Luke Skywalker Can't Read by Ryan Britt

Author:Ryan Britt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

Imagine There’s No Frodo (I Wonder If You Can)

When I was three or so, my parents used to drop me off with a nice Mormon couple who named their daughter “Galadriel,” in honor of the beautiful Elf person from The Lord of the Rings who we now know looks exactly like Cate Blanchett. In the early ’80s, I didn’t know what a Mormon was, or who Cate Blanchett was, but I’d like to think that I just inherently understood Elves. Beyond her name, there’s not much today that my mother can recall about my Galadriel or her family. They lived close enough to us in Mesa, Arizona, to function as a great place to plop me when my parents both needed to go to the grocery store, mind the fish store they owned together, or, possibly, get high and have sex. Beyond that, nothing has been retained of this friendship other than one Polaroid of the two of us; and I’m clutching the hand of the three-year-old version of the Lady of Lothlorien.

Pronouncing the names of all the characters in The Lord of the Rings is tricky enough, but if you’re a three-year-old, it’s totally impossible. The only thing my mom does remember about little Galadriel turns out to be the best thing: I could not pronounce her name at all. Instead of saying “Galadriel,” tiny-me apparently shortened it into a portmanteau word: “Deedle,” which rhymes with “needle.” This means that I’m the only Tolkien fan to invent my own canonical nickname for one of the major characters, though there are exactly zero references to a “Deedle” in any of the appendices in The Return of the King. Can you imagine Ian McKellan’s Gandalf saying the word “Deedle”? Do it now, please.

Despite how uncommon this name is, I’ve been unable to track down my old playmate. Dreamingly, I believe there’s an alternate universe where Deedle and I grew up and became great friends and I learned from her—a real-life Galadriel—how to pronounce “Galadriel.” As it stands, in this reality, our families drifted apart and Deedle is out there somewhere, a riddle in the dark of my childhood, which is only mildly interesting because I didn’t have any other childhood friends with names like Spock or Gizmo. So, I had to learn how to pronounce this name like the rest of you who have read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings trilogy: I invented a pronunciation in my head and then was shocked how wrong I was when the Peter Jackson movies came out in 2001.

In all seriousness, though, I think my toddler-self’s apprehension over learning the real pronunciation of “Galadriel” was a prescient metaphor for how afraid I am of real Tolkien fans. They’re not a vicious bunch at all, but hard-core Tolkien scholars are patient with information in ways that I am not. They can accept the fact that a whole relationship/marriage can exist as a footnote. They can believe that Tolkien merely “translated” these works from other languages.

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