Tolkien MeMes #8. When did I first read “The Lord of the Rings”? A mystery in library cards

One thing that I can only highly suggest is what every librarian, archivist, and museologist will tell you all the time: document, document, document!

Now, way more than thirty years after the fact it is difficult to determine at what point in time exactly I read “The Lord of the Rings” for the very first time.

The story ‘as is’ I have told a bombadillian amount of times and it has become a legend in its own right 😇

But… Is it true? In the sense of… WHEN did I first read it?

Let me take you on a journey - maybe even a quest - into the past.

Earlier MeMes # (Opens in a new window)7 | #6 (Opens in a new window) | #5 (Opens in a new window) | #4 (Opens in a new window) | #3 (Opens in a new window) | #2 (Opens in a new window) | #1 (Opens in a new window)

A scan of my second (?) librard card with the British Council Library, Cologne

And so it begins…

I have found in talking to Tolkien fans around the globe that their ‘origin’ story very often has an emotional connotation of particular importance.

“I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time in XYZ circumstances…” is one of the answers you often get, reminiscing about the impact reading this book - or any other works of Tolkien - had on the person I am talking to.

So my origin story is of great importance to me, too.

Unfortunately, I am not quite clear as to the year.

And here is where the library cards come in.

Part of my story is that I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time in former Yougoslavia beside the Adriatic Sea because on the very first day I had a massive sunburn and there was nothing else to do but read the only book we had with us.

The 1972 first paperback edition of LotR by German publishers Hobbitpresse¹.

And one of the first hints you can get from these two details is:

I wen to the British Council directly after reading The Lord of the Rings and returning from our summer holidays. That is, the week after our return I had my first ever British Council library card.

The stamped date on the card will tell you the one card picture above was extended from January 1990. I do know with absolute certainty I did not turn 18 the same year or the year after my return.

If - as I believe for the time being - we returned in summer of 1985 the holidays would have ended on August 3rd². So end of July or beginning of August 1985 should be my terminus post quem (Opens in a new window).

I think this was my only ever Amerika Haus Library card.

Well, I believe this library card will serve as my terminus ante quem (Opens in a new window).

That is, I ONLY went to the Amerika Haus - a cultural institution with support from the US government at the time - when I had READ THROUGH all the interesting stuff with the BCL. Both the BCL and the AHL no longer exist but there is a Wikipedia entry for the Amerika Ha (Opens in a new window)us as it was of major cultural importance in Germany’s third largest city³.

[The building still exists and is now home to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Opens in a new window).]

Now, I am pretty sure the following books were with the BCL that I read there for the first time (in English):

• The Lord of the Rings

• The Hobbit

• The Silmarillion

• Frodo’s Journeys (Strachey)

• Atlas (Wynn Fonstad)

• Pictures (by Tolkien)

• UT

• BoLT 1 +2

All of those in hardback (except for Strachey, of course.) Now, I am not sure whether the Lays had been there as well as this would ruin my 1985 assumption⁴. I will have to check back with my paperback collection of The History of Middle-earth for additional information.

Given the fact that I am assuming that it had taken me a year to go next door - the BCL and AHL were in adjacent buildings - this would put my first time read with the summer of 1988.

My - presumably! - second library card with Cologne City Library

Now, this particular library card is the most important hint that I can find right now for a number of reasons.

The years are listed (1988-1992), the numbers are the months I had it extended (that is, 1 for January, 2 for February and so on).

However, THIS IS NOT MY FIRST library card.

Why?, you might be inclined to ask.

Well, looking back now after more than thirty years I can tell you the Teilbibliothek in Köln-Neubrück (Opens in a new window) - the city quarter I grew up in - was my second home.

I spent an extraordinary amount of time there. I read tons of books. At one point in time I read shelves to be more efficient.

One year I decided to read books with a mininum page number of 800⁵.

I did. For a whole year.

And this was in direct connection with watching SHOGUN (Opens in a new window), the one and only tv series, originally shown in the US in 1979-1980 and for the first time in Germany in 1982. (Or 1986⁶.)

If I were to assume that I first watched SHOGUN in October 1982 then I would have immediately taken out a library card that very month. Which would add up - with annual extensions - to my second library card starting in January 1988.

Interim findings

Now, you can see there are more pieces of information available beyond the library cards but they are essential in determining in what summer I first read the single most important book of my life.

As I am on the train right now returning to Jena a few things are still eluding me… but I will keep you posted!

If you feel like sharing “your firsts” for a write-up with thetolkienist.com, for example - do send me an email: marcel@thetolkienist.com (Opens in a new window) or simply write a comment below!

This post is published first to you, the subscribers of [E+A]!
[First published April 21, 2025]

Update.

April 29, 2025, almost 36 years later.

I have found another piece of evidence.

I have not had a look at all of my movie tickets but this seems to be the first time that I watched the Bakshi-LotR. Given that my state had summer holidays from June 22 - August 5, 1989, this would not fit with our stay in Yugoslavia.

So, given that the holidays in 1988 were from July 7 - August 20⁷ there is a high probability that I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time in July 1988.

1. Taken from ‘Meine Tolkien Sammlung (Opens in a new window).’ ↩

2. Schulferien-Kalender (Opens in a new window). ↩

3. This is open to definition discussions. My beloved hometown of Cologne is #4 when it comes to population but #3 in major cities if you discount municipalities - there a places in the middle of nowhere in Germany that have more square kilometres to show for than Cologne but nobody actually lives there 😅 So Cologne is the third-largest “kreisfreie Stadt” (Opens in a new window) in Germany. ↩

4. Published first in the UK in August 1985 (Opens in a new window) no everyday library with limited means would have been able to immediately buy this book. ↩

5. Please note that Germans are lucky in that regard - an English text will be translated into German with an additional 13% of words. That is, a 100 page text in English would end up as a 113 page long text in German. So the “800 page rule” is essentially 708 pages for books translated into German. And those were a few - SHOGUN, for example, and other works by Clavell (Opens in a new window) like TAI-PAN. I also discovered James A. Michener (Opens in a new window)’s doorstoppers like HAWAII and ALASKA. ↩

6. See Fernsehserien.de (Opens in a new window) for more info. ↩

7. Schulferien.org (Opens in a new window). ↩