When I think about reading Lord of the Rings for the first time

The part that I remember - the only passage that I can say with any certainty that I remember reading for the first time - is when they are at the After Party For Saving Middle Earth, when Sam hears a minstrel stand up and announce that they are going to sing for the crowd the tale 'of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom':

"And when Sam heard that he laughed aloud for sheer delight, and he stood up and cried ‘O great glory and splendour! And all my wishes have come true!’ And then he wept.

And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness."

Their joy was like swords. Wounded with sweet words.

Their joy was like swords.

Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that it might have been my first experience of a story moving me to tears of joy. I'd cried while reading books before, but not like this.

I was sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom - twelve or thirteen years old, perhaps? - and my eyes, without my foreknowledge or permission, simply welled up and overflowed. I remember how it took me by surprise, the breath caught in my throat. It would be another decade or so before I started drinking wine but even so, here it was, the very wine of blessedness. Joy like a sword - sharp, bright, sudden, cutting to the quick of me.

It was the catharsis and relief of a great evil averted, etc. etc., but that wasn't what caused the tears. It was the telling of the story. Inside the tale within the tale I recognised myself, a child, on the cusp of everything, the scratch and smell of the carpet as I sat on the floor of my bedroom, the light of the afternoon. The story inside of the story. The way that we make sense of everything.