David O'Mahony: When it comes to books I’m OK with being cringe, as long as I’m the lord of it

Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn in he Lord of The Rings' has been such a cultural touchstone he’s still often held up as a model of positive masculinity

Dear Reader,

I have a confession. It’s a deep, dark kind of confession, the one that makes you rethink what sort of parent you’ve been all these years. Indeed, perhaps what sort of person you are overall.

For you see, dear Reader, this week I discovered we had not introduced our children to The Lord of the Rings. 

And not in a “we’ve mentioned it but they haven’t read the books or seen the films” kind of way. In a “oh, is that a fantasy book” sort of way.

I was showing them trailers of the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, after Beloved Wife’s very good suggestion that maybe they’d like to see it with an orchestra in October, when my son hit me with the revelation of my failure as a father.

Oh, how my soul recoiled from my body, looking down at me with such a look of pity I could nearly hear my ancestors tutting.

The various writing and speculative fiction groups I’m a part of would have revoked my author’s licence if they’d heard — to the point where they’d probably invent such a thing for the express purpose of stripping me of it.

And that’s after not only introducing my son to Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), Heroquest, and the like, but immediately after he joined a D&D group made of friends he made last year in school (I’m not crying with joy, you’re crying with joy).

Cue me urgently explaining that yes, it’s a fantasy book and not only that but it is sort of the foundation of modern Western fantasy literature (yes, I know there are other influential fantasy authors; no, I will not change my mind here — mail me at [e-mail] if you want to argue for someone else). 

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I mean, the general appearance and skills of elves in D&D are lifted from The Lord of the Rings, as are orcs wholesale. D&D even has halflings, who are just non-copyright versions of hobbits, for crying out loud.

Basically, most of the fantasy-related things he’s into, like Oblivion and Skyrim (though not the Zelda series), owe a debt to Tolkien. 

And I know I bought him a copy of The Hobbit — I have three of my own — so it’s obviously fallen into the black hole that is his bedroom. 

I’m choosing to think that and not that he saw it and went “oh, that’s one of dad’s cringe books”.

Joke’ll be on him when he eventually reads my own books and sees some of the bonkers things I’ve written short stories and novellas about. 

I’m OK with being cringe, so long as I’m the lord of it.

Still, it did give me pause to wonder what else I’d dropped the ball on. How to write? No, he’s fine with that. He can dress himself, can’t he? Yes, yes, that’s covered. How to use a computer? No, did that. 

Taught him to drive? Hell no, he’s 13 and I don’t want him losing his licence before he’s even old enough to have one.

Sharing films and books with the children

However, both my wife and I have a whole range of films and books that are important to us that we really should make an effort to share.

We have all the The Lord of the Rings books and films — including extended collector editions still in plastic wrapping with figurines, I’ll have you know — but we’ve never made the leap to actually showing them to the kids. 

And they were, frankly, formative to my late teen/early 20s sense of self; The Fellowship of the Ring film came out in my first year of college (stop telling me I’m old), and Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn has been such a cultural touchstone he’s still often held up as a model of positive masculinity. 

That’s not even factoring in Liv Tyler’s Arwen or Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel.

Whether it will have the same impact, if any, on children is another question entirely.

They have their own frames of reference anyway, like when we were making our way through the various Spider-man films — Andrew Garfield is superior to Tobey Maguire in every way, and Tom Holland is a delight — and my son informed us he recognised bits of it from memes.

Memes, dear Reader. But then again they are 21st-century ephemera and perfectly valid in their own way.

Sometimes, in such situations, it’s best to offer a grand gesture as a way of atoning for your sins, I mean errors — so I bought tickets for the three of us to see The Fellowship of the Ring accompanied by an orchestra at the 3Arena in October.

Daughter is no fan of the orcs, but wants to go if I’m going, and my son’s happy to join us. Take that, imposter syndrome.

We’ll make our own fellowship. But if anybody wants an enchanted ring dropped in a volcano somewhere, maybe give somebody else a shout.

• David O’Mahony is Irish Examiner assistant editor and a writer of horror and dark fantasy