the beacons are lit

Unlike the subject of this story, whose tale famously grew in the telling, I shall try to keep this short. THE LORD OF THE RINGS film trilogy will be released in theaters this weekend, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. I’ll go ahead and admit right up top that I’ve never read the books. (My name is Josh (hi, Josh!), I purport to teach storytelling, and I’ve never read the Lord of The Rings.)

But I have most certainly seen the films (extended editions, of course, duh). Literally, I've seen them every winter since they were released. All three. Above all other stories, these films have become a family tradition at House Shelovia, starting with my parents, and filtering down to the roots of all three of my siblings’s houses, including every one of our children, cousins and nieces and nephews and daughters and sons, 15 of us all told. Every single child in our family can now instantly recognize the smallest phrases of Howard Shore’s iconic score (we mix it in with our Christmas music), as well as random bits of dialogue uttered in memes or actual human interactions (One Does Not Simply…). When so triggered, our minds immediately fall back into the heather of Middle-Earth, the place we actually, really sort of wish to live. My family’s group chat is called The Shire.

Of note. The young storytellers of Written Out Loud have now literally willed into existence their own version of Hogwarts. They have named it the Written Out Loud Academy of Storytelling and Writing. There are a few dozen of these staggeringly talented youngsters roaming around the Academy’s virtual halls, all between 10 and 16 years old or so, exuberantly chatting about their favorite stories, sharing with each other their original ideas, drafts, poems, and works-in-progress. It is storytelling heaven on earth: an astonishing daily campfire of writing, storytelling, and above all, fellowship. Just look at their glorious avatars, all self-designed, each representing the story-self they have dreamed of becoming:

They are almost all obsessed with fantasy tales of one sort or another: Wings of Fire, The Land of Stories, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Star Wars. But for the overwhelming majority of even these story-savants, The Lord of the Rings is just out of their reach. The movies predate their birth by a decade or so, and the new-ish Rings of Power Amazon series didn’t quite pierce the culture, and bring a new generation of young fans into the proverbial fold. A near miss. Young folks’ ignorance of the story has made me realize that the film trilogy arrived even longer-ago than we Gen-Xers may realize. 25 years is a long time. Let’s not even dare to measure how long it’s been since the books were published: 72 years, good lord. As consistently as they have remained in print, the ornate, slow, practically Olde Englishe writing style has all but disappeared from young people's ability to comprehend, rendering the books opaque to the overwhelming majority of younger readers. And yes, truth be told, even to me.

But the films remain vibrant as ever, and I believe, deeply accessible, even to the young. They’re a bit scary for the under-10’s, perhaps - but I’ll be bringing one of our best and brightest 12-year-old storytellers to the theater with me, to watch him experience the actual telling of the story for the first time. He’ll feel in his bones the story’s influence on all that followed, the anime and manga and fantasy sagas that fill his mind now, and shaped him. At several points along the journey, something will go click.

Reader: join us! If you’re interested in a watchalong this weekend, grab a single film, or all three. I'll be in Stamford, CT, and the release is nationwide (Fathom Events is distributing.) As the wise man once surmised, my gut tells me that this story hasn’t aged a day.

-Josh