CNN has now officially recognized Tolkien Reading Day another in a growing list of misappropriated Gregorian Calendar dates applied to Tolkien’s confusing Shire/Numenorean calendar dates.
It’s all in good fun and if we have to blame anyone for the perpetual confusion it should probably be the Professor himself since he never anticipated the outrageous fandom that would evolve from the quiet readers of his books in the 1930s and 1940s.
I say “outrageous” only because I mean that what we do to express our interest in literary and cinematic franchises today was simply unimaginable back then. There was to my knowledge only a very small science fiction and fantasy community and their conventions and clubs were nothing like today’s fandom events and organizations.
No one in America would have called themselves Storm Troopers in the 1940s and 1950s that is for sure. George Lucas had to redefine the term (although it clearly evoked Nazi connotations at several levels) in order to make it more acceptable to fandom.
Tolkien’s calendaric manipulations have not been lost on scholars and fans. Many of us know that today (March 25) is not really his March 25 but to be honest I would have to reach for the book and calculate it by hand — or search the Internet for a tool that does it (and then calculate it by hand anyway to make sure the tool was doing it right).
And who wants to go to all that trouble? I remind people every year that September 22 is not really Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday but I usually write something somewhere about the date on that date anyway.
It’s just easier to use our calendar to celebrate his calendar. I get that and the mainstream media couldn’t care less I suppose.
Anyway after all that Happy Tolkien Reading Day. Pick a good passage.