Lord of the Binges

In Binged(opens in a new tab), Mashable breaks down why we binge media, and what it does to us.

Tolkien is in. Again.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, war veteran and Oxford medieval language professor who died more than 45 years ago, is about to be the subject of another of those global waves of fame that so perplexed him when he was alive.

This May sees the release of Tolkien(opens in a new tab), a big-budget American movie focused on his early years. Last year, the world’s richest man(opens in a new tab) gave an estimated $250 million to the Tolkien estate so he could develop what he hopes is the successor to the global smash hit Game of Thrones, which ends this year. It will be a billion-dollar(opens in a new tab), five-plus season epic titled — you guessed it — Lord of the Rings.

A TV show. A movie series. An animated movie(opens in a new tab). A $25 million musical(opens in a new tab). At least $3 billion in merchandise. An endless treasure trove of memes(opens in a new tab). Lord of the Rings has now become so many versions of itself that the original novel — a decade-in-the-making sequel to the only other novel Tolkien actually finished in his life, The Hobbit — seems buried under all the layers. And yes, Tolkien conceived Lord of the Rings as one novel; it was published in three parts because paper was expensive in Britain after World War II. We think of it as a trilogy largely because of the Peter Jackson movies. See what I mean?

Jackson’s trilogy, three bottles full of lightning that earned 17 Oscars and nearly $3 billion at the box office, is by far the most likely way you or anyone else experienced Tolkien’s tale. Sure, the book sold an estimated 150 million copies(opens in a new tab) (30 million more than even the bestselling Harry Potter). Many read it; some read it multiple times. But I'm willing to bet most of those copies sit on shelves, looking at their owners reproachfully, bookmarks stuck in an early chapter. 

The book weighs in at nearly half a million words. There are long speeches, strange songs and a whole lotta Elvish. In our distracted social media era, in the Golden Age of TV, who has the time? 

For many nerds, it’s enough to know that Jackson remained largely faithful to the story. He removed(opens in a new tab) some extraneous characters, foregrounded others(opens in a new tab) (in part because Tolkien wasn't exactly the best at writing women(opens in a new tab)) and rewrote(opens in a new tab) the ponderous dialogue. 

When one wants some Lord of the Rings action, one calls in one’s Fellowship, orders pizza, and binge-watches the extended editions of the movies over the course of a day, pausing for bathroom breaks, nerd arguments and more pizza.

One does not simply binge-read the whole of Lord of the the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien in less than 24 hours.

So of course, I set out to do exactly that. 

This quest did not make a lot of sense. I’m no speed reader, more of a science fiction nerd than a high fantasy fan, and my relationship with Tolkien can be best described as “complicated.” 

I went to Merton College Oxford(opens in a new tab), where he taught, lived in the building he occupied(opens in a new tab) after his beloved wife Edith's death, and sat under the trees that were said to have inspired(opens in a new tab) the Ents(opens in a new tab). But I never actually read Lord of the Rings. 

Not with my own eyes, that is. My mother the Tolkien fan had been so keen for me to get into the book that she read it to me, over a year’s worth of storytimes by the fire, when I was 7. This is both a fond memory and also, in retrospect, way too early. I had only just fallen in love with The Hobbit, so it was hard to hear my hero Bilbo Baggins pushed aside for that upstart kid, Frodo. 

Harder still when the whimsical magic ring that made you invisible (how I had wanted one!) became a nightmare, a source of the most terrible addiction, an object that must be consigned to the fires of hell or destroy the world.

Talk about growing up fast.

The “Scouring of the Shire” chapter at the end was apparently so traumatic that either my mother never read it to me or — like Jackson, who left this sad denouement out of Return of the King — I’d blocked it altogether. I wanted to (re?)discover how the real story ends. But getting the reward without slogging through the journey seemed an offense against the greatest ghost of my alma mater.

In my 20s, with the first Jackson movie coming out, I bought one of those 150 million copies of the book. This doorstop moved with me from house to house. Every time I unpacked, I felt a little more guilty about avoiding it. Especially when I wrote a book(opens in a new tab) on Star Wars and discovered how much George Lucas was inspired by Tolkien. (Obi-Wan=Gandalf, droids=hobbits, Death Star plans=the One Ring, Death Star=Mordor.) 

Each time I picked up the doorstop, however, I glanced over at the other great fantasy authors I hadn’t yet experienced in any medium. Ursula Le Guin, Robert Jordan, Robin Hobb begged to be read. I sent my limited fantasy-reading tolerance their way instead.

Eventually, this book I hadn’t really read and a story I’d experienced too much started to feel like a giant psychological knot. It stood in for every book I should have read by now, from The Odyssey to Ulysses. If I read it, every sentence would recall the full-of-possibility 7-year-old me. Decades of nostalgia had settled over a story that was itself filled with nostalgia for a lost age. I could not bear it. 

Unless … unless I binge-read instead of binge-watched. Unless I sliced through that knot with a read so fast, I wouldn’t have time to even consider switching. Peter Jackson’s later movies based on The Hobbit were so bloated that it's easy to read the book faster than watch the full 9-hour extended edition. Could the same be said of the book and the 11-and-a-half-hour extended versions of Lord of the Rings?   

I’m no speed reader, but I’m no slouch. Writing insta-reviews(opens in a new tab) of political bestsellers(opens in a new tab) on the day(opens in a new tab) they were released(opens in a new tab) has upped my game. I took an online test that clocks your reading speed(opens in a new tab) and predicts how long you could read various classic books. For Lord of the Rings, its estimate was 11 hours and 9 minutes — 21 minutes under Jackson's total. Bags of time!

Of course, I could no more keep up that pace (more than a page a minute!) than I could sprint a marathon. But nor could we watch the movies without frequent breaks. Surely I could knock off half the Middle-Earth monstrosity in that time, at least, and wrap it all up inside 24 hours. I'd avoid the biggest time-waster of reading piecemeal: picking up the narrative thread over and over, wracking our brains for who's who and who did what to whom. 

The question I dreaded in those fireside sessions — “remember what happened last time?” — presents no hurdle to the binge-reader. 

Perhaps this is how we gain focus in a fragmented age — go in really hard and fearless on a big old intimidating book. Aren't we already spending weekends lost in narrative? Maybe our binge-viewing skills are transferrable, and more of us have the power to spend a rainy Sunday knocking off, say, War and Peace (estimated read time: 14 hours) than we know.

It may not win you high fives from co-workers at the watercooler on Monday, but screw them. You’d feel achieved and edified, with one less doorstop on your bucket list.

Some friends blanched when I told them what I was doing. It was as if I was going to stuff piles of delicate sushi into my face Nathan’s hot dog contest style(opens in a new tab). Wasn’t this stuff supposed to be savored? “I love the books,” wrote a follower on Twitter, “but that’s a ridiculously cruel thing to do to yourself.” He had a point. Would Tolkien be tut-tutting in his North Oxford grave?

On the other hand, his epic is filled with characters talking about how unrelenting their journey is, but they’re going to stay cheerful and do the job regardless. Why shouldn’t we enhance our novel-reading experience, this novel above all, following their example? I work on a treadmill desk(opens in a new tab); I could walk every time the Fellowship walked, stop when they stopped, eat when they ate, rest for a few minutes or even nap when they slept. I could blast the complete Howard Shore soundtrack — or better yet, the ambient mix(opens in a new tab) — on repeat. 

It would be the closest you can get to VR Lord of the Rings without a headset. 

But I was unwilling to consider the flip side of all this augmented reality: that the quest would leave me as dazed, as drained and as stubbornly resistant to finishing as Frodo on the final march to Mount Doom. 

The ground rules were simple. 

I would read all 1,000 pages of Lord of the Rings as fast as possible. (Tolkien’s foreword and his bloated hundred-page appendices would not be part of the quest; nor for that matter would The Hobbit or The Silmarillion(opens in a new tab).) I would use one stopwatch app for my reading time and another for the total elapsed time. I could skip between a printed copy and an ebook version as I wished, but the audiobook was not allowed. (At 54 hours’ duration(opens in a new tab), it would only slow me down anyway).

Nothing would be consumed beforehand to make the task easier: no movies, Cliff’s notes, or other performance-enhancing substances. I wouldn’t have to pronounce all that Elvish in my head, but I couldn’t skim so fast that I started skipping sentences. If I honestly didn't understand what I just read, I would read it again. 

There would be regular breaks between each of the three volumes, and between the two books that make up each volume. I would try to meditate. I would try not to livetweet. I would keep myself well-fed and extremely well-caffeinated.

Of course, these best laid plans went out the window as soon as I began the first (and at 400 pages, by far the longest) of the three volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring. 

HOUR 1-2

Ugh, the prologue. Tolkien kicks off not with Bilbo’s firework-filled 111th birthday party, but with a history of Hobbits, which tells us more than we need to know and raises more questions than it answers. We learn Hobbits used to be taller in the olden days. Now, I know we’re not supposed to apply modern biology to old-school fantasy, but that’s a sign that a species is not getting enough nutrition, or there’s too much in-breeding. Poor Hobbitses.

Such meta thoughts swirl around my head unbidden. My brain is desperate to avoid the quest by going off on any tangent it can find. Unable to tweet, I find myself crafting a kind of mental Twitter feed. I see that Bilbo’s father was called Drogo, and I pause to wonder whether that name inspired George R.R. Martin.

It’s going to be a long day.

HOUR 2-3

Walking while reading is helping. Listening to the overly flute-filled soundtrack is not. It's helping me waste time by mentally categorizing what parts of the book made it into the Jackson movies and which didn’t. 

Example of the latter: Fatty Bolger, a kind of Fifth Beatle Hobbit who accompanies Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin out of the Shire and selflessly acts as a decoy. He is not to be confused with Fatty Lumpkin, a pony that shows up shortly thereafter. Was Tolkien trying to lose a few pounds when he wrote this, I wonder? 

Another reason the soundtrack isn't working is the sheer number of songs in the book. And with that we must welcome Tom Bombadil, magical folk-singing sprite in green stockings who is too weird for all the adaptations. Hello also to Tom’s wife Goldberry, literally the only woman with a speaking (or singing) role in the first third of Lord of the Rings — and a character sadly more forgotten than Tom.

I remember enjoying my first encounter with cheery old Tom at age 7; now he seems as creepy as a clown. His instruction that the Hobbits shed their clothes and run around naked doesn’t help.

Still, I’m not complaining about the proliferation of songs; every verse Tolkien writes means lots of lovely white space, which moves those pages faster than ever. (Sample lyrics: “Hey! Come derry dol! Hop along, my hearties! Hobbits! Ponies all! We are fond of parties.” Hashtag Bombadil banger.)

HOUR 4-5

Enter Strider. I remember my 7-year-old self stubbornly refusing to call him Aragorn, son of Arathorn (or any of the half-dozen titles Tolkien subsequently bestows on his favorite king-to-be). It’s good to see the Hobbits mostly keep calling him Strider too. Hobbits know what’s up.

At the Prancing Pony inn, the Hobbits “were suddenly aware of great hunger, for they had not eaten anything since breakfast.” Hey, me too! I prop the book by the toaster oven and make something approximating a lembas(opens in a new tab) bread wrap.

A pit stop for the ponderous speeches at the Council of Elrond (which desperately needs a TL;DR), and the Fellowship is on its way. Sadly, Boromir never utters the words “one does not simply walk into Mordor” — that immortal meme(opens in a new tab) is a Peter Jackson invention. Instead, Elrond tells the Hobbits “you do not understand and cannot imagine what lies ahead.” 

I stare at the 731 remaining pages and feel called out.

HOUR 6-7

We reach the Mines of Moria faster than expected, and it’s more than a little weird how nobody even mentions Gandalf after he apparently dies fighting the Balrog. Gimli the dwarf seems intent on sightseeing instead. Luckily, Lady Galadriel shows up just in time to help these overly stoic dudes process their grief.

Reading fatigue is starting to set in, so I switch from physical book to iPad. I sample all available fonts, convinced that one will help me read faster. It works, sort of. I complete Fellowship of the Ring … some 2 hours behind schedule. I blame Aragorn, who is way more mansplain-y than I remember and has acquired about 17 names at this point.

Still, time for a well-deserved 10-minute break!

HOUR 9-10

I’ve been trying to ignore all the unintentional double entendres in Tolkien’s prose so far — and when I say “ignore,” I mean “highlight so I can laugh at them later.” But volume 2, The Two Towers, is making it harder, so to speak. On the very first page Aragorn “stiffens” at the “horn of Boromir.” (There is an unfortunate amount of stiffening in this book.) Captured by orcs, Merry and Pippin are repeatedly “licked” by a “cruel thong cunningly handled.” It is possible that this is only funny because I am ridiculously tired.

HOUR 11-12

And so to the battle of Helm’s Deep at the very midpoint of the book. I don’t normally enjoy reading long descriptions of battles, but the greatest set piece in the movies also turns out to be Tolkien’s finest hour. There’s more than a whiff of Henry V about his prose here. It’s as if Shakespeare had been assigned to write a World of Warcraft novelization.

Any modern writer would switch back and forth between the Aragorn-Legolas-Gimli-Merry-Pippin-Treebeard narrative and the Frodo-Sam-Gollum narrative. But Tolkien stubbornly refuses to do so. They occupy book 1 and book 2 of The Two Towers respectively. There’s something compelling about the way he goes deep on each story.

By book 2 he has me in his thrall, as if I’m Gollum and the story is the Precious. I can’t stop following it around, even though I probably should bed down for the night.

HOUR 13-14

I’ve switched to reading on my phone, which is making it way too easy to keep reading in bed at 2 a.m. Every time I think I’ve put the phone down for the final time and am nodding off, I wake right back up with the need to know what happens next.

Uncannily, the Hobbits are starting to act as fatigued as I feel. In my sleep-deprived state I start to imagine that Tolkien is taunting me directly. Mentions of sleep suddenly accelerate around the end of the Two Towers, cropping up twice on page 572, four times on 591, twice each on 600 and 612, three times on 632, a record six times on 714. And that’s not nearly all.

Page 617: “They knew they must not sleep for a moment.” 655: “Don’t you drop off while I’m still nodding, Mr. Frodo.” They reach Mordor and stare at it “like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off.” Faramir shows up, and wakes Frodo up early. Gollum acts like an annoying alarm clock, not once but three times:

'Are we rested? Have we had beautiful sleep?’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’ 

'We aren’t, and we haven’t,’ growled Sam. ‘But we’ll go if we must.’

They go, and he falls asleep again on the next page.

I feel you, Sam.

HOUR 15 -17

I finally dropped off in the lair of Shelob(opens in a new tab), which made for uneasy spider-fueled dreams. When I wake in the morning I’m within a chapter’s distance of the final (and shortest) volume, Return of the King. But Tolkien is up to his fatigue-enhancing tricks again. On the first page of Return of the King, Pippin isn’t even sure if he’s awake or asleep: “his memory was drowsy and uncertain.” Yup.

Gandalf tells him to go back to sleep, and then bellows at the men of Gondor: “fare you well, and sleep not!” Sheesh, talk about mixed messages.

Meanwhile, something terrible has happened to the prose. If the first book of Two Towers was positively Shakespearean, the first book of Return reads like a bad Old Testament parody. Almost every main character is now using the words “Lo!” and “Behold!” I wish I was exaggerating: there are 15 “lo!”s and 19 “behold!”s in the book.

Aragorn leads a company “upon the journey of greatest haste and weariness that any among them had known — save he alone.” Great, now Aragorn’s a fatigue hipster. 

HOUR 18

I was trying to avoid the big screen version of Lord of the Rings. So it’s ironic that the only way I can push myself through the last 150 pages is by … putting the book on a big screen. I’ve got the Kindle app mirrored to my Apple TV(opens in a new tab), and I’m scrolling slowly but surely down the home stretch.

It’s kind of like watching the credits roll at the end of the film, if the filmmakers had opted to put a book in the credits. My speed has increased to the point where I’m kicking myself that I didn’t utilize the TV like this from the start. I’d be finished by now.

HOUR 19

If you’ve only watched the movies, you may wonder why Sam was never tempted to wear the One Ring, and acquire all the power that goes with it, when he had to carry it for Frodo. Was he really that saintly? No we was not. “Wild fantasies arose in his mind, and he saw Samwise the Strong, hero of the age,” Tolkien tells us. I would have loved to see Jackson’s take on that, but we have to make do with the 1980 animated version:

HOUR 20

We have now fully entered the realm of scenes that are better in the book. The Mount Doom chapter is an absolute mic drop; it’s Tolkien back to his Helm’s Deep level of writing. For anyone who ever wondered why the Great Eagle that bears Sam and Frodo away from Mount Doom didn’t just drop them there in the first place(opens in a new tab) and save everyone the trouble, the answer is way back in the first volume: “I was sent to bear tidings, not burdens,” Gwaihir the Windlord(opens in a new tab) tells Gandalf. 

The Ring would have been the heaviest burden of all. But two unladen Hobbitses? No problem.

HOUR 21

And then we came to the end — possibly the longest and most heartbreaking denouement in fiction. Tolkien lingers on every character’s goodbye until you feel your heartstrings fully tugged. (Try not to cry when we encounter Bilbo one last time.)

Thanks to earlier chapters, I finally understand what’s going on with the Elves; the destruction of the One Ring has diminished their power too, and they aren’t sailing away into the undefined west like hopeful immigrants. They’re fading away like ghosts at sunrise.

The Scouring of the Shire isn’t quite as traumatic as I feared, although I am shocked to see 19 unnamed Hobbits die in the process of reclaiming it. You’d think a man like Tolkien, who survived the battle of the Somme in World War I, would help us remember the names of the fallen. 

But I find myself marvelously unprepared for the sting in the tale: Saruman the White, a.k.a. the late great Tolkien fan Christopher Lee(opens in a new tab), living in Bilbo’s old home, Bag End! My mother, who read the book four times before reading it to me, couldn’t remember this either. Maybe it feels like such a transgression by this point that we block it in our minds.

But all’s well that ends well; I won’t reveal exactly how, go read it yourself. Sam gets married and has oodles of Hobbit babies. Frodo sails away with the Elven tide. My wife has joined me on the couch for the on-screen scroll through the final chapter, and we’re both weeping. It reminds me of our best binge-watch moments. 

21 hours, 57 minutes. I’m done, in less than a day of reading time — plus another half a day of sleep and mental health breaks, for a total of 33 hours. I'm not satisfied, and make a list of all the ways I could have read faster(opens in a new tab).

Still, the burden has been lifted, the psychological knot sliced clean through. An ending has been uncovered decades later; for me, not even the final episode of Game of Thrones will achieve this level of delayed gratification. A point has been proved, and though I feel enriched and enveloped by the slow-burning wonder of literature, I am resistant to trying it again. War and Peace in a weekend? Maybe. In a day? No way.

I stand up, stretch, draw a deep breath, and echo Sam’s last line: “well, I’m back.”