cavan overlapped each other pretty quickly. For me this was a good thing.

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*I could argue that growing up in New York City in the 1960s after the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants had passed into the West bears a certain analogy to growing up in the Shire at the end of the Third Age when the Elves were going into the West. But let that pass.