Today would have been Tolkien's 126th birthday, so let's raise a toast in honor of the grand master...



-M

Let's smoke some delicious Old Toby pipe-weed together in celebration.

My first glimpse of the hobbit was when the Rankin-Bass animated movie was on broadcast TV. I didn't see all of it, it was a weekend night and we were visiting family friends who had it on and I saw the dragon and was engrossed, but had no clue it was tied to a book. It was probably 1978 or 1979 (the movie was released in '77 and it was while I was living in CT, and we moved to Maine in May of '80, so that was the window I saw it in. I was 8 in '77, so was like 9 or 10 when I first saw it.

I quickly learned it was a book but didn't encounter the book itself until after we Moved to Maine when I found this edition in the school library when I was in 6th grade, so it was fall of 1980.



I devoured it and asked for a copy of my own for Christmas that year, and I got this edition...



The elementary school library only had the Hobbit, not the Lord of the Rings. It did also have Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, which is what I read immediately after reading the Hobbit.

That summer I got a copy of Fellowship for my birthday.



and used birthday money to buy the Two Towers as well...



but I had to read Return of the King from the jr. high library once I got back to school in September, as things were real tight financially and my parents couldn't afford any extras outside of occasions like birthdays and X-Mas, and I had no access to earn my own money and no allowance.

That summer after 7th grade we moved back to CT, and my older cousin gave me his copy of Return of the King (well sort of, he had gotten in trouble for smoking pot and his step dad blamed all the fantasy sstuff he wa sinto and mad ehim give it all away, it's how I got my first Conan paperbacks as well).



but the front cover had the art cut off (he had put it up on a corkboard to decorate his room).

That summer I also found this in a used book store...



and since we were staying in my grandparents 3 family Mark Twain era house in downtown Hartford for the summer before we got our own place in the fall, I didn't know anyone, had no one my age around and lots of time to kill, so I reread the entire trilogy twice that summer and the Tolkien Reader twice.


I ater started collecting different editions of LOTR, and got all of the white 1979 edition of the Hobbit and LOTR, the yellow/blue/green/red edition I first read LOTR in, and the oversized illustrated edition of the Hobbit I had first discovered in the library. My favorite though was this boxed set...



which is the only version I kept of all of those.

-M

I got a copy of the Silmarillion for Christmas of '82 when I was in 8th grade, but failed in my first attempt to read it at that time.

-M

I did finally play in a Lord of the Rings rpg many, many years later, but it was a different system...



it's been about 10 years since that game though. I played a dwarven loremaster and my wife played one of the Rohirrim in a game set between the events of the Hobbit and the Fellowship. It is one of the most fun rpg experiences I have had, in large part due to our friend Jonathan, who ran the game and is one of the biggest Tolkien fanatics I have personally known. The boy's ability to recall and retain the most obscure bits of Middle Earth lore was just impressive.

-M

Great subject for discussion, berkley!

I first became aware of Tolkien's work in the early '80s via the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. My best friend back then, David, introduced me to playing D&D when I was about 8 or 9, and that got me into fantasy generally. Although he was the same age as me, he had already been reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for a year or two, having "borrowed" the books from his parent's library (they were a couple of old Hippies and very into their sci-fi and fantasy literature).

Myself, I didn't actually read any Tolkien at that age, being much more interested in Star Wars. But, as best friends do, David and I talked constantly about our passions and obviously Tolkien came up a lot, so I kinda got to know the characters of Middle-earth almost by osmosis. However, I do remember reading short excerpts of The Hobbit on occasion, when I stayed over at David's house -- I guess this would've been 1982 or 1983, when I was 11 or 12 -- and like you berkley, it was this mid-70s paperback addition that my friend had...




David also had the Lord of the Rings Fotonovel, which was a comic book made up of stills from the 1978 animated movie, and I read that a lot at the time too. That's how I first became familiar with the story and characters of The Lord of the Rings. I actually picked up a copy of this Fotonovel recently for purely nostalgic reasons, and here it is...






Despite my best friend's enthusiasm for the books, I didn't read The Hobbit or The Lord of The Rings in their entirety until I bought my own copies in 1986, aged 13. First I picked up a brand new paperback of The Hobbit, and it was this particular edition that I had...




Then, as luck would have it, I found the single volume paperback collection of LotRs at a jumble sale some months later for a ridiculously low price, like 20p or something! It was this late '70s paperback edition that I got...




Once I'd actually read these books, I became fully obsessed with Middle-earth and would re-read them again and again as a teenager.

It would've been 1987, when I was 14 or 15, that I found a copy of The Silmarillion gathering dust in the library of my Secondary School, but, as I noted earlier in this thread, I struggled to get further than about a chapter into it. Since then, I've tried another two times to read that book and every time I end up giving up after about a chapter. I am definitely considering a fourth attempt after reading people's comments in this thread about how best to approach it.

Since David and I were both into fantasy role-playing games and books like Dungeons & Dragons, Fighting Fantasy, Pendragon, Tunnels & Trolls (along with other non-fantasy games such as Call of Cthulhu, Star Trek and Judge Dredd), it was a no-brainer that we'd start playing Middle-Earth Role-Playing, or MERP, when it came out. Wikipedia says that MERP was first published in 1984, but we definitely weren't playing it that early. I remember playing it from 1987 or so, until about 1989. Maybe it came out later over here in the UK, or maybe we were just slow on the uptake.

Anyway, as the '90s dawned and my 20s came, I began to read Tolkien less often, preferring instead to get my Middle-earth fix from the BBC radio dramatisations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which I purchased in these two rather attractive cassette collections...






I'm not sure I read any of Tolkien's books in my 30s, although I continued to listen to the above radio dramatisations fairly regularly. Plus, of course, the Peter Jackson's LotRs movies started coming out, which I loved (his Hobbit was terrible though!). I have the extended edition DVD box set of the LotRs trilogy and I still think that they are fantastic cinematic adaptations of the books -- much better than we fans had any right to expect them to be.

I last re-read The Hobbit about four years ago, and I re-read The Lord of the Rings only about 18 months ago. These days I have a set of late '90s hardcover editions of The Hobbit and LotRs, with the trilogy being in a box set. My copy of The Silmarillion is a 1977 first edition hardcover. My original mid-80s copy of The Hobbit was given away to charity when I upgraded to the hardcover, and my late '70s LotRs basically fell apart from re-reading. Here's what the Tolkien section of my book shelves looks like today...

Around 1980 (I was 15 or 16), there was this series of novels in the small books section at The Bay... I recognized the writer as the guy who had written The Hobbit, but didn't really know who J.R.R. Tolkien was. I must say the massive number of pages was a little daunting (600 pages for the first one alone!) but there was something really alluring about it. I looked at it for two-three weeks and finally bought the first volume.



I had a hard time getting through the first few pages (in the Shire) but as soon as Frodo and Sam got underway I was completely engrossed. I read the three books as a junkie does heroin, although I stopped right before the last chapter, realizing that once I was done the adventure would be over! I managed to restrain myself to just a few pages per day.

Next I borrowed my sister's copy of The Hobbit, which I enjoyed tremendously. There was such joy in that book!



After that, the logical thing would have to go for The Silmarillion... but that was no longer available in French, and my English was still approximative. The next best thing I could get my hands on in the following years were these two green books translating Tolkien's poetry and collecting short tales like Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle and so on. 

I also got a few paperbacks about Tolkien's work, mostly because there was Tolkien's name on the cover. (From what I can recall, these books were okay).



I would re-read Lord of the Rings every few years, explaining the battered state of my copies. The Silmarillion was released again in the mid '80s, but my first exposure was a disappointment; I expected an adventure, not a history lesson. (My opinion on the matter changed completely over time!)

In 1989 I inherited a friend's English versions, although I'm still waiting to find the right hardcover copy. 

This is my Tolkien shelf today.



The Father Christmas letters is a really cool one, unrelated to Middle Earth but full of the writer's humour and skill. (He was a pretty good illustrator, too!)