My father was a World War II guy, a combat veteran of the Pacific theatre. He experienced great loss as a direct result of the war, and though he barely had attended high school as a teen, he came home and read thick and extensive narratives – works by writers like Wouk and Michener — that I th ink were his way of trying to sort out the unspeakable. Years after his death, I met a war buddy of his who gave me a sense of what they saw, images that stay with me at night and makes me wish I could say to my dad: Now I see. It also helps me to appreciate — when I think back on the time maybe 60 years ago when my late brother, Dennis, brought home JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy from college — why my father picked up those books and started doing what so many of us still do to this day: He read them and reread them, again and again, over the years. Scholars of far more academic knowledge than what I bring to the table can debate all of this on a much deeper level, but it has always been my belief that LOTR is, in a way, an act of staggering and beautiful madness… that Tolkien, who lost his father in early childhood and then as a teen was thrown into a war of numbing and impersonal industrial slaughter, spent his adult life mapping out a vast mythology involving its own widespread bloodshed, cruelty and despair. Within those borders, he tried to provide fiercely intimate embers of burning hope as one small remedy to the most sickening and cynical examples of human nature. One of those embers, certainly, is Samwise Gamgee. The hobbit in the shapeless hat will be the focus – the star, if you will — of our annual Tolkien Reading Day in Syracuse, global birthplace of the event. It’s set for Saturday at 2:30 pm at the Betts Branch Library, at 4862 S. Salina St. Joined by my friend John Mariani — a gifted artist, a fine journalist and an extraordinary human being — we’ve been putting together this event for many years, bolstered annually by a crew of steadfast and soulful regulars, though this one has taken on a special meaning. For the first time, the Onondaga Public Libraries and my new journalistic home, The Central Current, have combined forces to support and promote our where-it-all-began Reading Day. Among the benefits of that alliance will be coffee and cookies for whomever shows up, and I suspect this coalition will continue into the future for as long as our Reading Day does. An image of the many books at one of our Tolkien Reading Days, courtesy Vicki Krisak. Credit: Courtesy Vicki Krisak In short: If you love Tolkien, you’re invited — and it’s free. How our little tradition came to represent the absolute birth of Tolkien Reading Day is a tale that still, well, blows my mind. Decades ago, I was one of the readers invited to take part in a gathering at Le Moyne College for “Bloomsday” — a celebration of James Joyce and “Ulysses,” a literary masterwork. Once I went home, as a guy whose life was deeply affected by “The Lord of the Rings,” I had a thought. I emailed the international Tolkien Society in England, wondering if the officers there had ever thought about doing a “Tolkien Reading Day.” A while later, when I saw an Associated Press story on how the Tolkien Society was creating a global Reading Day event – based around, no spoilers here, the March 25 date of the culminating sequence — I was pleased and thought: A lot of people must have made a similar suggestion. Not long afterward, I received an email directly from Tolkien Society officials, saying they wanted to credit me as the founder of Reading Day. My immediate response: If I was the founder, pretty clearly we needed to do one in Syracuse. The global theme of this year’s Reading Day is “unlikely heroes.” The way we see it, that comes in a world in which qualities like mercy and empathy and kindness are increasingly discarded as weakness, rather than held up as the bedrock elements of humanity — which certainly parallels the emotional landscape in Middle-Earth at the time of the quest, as epitomized by, oh, Saruman or Denethor. A Tolkien Reading Day years ago, at the Syracuse Marriot Downtown, or the Hotel Syracuse. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current The book, then, is about warring ideals, and one can argue forcefully that Sam — in the end — becomes the pivot for everything a lot of us believe. So here’s the way we’ll do it, following long tradition: We’ll have an open discussion at the start about Sam and his role and what he means to people in the room, and then we’ll read “The Choices of Master Samwise” and “The Tower of Cirith Ungol” … two great, great chapters about Sam … and if we have time we’ll read the climactic chapter in all of it, “Mount Doom.” When we read, we go around the circle — each person reading exactly one page at a time — and there’s a kind of quiet throwback beauty to it all. It is, above all else, a reading event, held at a time when reading itself is a threatened quality, and our Tolkien day, hopefully, is a quiet reminder of why it matters. If you can’t make it, you’ll be able to Zoom in and read along by following this link, though for practicality’s sake we have to keep actual participation to the readers in the room. As for me, I will — as I do each year — be thinking of my dad. In October 1988, not long after my mother’s death, he was admitted to the hospital in my hometown, Dunkirk. He initially seemed fine but went into a swift decline, and my siblings called — I was working then in Oswego — and told me I had better get home and fast. By the time I arrived, he wasn’t really conscious. He died a few days later, at 70. John Mariani’s magnificent reading day poster, 2026 Credit: Courtesy John Mariani On his hospital bedstand, open to the middle, was “The Two Towers.” I didn’t, as I should have done, check the page. But I still have that copy, and will bring it — as I always do — to Reading Day. I don’t know exactly where my father was in that book, but there is a powerful chance that his last waking thought on Earth was alongside Frodo and Sam, standing with them as they recoiled from the nauseating smell of the dead marshes on a ledge along the Emyn Muil, where Sam said: “Well, master, we’re in a fix, and no mistake.” It’s a thought that suits the theme this year, on Tolkien Reading Day. The post Sean Kirst: For Saturday’s Tolkien Reading Day, celebrating Samwise Gamgee at the Betts Branch Library appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less