Marilyn wrote:"...But I must admit that I hoped you would take to me for my own sake. A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship..."
How many of us look at someone or read something about them and judge them accordingly?
From this chapter on I was completely hooked on LOTR.
That may be THE quote from LOTR that has "hit" me the most. Whenever I read it, I fall deeper and deeper in love with Aragorn.

So strong and yet so vulnerable...

Think I should stop writing before I make a fool of myself.
I agree that LOTR was a fairytale before Strider showed up, but a horrible one, with Black Riders, Old Forest, Tom Bombadil (weird

) and Barrow-Downs.

Also it made little sense to me, it was just a series of horrible, unexplicable events in a setting that felt strange and still too familiar to me to feel at ease. I have read too many fairytales and seen too many old forests and ancient stone monuments to like the combination.
I read on just not to be stuck in the middle, getting nightmares from it. I knew that there must be some kind of lucky end, so I just read on for a while longer. I had no intention of reading the whole book, since reading so far had by no means been pleasant, thought I would leave the hobbits in Bree, where they seemed to be pretty safe, but then I met Strider.
Then comes the funny thing, I thought the man with the broken sword was Sigurd the Dragonslayer, that this book actually was some kind of sequel

to a Viking saga and when I, after a while, realized that this guy actually was called Aragorn and definitely wasn't Sigurd

, I naturally got angry with Tolkien

and very upset

, but was so hooked on this new man with a broken sword, that I read all three books, just waiting for the end, for him to become king, as promised in the title of the third volume. I had read the rhyme, you know.
So Tolkien got me interested, pretending to write about a character I already knew.

I think it's a rather rare experience.

Sometimes I wonder if it's an in-joke aimed at his fellow scholars, unintentionally working on some Scandinavian children as well.
From the moment Strider showed up, he also made me feel safe somehow. I knew he was a hero.

OK, he's mysterious, has a hidden agenda, you might say

and isn't exactly cheerful

, but I trusted him, just like the hobbits did. It didn't matter what happened, as long as Strider was there to protect both me and the rest of the fellowship.
(

Reading makes you part of the fellowship, doesn't it?

)
Many years would pass, before I could read the non-Aragorn parts of LOTR without feeling this unrest, just waiting for the next chapter including my hero.

You might say Aragorn is my security blanket.
