please please please just imagine the following:
Steve reads The Hobbit in the 30s/40s. Maybe Bucky saves up and buys it for him one year for his birthday. Maybe he picks up a copy while on the USO tour. Maybe Peggy lends it to him.
He reads it. He loves it. He goes into the ice.
He wakes up and rereading it crosses his mind but “It’s an old book now, no one’s probably heard of it.” and there are so many new things to read that it gets pushed aside.
(Or maybe he knows that they’re making The Hobbit into a movie and he’s so happy about that but he doesn’t really read into it, you know? It’s going to be a movie, that’s good enough for him. He doesn’t watch interviews, he doesn’t read articles- he hears about The Lord of the Rings, of course, but no one ever makes the connection for him.)
(“I’ll reread The Hobbit before the movies come out,” but there’s still so many new things that it still gets pushed aside.)
Someone (Nat or Sam, in a hotel somewhere while they’re looking for Bucky, or Bruce in the Tower, or whoever) flips through channels and puts on The Lord of the Rings movies and Steve is only half paying attention. Maybe he’s sketching. Maybe he’s reading reports. Who knows.
Then he hears “hobbits” and it catches his attention because wait, is that…? But this isn’t The Hobbit, he doesn’t know this story, but he’s invested now and he’s watching a little bit more.
Gandalf appears, and Bilbo, and wait he definitely knows these characters what’s going on, what’s happening here, what story is this?
“Well, yeah, it’s The Lord of the Rings, it’s the sequel to The Hobbit-”
“He wrote a sequel? There’s a sequel!?”
“…there’s technically a prequel too, mostly put together by his son, but-”
“HOW MANY MORE BOOKS ARE THERE?”
“…three in The Lord of the Rings, plus the Silmarillion, and a lot of history/meta stuff too…”
“I WANT TO READ THEM ALL.”
Steve does read them all.
(There’s a moment of loud indignation when he reads about the riddle game because “It didn’t happen like that!” He has to have the changes explained, and then it’s the funniest thing in the world to him.)
Please just imagine Steve Rogers in his office at the compound with a tiny book shelf that’s just full of copies of all of Tolkien’s works. And tucked in a corner is a first-edition copy of The Hobbit that Tony bought for him, and Steve knows that it has to be ridiculously expensive but he dosen’t care, because it’s almost exactly like the copy he used to have. And even though he knows he probably shouldn’t handle it too much, sometimes he picks it up and rereads the riddle game scene. (The original is still better, in his opinion.)
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