The Hobbit and I
The Philippine Tolkien Society is holding an online group reading and discussion of The Hobbit. In line with this, they asked for suggestions on what topics to discuss on the mailing list. After some thought, I proposed: "Where (or who) were you when you first read The Hobbit."
This in itself revved me up for a sentimental muni-muni sans pipeweed and smoke rings. Here is what I posted for that topic:
It was 1979. I had never read LOTR because in Pampanga, bookstores where rare (there were no SM's around our country, and thus, also no NBS's). I had heard of LOTR from some of the fantasy/sci-fi magazines I'd picked up from the PX stores in Dau, mainly because I wanted to read as much Star Wars news as possible. The magazines kept mentioning LOTR as the best fantasy books of all time. A couple of Star Wars reviews even drew the parallels with LOTR. These things wouldn't escape the geek eye. It was torture to know about a book that I could not have access to.
1983 changed that. I left Pampanga and moved to the Kalayaan dorm at UP. My roommate, named Henry Ma, was a geek (what else?) from Pisay. We both liked F/SF novels and we started to talk books, which led to LOTR and my gripe about not finding a copy. It so happened that he had just been to the new 5-storey NBS in Cubao and he told me that he'd seen the complete set there (it's important to note that at that time, Araneta Center, not Megamall, was the center of the universe). He told me that it would be great to start with The Hobbit first.
After Saturday CMT, I went to NBS in Cubao and there, with hands shaking with excitement, I picked up and browsed all books in the cycle: the 3 LOTR volumes, The Hobbit and the Silmarillon. I blew my stipend on the first four books and started the long trek to there and back again.
I'd like to think 1983 was a pivotal year for our country. Certainly it was for UP. Lean Alejandro was the USC chairperson and he roused the sleepy UP students to march to Malacanang to protest tuition fee increases and other issues. I, who had vowed to my parents not to join a rally, was so moved by Lean that I joined the protest action. It was the first demonstration since Martial Law clamped down on student protests. 1983 was also the year Ninoy was assassinated and the economy started to crumble, which in turn set to motion the fall of Marcos, the rise of Cory, and the murder of Lean.
At Lean's wake, I learned that his favorite books were the Tolkien books, and that he drew inspiration from them. I realized that all of us, like Lean, will one time or another be put in Bilbo's (or Frodo's) position, forced to play some role that we did not really bargain for. Like Bilbo, we all would like a piece of the action. But when we get in the thick of things, once we realize that everything we had ever valued may be lost, we start to wonder if adventure is really what we bargained for in the first place.
The Hobbit and LOTR will always be a place that I can visit, from which to draw and renew life.
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If you wish to join the group reading or just participate at the discussions, please read: http://digitalsolutions.ph/couchkamotereviews/hobbit_group_reading
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Interesting
Philippine Tolkien Society... Haha interesting that such a society exists. :)
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Photographic hobbyist blog
Hobbits and lembas and bibingka
hi benc:
what a cowinkydink of sorts that I found your blog today. opo huli na sa panahon.
just wanted to share that I read the hobbit in the Fiji Islands, of all places. I found it in the library of the University of the South Pacific. It completed the reading experience of LOTR for me in '86, for I'd brought copies of LOTR to reread---it was a great time for me, because my family lived with a partial view of the sea and we were always twenty minutes from shore, a great chance to dream of elven ships, lembas and distant fictional lands.
Also, I recently wrote a piece on kakanin for a local mag, in which I mention that our bibingka galapong (a Kapampangan invention!) resembles lembas, the elven waybread that staves off hunger, and keeps fresh in leaf wrapping. :)
Corinna
Hey Corinna! Kumusta? Tama, o
Hey Corinna! Kumusta? Tama, our bibingka is lembas. Did you hear that the US military has actually made army rations from a bread-based meal that soldiers can eat while on the go? Sounds lembas-inspired to me!
The Hobbit, Lean and the University Student Council
This was a comment I received by email from Tito Raffy Aquino:
Hello Benc and everyone. I was telling Benc about getting to bed at 3 AM the other day because I just had to finish ROTK on DVD. Just a few hours ago, over dinner, I was trying to get Bea to listen to me as I read aloud from Smith of Wootton Major. Then after doing the dishes, I check our mail and what do I see? A posting on hobbits!
[snip]
Alright then, I'll bite. Lean and Tokien is it?
I was with Lean in the 1981 USC (he was our Vice Chairman). One of his gifts to me was this new appreciation for things British. First were Dunhills (nabibili ng medyo mura sa Shopping Center, doon sa stall na meron pang maliit na mezzanine). Next were Chariots of Fire and Galipoli, both in lousy betamax format. Then came Tolkien in yellowed pages and ripped but lovingly scotch taped paperbacks.
(There was actually a Tolkien book in the house in Kamias and I remember it gathering dust on the shelf there, lying unopened since the long night before Iluvitar wove his music. But I found the shorter Reader�s Digest articles more readable then.)
I digress.
With the Tolkien books Lean lent me came precise reading instructions which I had to take an oath to obey. First, the tirology, then the Hobbit which was to be read at least twice. Only then was I to wade into the genesis (how do you spell �Silmarillon�?) but always with the four other books close at hand -- for rapid cross-referencing, you see.
That was it. I was hooked. I abandoned trying to understand Feuerbach�s Historical Materialism or trying to like Mao�s poetry. I think I even lost interest in your Tita Acay for a while (I was contemplating on courting her na that time). It was Tokien for me, 24-7.
For bringing me to Middle Earth, I repaid Lean with a draft for a statement of the USC on some raging national issue then. My proposed title was �An Ancient Evil Lurking in Deep Places� which was, of course, an allusion to Gandalf�s description of the Balrog, roused by the orcs in their raid of Moria (si Balin kasi, sakim); and the last line was ��these are dark times and strange things happen in dark times.� Also, it had drawings of dwarves and Hobbits which we commissioned from Zaldy Zuno, Collegian artist and creator of Tibo, Iskolar ng Bayan (the dwarves looked somewhat like the seven companions of Snow White though)!
That statement was a hit! As intended, style-wise, it was a clean break from the �kunot-noo� writing then emanating from the various centers of student activism even in UP. And more importantly, it was a conscious attempt to be more �pop,� to critically engage the mass of students at their own level rather than forcing them all at once to ascend to the consciousness level of the CPP Politburo. And this because of Tolkien!
I remember Lean rushing with freshly mimeographed copies of that piece of Tolkienese propaganda down the hall from the USC offices at Vinzons Hall, intending to show them to Roan Libarios and JV Bautista at the Collegian office. They weren�t there so he instead went down to the Office of Student Affairs and pestered Louie Beltran (then Dean of Student Affairs and Lean�s chess playmate) into reading it.
Lean was our resident Istari, our personal Gandalf; and I think he was tickled pink playing that role. He was impatient and had a temper with the Peregrins and Merriadocs surrounding him and yet he never treated anyone with condescension. He was never unkind and was generous to a fault, often treating us to small feasts at Trellis the same day he received his monthly allowance from his father in Saudi. He spoke in riddles and cryptic one-liners and enormously enjoyed the consequent irritation of our simpler minds.
On a deeper, perhaps even unconscious, level, Lean was like Gandalf in two ways: First, he had a profound appreciation of how the past determined the future. Second, he had a gnawing fear of not understanding and not knowing. So Lean was always studying the Elder Days and the passing of the ages, for clues as to how this society is moving (and how it may be guided) towards an uncertain future.
He was always after us to go beyond the Maoist templates dominating activist underground schooling. He had us look even farther back, to Russia and the socialist movements in Germany and England, and of course to revolutionary France, to the Jacobins and Robespierre. He would insist on us reading Marx and Lenin themselves, without made-in-Beijing spectacles, while at the same time acquainting ourselves with Cuban, Vietnamese, Nicaraguan and other post-Mao experiences.
He never tired of reminding us that the dramatic risings of the early �70s would not have been possible without the nationalist scholarship and relatively quiet intellectual ferment of the late �50s and early �60s.
I think it was one of his missions to recreate that ferment in UP in the �80s. But he would never venture into this without first attempting to know and understand. So what does he do, he and Jojo Abinales hire your Tita Acay in the summer of 1982 as their paid-a-pittance researcher for a comprehensive study on the UP Student Movement which he was preparing for Third World Studies.
That study was not to be completed unfortunately, because he was again conscripted to run for the USC, this time as its Chairman. I was Chairman of Samasa that year and we swept the elections. Lean Alejandro was Chairman of the UP Student Council and 1983 � your pivotal year � was upon us. Thereafter, your Tita Acay and I went to law school and Lean went to his Gorgoroth outside Diliman, and beyond that, to his glory and his peace.
Sabi nga ni Bilbo:
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
So there. I have purged myself and I have reached catharsis. I am at peace and I go to meet my sleep.
Tito Raffy
Hobbit
Hey, Benk, I also discovered the Hobbit and LOTR in 1983, though that was in high school, thanks to St. Paul Manila's high school library. I was a pretty shy and poor kid, on scholarship at an exclusive rich girls' school, so my refuge was the library where I had access to lots of books which my parents couldn't afford to buy. Then and now, I loved the smell of old books, and browsing through the shelves one day, I came upon the Hobbit and the complete LOTR which apparently, no one has read since the early 70s, going by the library card. I knew nothing about sci-fi or Tolkien or his books and I feverishly read everything in one week. And then re-read them again, and again. Fortunately, honorariums from the Collegian made it possible to buy my own set in college :)