Iavas, I just finished reading all of these. They are a wonderful collections of posts, and you do us all a great service.
Note: I have a low-ish post count for my time as a member, but, as will be seen, I make up for it in long-windedness.
Mecthild (surviving member)
Gender: Female
Joined: 17 February 2003 (but first posted Dec. 2003)
Age or age group when joined: I am the oldest person on most threads I have been on. I am thirty years older than the actor who played my favourite character. I am so old that in the fifth grade, when we lived in Tennessee, there still were “Colored” and “White” drinking fountains. In the 6th grade, when we lived in NYC, one could still ride the subway for a dime.
The Sound of Music and
Camelot were still running on Broadway. In the 8th grade, my big sister (who later went to Haight Ashbury to be a hippie) took me with her to see the Beatles and the Rolling Stones -- on their first U.S. tours. And, much teased by our teenaged daughter, I have only recently been able to stop calling a DVD, a video.
Nickname(s) : "Mech”; “Auntie Mechtild”; “Naughty Auntie Mechtild”
General stance on Jackson's LOTR: Since I expected any film version of these books to stink, I adamantly refused to attend
FotR when it was released.

(I never went to films anymore, anyway, so I hadn’t even heard of it until it was already in theatres.) I counted LotR as my favourite book (I had an intense love affair with it during my twenties), although I actually hadn’t read it in twenty years. But when I finally saw
FotR (on video) I surprised myself by becoming immediately enamoured of it. To me, these films possess true greatness -- despite their cinematic faults and infidelities to the books.
Description: (in her own words)
I did not know how to use the internet at all until late 2001, when a beloved pet’s cancer drove me to venture onto it. But nothing after that inspired me to go back to it until my unprecedented passion for these films. Seeing
FotR rekindled my sleeping passion for the books, too, as well as for all of Tolkien’s other writing. When I had done with that, I went on to all the secondary literature I could find. But the internet intimidated me.
Keenly anticipating TTT, I finally girded my loins and looked up “Tolkien” on the web browser. I found TORn. I looked there daily for film news after that. I never looked at its messageboards, not knowing what messageboards were. I also found TORc, but thought the news sparse and old. Long after TTT came out, I decided to read a review there; I enjoyed reading it so much, I finally joined TORc in order to post an appreciative comment. The one dip I made into the messageboard itself, though, landed me into a spammy, chatty thread that held no interest for me.
I did not look at a thread again until November of 2003, while feverishly awaiting the release of
RotK. I was too excited to resist, having no fellow-fans among my family or friends. Another random dip took me to “
PJ as Eisenstein.” At that point in the thread, posters were trying to figure out why they responded the way they did to the films. It was an aesthetic sort of thread. I read there the posts of other people who were deeply moved by the films -- even when their minds were in revolt over poor or senseless choices on the part of the filmmakers. This was my own position. In spite of all my intellectual objections, my heart and my sense of aesthetic appreciation had allowed me to be transported by the films. I found the films “sublime,” even. In fact, I swooned for the films. My perspective towards the films is one of (borrowing from St. Augustine) “faith seeking understanding.” I was in love, but it wasn’t enough to be in love; I wanted to know all about my new cinematic beloved. I wanted to know why I had fallen in love. And, I wanted to gush with other lovers.
Subsequently, I found “
Tolkien’s Moral Universe” and I was hooked on the Movie Forum. I lurked in many threads, all of a serious nature, but was held more by threads in which the perspective was one that sought to understand why the films worked, more than why they didn’t. Reading and posting in those threads, I learned massively more about writing, as well as about how to best comport oneself in a thread discussion. I saw some very bad behaviour, but more often saw modelled good-humoured, even hospitable behaviour, despite the strong feelings of posters.
After a strong bout of “First Viewing Syndrome” from watching the newly released
RotK, I fell over the edge and became a truly-madly-deeply sort of fan of the films. I was so besotted and was such a churning mass of emotions inside, I felt compelled to better understand why that was so. What was going on in me because of these films????
At this point I found what I will call the “wounded” threads, all of which seemed to ask why these films had touched people so profoundly, especially through the themes of suffering and sacrifice. Not surprisingly, these threads tended to focus on the character of Frodo. After
RotK, it was in the character of Frodo that my general swoon for the films found its most concentrated expression. After trying to maintain objectivity on even these fairly emotional, self-revealing threads (--all of which were in Movies except the often fascinating
Frodo’s Kitchen), I admitted to myself that I was essentially a swooner. Swooning is an aesthetically-centered behaviour, in my opinion. More than anything else, I am a fan whose response is an aesthetic one.
I looked for the Frodo swoon thread in Fandom, but thought it mostly chatty and terribly light-weight. When I returned later, having embarrassed myself by swooning openly for the hundredth time in an intellectual thread, I stuck around for longer and discovered that swooning can be quite intellectually satisfying. (And far more naughty and amusing than on more buttoned-up threads.

) After that, except for the invaluable
M00bies reads the B00ks, I have pretty much stayed in my Frodo-nook on TORc (not counting my “guest swooning” in MOME III, which was splendid fun). I would like to lurk and post more in Movies -- I was late to this party and I am not finished -- but I haven’t the time! Why? Because I am all wrapped up in a writing project of my own.
One of the things I’ve noticed about the LotR fan experience (perhaps more so in the swoon threads where people ‘fess up more about what drives them and about what they are driven to do by it), is that being a fan has been a tremendously exciting and revitalizing experience. We have not merely analyzed and admired, as watchers of the films. We have been inspired by them to be doers ourselves. For many of us, creativity that had been languishing -- dormant; even given up for dead --was sparked into a blaze by the passion for these films (and made all the hotter by our various swoons). Dulled imaginations were rekindled.
I have seen it over and over: LotR fans themselves moved by their love of the films and its characters to create – and at a time when they thought we were all washed up in the creativity department. *raises geezy hand*
Well,
HA!
As Miss Jean Brodie said,
“I am in my prime!”
I feel that I owe this renaissance -- this unexpected hitting of “my prime” I had despaired of -- to these films. And, perhaps just as much, I owe it to its fans, so many of whom have poured out their hearts and minds in these threads. I am massively indebted to you who have posted here. And, of course, I am in debt to the character of Frodo.
Who would have imagined Eros was lurking in Frodo Baggins, hobbit of the Shire? Not I. But, lo! I am smitten! -- pierced by a diminutive Cupid of the West Farthing.
And I just love it.
Awards: Best Swooner (or a similar title), MOME III Pageant, 2003
Nominations: Suave and Savvy Swooner, 2003
~ Mechtild