http://www.tolkiensociety.org/ed/tolkienreadingday.html
How Tolkien Reading Day came about
It all came about because a New York journalist enquired whether there was such a thing as a �Tolkien Reading Day�.
- My grandparents were fishing folk from Buckie in the north of Scotland, carriers of the old stories and legends, and the trilogy has filled a certain hole in my life. I have many friends here in New York who were equally moved by the book, reignited by the film, and we all wondered: is there any day devoted informally to readings from the trilogy, in the way that �bloomsday� is devoted to Joyce?
That enquiry was sent to the Tolkien Society in January 2002. The then committee liked the idea and after a certain amount of discussion picked March 25th as �Tolkien Reading Day�. The rest, as they say, is history!
Thank you, Sean.
Why Choose March 25?
There are two obvious dates that could have been chosen: Tolkien�s birthday: January 3rd; and Bilbo & Frodo�s birthday: September 22nd. However, both of those dates already have events happening on them. There is the Birthday Toast on Tolkien�s birthday; in September there is Oxonmoot in the UK and other societies around the world also have events on or close to that date.
The next thought was to go equidistant between the two dates: which comes out as mid-May or mid-November. But there was a tag-line to that suggestion:
- Or we go for a good date from the books, such as Downfall of Sauron (March 25th).
Well, we chewed the fat as committee do, with comments like:
- Other factors affecting date: I think a school day would be good (we could suggest that a passage be read at assembly if they still have such things). I like the �equidistant� suggestion, preferring May as that�s the longer gap (in November, Christmas is looming, and the Birthday comes as a nice finishing event to the holidays, so it seems as if it's just a few weeks away! In May, the whole summer stretches out before Oxonmoot.
So the following suggestions were made:
- March 25th: downfall of Sauron
- April 8th: Field of Cormallen
- May 1st: crowning of Elessar (but May Day has other connotations, these days)
- June 25th: Elessar finds the sapling of the White Tree
- Midyear's Day: wedding of Elessar and Arwen (so much for Shire Reckoning; this isn't in either June or July!)
We finally went for March 25th:
- I think that March 25 is probably the most suitable date, for a variety of reasons.
- It is a date of renewal: the change from the Third Age to the Fourth, the change from fear and oppression to new hope. Re-reading Tolkien (or, for many, reading him for the first time) will be an act of renewal and refreshening their appreciation of his works.
- The TS, and we are sponsoring this project, doesn't yet have an event in March; we do in the subsequent months: April = AGM, May = Tolkien Weekend, June / July = Seminar, August = Summermoot, September = Oxonmoot.
- A reading event will probably be an indoor activity (though not exclusively, of course), March, certainly in the Northern Hemisphere, is more suited to indoors than out. The other dates (May & June in particular) would be better served with something outdoors.
It was decided that to do it properly there wasn�t enough time to organise one for 2002. We had a busy AGM coming up and, more importantly, the copy date for the last Amon Hen before March 25th had passed, indeed it had already gone to the printer. So, the first �Tolkien Reading Day� was scheduled for March 25th, 2003.
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