J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar by profession. At school, he not only debated in Latin and Greek but “broke into fluent Gothic.” Illustration by Istvan Banyai

Quenuvalye i lamber Eldareva? A boring question, I know, and I’m sure that people ask you the same thing all the time. What it means, of course, is “Thou canst speak the language of the Elves?,” and, if for some unpardonable reason your Elvish is on the rusty side, you have until December 19th to make it shine anew, even as the tumbling waters of Nimrodel refresh the weary traveller who ventures unto Lothlórien, below the eaves of the Golden Wood. For, on that day, men in the bright havens of the West, and along the storm-tongued seaboard of the East, and at your nearest multiplex pretty well everywhere in between, will release the first installment of “The Lord of the Rings,” rated PG-13. Ele! Eglerio! Laite! And a box of Raisinets!

The film has been a long time coming. An animated, severely truncated version arrived on our screens in 1978, but this fortress of a story has a habit of repelling invaders. “The Lord of the Rings” is about hobbits—small, peaceable souls, the tops of whose heads lie level with the average human crotch. The plot tells of a journey taken by Frodo Baggins and his hobbit companions from the Shire, where they have long conducted blameless lives, to the land of Mordor, far away to the east, where Frodo must hurl a ring of inexpressible power into the crater of Mount Doom. Everything about the book seems so earthy and rooted, so densely planted with discernible characters and landscapes, that you would expect movie directors to leap upon it with glee, and yet something—some mysterious element of wit or magic—has been missing. Now we know what the element is: three hundred million dollars. That, give or take a few million, was what the director Peter Jackson was given to play with: a gratifying deal, considering that, unlike Bilbo Baggins—uncle of Frodo and hero of “The Hobbit,” the predecessor to “The Lord of the Rings”—he didn’t have to sneak past a dragon in order to lay his hands on the loot. The bulk of it seems to have been spent on re-creating Middle-earth, the place where the story unfurls. People who complain that for three hundred million you could purchase a small nation are absolutely right, but that only proves what a bargain this movie may turn out to be. Jackson isn’t buying himself a country; he’s building us a world.

The film, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s original novel, will appear in three parts. After “The Fellowship of the Ring,” we will be forced to wait twelve months for “The Two Towers”—a period of reflection that, given the title, is probably a good thing. Finally, at the end of 2003, we will don our chain mail and stand to greet “The Return of the King.” No one can say whether audiences will stick with the story, or whether, in two years’ time, they will have dwindled to a small band of hobbit wanna-bes, lining up glumly in the rain. All that Jackson can do is look back at the example of Tolkien himself. When “The Fellowship of the Ring” came out, in 1954, Tolkien’s publisher, Allen & Unwin, gambled on selling as many as thirty-five hundred copies, falling to thirty-two hundred and fifty for “The Two Towers,” and so down to three thousand for “The Return of the King,” the following year. In the event, this estimate proved a little cautious. By the end of 1968, total readership of the trilogy was thought to stand at around fifty million.

And so, once again, we will enter the outlandish plenitude of Middle-earth. For the next two years, we will be assailed by unorthodox creatures, the like of which many of us will have read about but few will have witnessed in the flesh. Towering or stumpy, brazen or subtle, smooth or hirsute, gabbling or speechless, yellow-bellied or stout of heart, reassuringly human or halfway to the swamp: there’s no two ways about it, Tolkien fans are a funny bunch.

I should know, for I was one of them. Been there, done that, read the book, gone mad. I first took on “The Lord of the Rings” at the age of eleven or twelve; to be precise, I began it at the age of eleven and finished at the age of twelve. It was, and remains, not a book that you happen to read, like any other, but a book that happens to you: a chunk bitten out of your life.

The size of the beast is important in this respect. Tolkien sales remained earthbound until 1965, at which point the three parts of the novel were clamped together and published in America as an unauthorized one-volume paperback; five months later, an official equivalent hit the bookshops, whereupon sales went through the roof and never came back down. That one-volume slab was a challenge in itself. The thrill of it was pricking you before the story even began; you turned over the title page, and the next page was bare, except for an eight-line chant. One couplet went straight to your bones:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

Even at the time, something cinematic stirred in those words; they reminded me of the drumbeats that herald the flame-lit appearance of King Kong, and it came as no surprise to hear the lines intoned again, when the trailers for “The Lord of the Rings” started playing in theatres this year. Six lines into the book, and the author had us exactly where he wanted us; even the foreword, two pages later, continued the doomy thrill. “This tale grew in the telling,” Tolkien wrote, introducing the second edition, and that blend of modesty and grandeur hinted at a process of growth beyond his reckoning, as if the story we were about to read possessed a life of its own.

Before embarking, I had one more detail to attend to. I flipped to the back, not to sneak a glance at how happily the narrative would end—a matter on which I am more undecided than ever—but to frighten myself with a simple count. A thousand and seventy-seven pages: the number itself was like a spell. (Tolkien had typed the whole thing out with two fingers.) My idea of a big book, until then, had been “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and even there I had become bogged down in the Oompa-Loompas. So how on earth would I grind my way through this great brick? One answer was “The Hobbit,” which my friends and I read by way of a training program; if we could follow Bilbo to the dragon’s lair and evade the inquiries of the slimy Gollum (“What has it got in its pocketses?”), we would be primed for the longer haul, like mountaineers who haunt their local hills before setting off for Nepal. What the explorer of “The Lord of the Rings” soon comes to understand as he launches himself into the text, and what puffs him with pride as, weeks or months later, he reviews his completed task, is the fact that this book about a quest is itself a quest. You battle through it, against the odds; you fend off the blizzards of bewildering mythology; you stand firm as the reams of dodgy dialogue try to suck you into the mire; and you come through. If you encounter it as a child, it will be the longest book that you have ever mastered, and, for many adults, it will retain that talismanic status. The tale grew in the telling, but, more significantly, the reader grows in the reading; such is the source of Tolkien’s power, and it is weirder and more far-reaching than even he could have foretold. I wonder what he had in his pocketses.