The Road Goes Ever On
I’ve spent all day quiet, subdued. I don’t have much to say about it all. I don’t have many answers except that we should look out for and take care of each other. As I was thinking what I could do to help, I turned to what I know best: writing.
The following is an unaccepted essay on the influence of Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings over me. It’s probably insufficient, but it is true. May it give you some comfort.
I've been asked to write about what Lord of the Rings means to me, and I don't know where to start.
I can tell you I remember the afternoon the books were given to me, the swelter of Old San Juan in late summer radiating off the walls of the Spanish Colonial. My dad needed his watch repaired, and let me tag along. Up three flights of stairs, the stairwell tight enough that we had to stand with our backs against the wall to let one of the other residents down. The jeweller asked his son - several years older than me - to entertain me so that he and my dad could talk business. We ended up paging through his collection of manga, full of lurid illustrations of muscled fighters alongside animals that represented their martial arts style. I don't remember why he offered to give me something out of his collection, but in the end he didn't let me keep one of the mangas. Instead, he pressed three books with sedate watercolors of landscapes for cover art.
The Lord of the Rings.
I can recall trying to read Fellowship more than once and getting no more than one or two chapters in before setting it aside. For all that "Part One" was on the cover, it felt like it was part of an ongoing story, like I had missed something. It wasn't until after a friend lent me his copy of The Hobbit that I tried again. Having torn through the so-called prequel to The Lord of the Rings overnight, I was convinced that momentum would carry me through.
I'm unsure when I found a copy of A Tolkien Bestiary in the school library, but I spent most of 7th grade lugging it around school. Every chance I got - lunch, between classes, waiting for the bus after school - I cracked the book open and pored over its entries and artwork so often that I could've gotten class credit.
Mid-term in 8th grade, I discovered our math teacher - Mr. Jenkins - was not only English, but had read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. Whatever my grades in his class might be, it felt like I found something we could talk about beyond his role of teacher.
That I can remember these things so vividly but never recapture them is the tragedy of the arrow that once strung can never be called back. It brings to mind Tolkien's Elves. Beautiful, doomed. Immortal but weary of it, the crushing weight of years piled upon their shoulders. Mourning their loved ones as if their loss happened but yesterday, when centuries have passed. In The Shape of Narrative in The Lord of the Rings, Diana Wynn Jones called the Elves widowed from history, depending only on their own memories of ages past.
When at last I finished The Lord of the Rings, joining Frodo, Sam, and what remained of the original Fellowship at the Grey Havens, I wept. Not only at the irony of Frodo sacrificing so much for a Shire where he could no longer live, but because I could no longer go back. I would never again encounter the books for the first time in a watchmaker's shop in the heat of Old San Juan. I could not experience Middle Earth in the same way, full of danger and potential, unsure of where the proverbial road Bilbo warned about may take me. Now, there was no frisson, no thrill of what might happen next, but the calm and steady comfort of rereading.
It has been long enough that I'm no longer sure what The Lord of the Rings meant to me when I read it first. Now, looking back, I'm struck not so much by an image, but a general feeling of twilight. Not day and not night, exactly; belonging to neither, ambiguous and magical. This may be in part due to A Tolkien Bestiary's entry for Elbereth; it might have also been something in the text of the trilogy, but I wonder.
I'm in danger of sounding like one of Tolkien's Elves, and perhaps I'm old enough that it's inevitable now, looking back. How often do our defeats outweigh our victories when we look back over the long tally of years? Seen in that rather thin light, a lingering melancholy seems justified, even respectful. In the end, though, change comes, death awaits us all, and meaning cannot be gleaned from something so crude as a ledger. Melancholy is the slow poison of the past seeping into the present, and we must strive against it. The sun is shining now, and this exact moment will never happen again.
Perhaps, The Lord of the Rings is - as Nathan Ballingrud has said - an elegy, and like all laments it yearns for what once was. Tolkien's genius was to center the Hobbits - creatures of the present moment (as evidenced by their sometimes comical and often touching needs for food and drink and song), who are not widowed from history. Who is the eulogy for if not the living, for those who can still remember the feel of grass, the taste of strawberries, for those who can still hope?
By the way, if you know someone who this might help out in whatever small way, feel free to pass it along/share.
Until next time, take care.