Meditations on Middle-Earth (15 page)

At the time, I was dimly aware that my parents regarded this leaning of mine toward escapism as slightly unnerving, possibly a sign of some instability. They had a slight case of something I’ve since seen more virulent cases of: a suspicion about the desirability of allowing kids to read fantasy—either because of an idea that the child might not be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, or because of the feeling that adults have some dire responsibility to keep the noses of the next generation firmly against the grindstone of merciless reality until they’ve lost beyond recall the ability to recognize that there are things worth escaping from, and places (real and unreal) worth escaping to.

I later, to my pleasure, discovered that Tolkien was under no illusions about this particular perception of “concerned adults”: his feeling was that the people most concerned with or alarmed by the possibility of other people escaping, were jailers. But at the time, mostly I knew that I was imprisoned in a world I didn’t particularly care for, and I looked forward to the day when I would be able to get out of the present set of circumstances. Meanwhile, I had to settle the issue of where I would go and what I would do with myself when it came time for college, and whatever would follow. And so I read voraciously, evaluating every possible option, finding out as best I could what the world was like, especially all parts of the world that did not look anything like a “bedroom community” in a suburb of New York City.

I explored the world remotely by more or less living, in my spare time, in that local public library. Other kids might chase me and call me a bookworm when I left, but while I was there, I was in sanctuary as certain as that of any church. And there was a whole lot more to read. Through books I explored deserts, oceans other than the Atlantic, faraway and exotic cities (even New York, where I was not yet allowed to go alone and which might as well have been as distant in time and space as Atlantis for all the good its presence only thirty miles to the west did me). Mountains, particularly, and especially the Alps, I looked at in pictures with the most intense longing, as somewhere I would eventually go, no matter what I did. They were almost a symbol of the real world, a world that was interesting and exciting and worth doing things in, even more effective for me as a symbol of the world than outer space—for the Moon landing of 1969 had moved me profoundly.

When I had started reading
The Fellowship of the Ring
I had no idea what was going to happen in it, or where it would take me. Mountains were there, and they delighted me . . . partly because they weren’t just
there:
among them, things that suddenly concerned me deeply were happening to people and creatures who mattered. Shortly, the delight of faraway places was swept away in something much more important. All that Friday afternoon, after school, and Friday night until late, and all of Saturday and late into Saturday night, and then early on Sunday morning, I was completely and literally out of this world. And now, on this suddenly desolate Sunday morning, as I sat there in the sunny dining room, all alone—it was 6:30 in the morning, and no one was going to be up for a while yet—I found myself completely concerned with circumstances the likes of which I had never imagined, which made my troubles, and indeed just about every other trouble I knew anything about, seem petty and small by comparison. The idea that there were much, much more important things to worry about in the world than whether I was ever going to manage to grow through and out of a not terribly interesting or enjoyable childhood now descended on me full force. Suddenly I found myself confronting the issue of ultimate evil. It astounded me that I’d never particularly noticed it before. Now I realized that it had been sitting in front of me my whole life, like a rhinoceros in the middle of the living room, and I seemed to be required to take some kind of stand on the subject.

UGLUK, CHIEF OF THE ISENGARDERS

The Two Towers

Chapter III: “The Uruk-Hai”

I shied away then (and for a long time after) from considering who or what was doing the requiring at that point, or how my taking a stand could possibly make the slightest difference to the status of the world. That was a question I still haven’t answered to my satisfaction. But on that Sunday, I didn’t give the question more than few minutes’ thought. I was completely overwhelmed at the thought of having to wait a whole day to find out what happened next. It was intolerable. My family watched me moping around the house, and wondered out loud, several times, what was the matter with me. Trying to explain was a mistake. My father just shrugged and said, “It’s just a book; don’t get so excited.” And then rubbed in some salt by saying, “You should have taken your time and made sure there wasn’t a third one before you left.” Gee, thanks, Dad. See if I stand up for
you
the next time a giant spider stings you in the neck.

The rest of that day and that night (during which I got to sleep only late and with difficulty) dragged in a bad imitation of Einstein’s joke-definition of relativity. But, finally, Monday morning manifested itself. I had to go to school first, which was even more of a nuisance than usual: the eight hours between going in there and getting out again looked wider than any desert and more challenging than any mountain. Caradhras the Cruel was on my mind—all that horrible ordeal the Company of the Ring had gone through, and for what?—and poor Sam lying there on his face, and Frodo, gone, alive, but maybe not to be so for long—who knew? I was shaking with nerves on this subject all day, for what had struck me as I read the first two volumes was a sort of merciless quality about Tolkien’s writing—not so much a transparency of plot as an absolute subjection of it to the requirements, not of the author, but of the world he was writing about, or in. Middle-earth seemed to have its own agenda, to which maybe even Tolkien was, in a very special sense, in service, and it had occurred to me that happy endings might not be what that world was going to require of him, or me. I was terrified to get my hands on the third volume, and I couldn’t wait.

Finally, time doing what it normally does in this universe, 3:30 rolled around, and I escaped from that place of torment at high speed, and ran to our little town’s main street, and caught the bus to the next town, where the bookstore was. I threw myself in through its door and went straight to the rack where I had found the first two books, and found the third one, and seized it as if it was the heart out of my body, and just barely remembered to pay for it, for I was already reading it as I got to the door where the cash register was.

To this day I have no memory of how I got home. I was much more concerned with events on the plains of Rohan and at the tower of Cirith Ungo! And after finishing it that night, it took me a long time to get to sleep—I was suffering from a sort of jetlag of the soul. The world I lived in had been immeasurably broadened, but also somehow contracted by comparison with that other one—which was not “realer,” for I wasn’t deluded in the slightest on that count, but better. Yet having for the first time experienced a world so deeply imagined, I was also having to deal with an odd sense that it had been there for a long, long time . . . and also that, even after the book was closed, that world still existed somewhere else. That it would be there again when I opened the book once more seemed almost an accident, as a room you’ve left will still be there (barring meteor strikes or other physical disasters) when you open its door again. At that point, at least, I was in no mood to leave the book closed for long. I started reading it again right away, and for about the next month probably would have been in serious contention for any award for the person who read the whole trilogy the most times in a week.

The Lord of the Rings was what started me on my present course of writing. I had always written stories to amuse myself, usually in the vein of whatever I was reading at the time—at that period the work was vacillating between what would now be considered fairly “hard” science fiction and the fairy-tale kind of story that E. Nesbit had done. But now I immediately began to write a series of wildly imitative and not very profound “epic fantasy” stories, and the Ring dominated my internal imaginative landscape for about the next twenty years. I still thought of the Alps, but now the great massif that included Celebdil, Fanuidhol, and Caradhras the Cruel was just as often on my mind; oceans still interested me, but the one across which one took ship from the Grey Havens had acquired more profound associations. The pain of that long, long Sunday faded quickly, and left me with something far better: a spare world to live in when this one occasionally became unendurable because of circumstance or boredom.

In the larger sense, life then proceeded to do what it usually does, and moved along, finally in some most unexpected directions. I went to college. I bombed out as a student physicist, but did well as a student nurse. I graduated with a preference for working in psychiatry. And as “work in the real world” went, that turned out to be satisfying, but also frustrating in some ways; and I had urges that nursing did nothing to satisfy. I kept writing, to the amusement, or sometimes bemusement, of those around me. Much to my surprise, I then mostly quit nursing, and went to work for a writer. And suddenly I got caught writing a book—a fantasy based in a vaguely medieval other-Earth, oddly enough. The book actually got bought by a publisher, and suddenly I was a writer, too. A joke around the household these days is that if I’d known how much the business of writing was going to cut into my reading time, maybe I wouldn’t have gone on with it. But regardless of that, one book that still gets reread by me, at least once every year, is the
Ring
.

Eventually, I did make it to the mountains. I still remember well that first catch of the breath as I looked across the great vista of snowy peaks, a whole half-horizon of them, stretching away endlessly like waves of the sea: bigger than me, older than me,
realer
than me in some way; body and personality together suddenly seeming, in their presence, little, evanescent, and unimportant. It’s a good experience, I think, one that I’ve had the chance to have fairly often in recent years. But the last time, I got something I wasn’t expecting.

I was up on Mount Rigi, in the middle of Switzerland. It was spring. I was out for a walk one morning, to a place where that view is particularly good. There are no roads up there, just walking paths and meadows, and as I went by one meadow, I looked down into the grass and saw there something I hadn’t been expecting: little, white six-petalled flowers, about an inch across. And a voice, Sam’s voice, said in my head, “Do you remember the elanor, the sun-star, that we saw in the grass in Lórien?”

I got down to have a closer look. The little flowers turned out to be
Crocus alpinus
, the alpine crocus. But what the botanical references do not tell you is that
Crocus alpinus
throws a “sport” version in about one bulb of every twelve: a six-petalled version with little tips of pale gold at the end of the petals. They are unusual enough to make you search them out, once you start seeing them. They are (I think) elanor: for Tolkien holidayed in these mountains, and would certainly have seen them.

I straightened up from the little scattering of elanor and looked across the “back” of Rigi toward the higher mountains. If her devotees refer to Rigi (with some etymological reason) as “the queen of mountains,” they do it also with a sense of rebellion, for in the background, from her peak, can be seen mountains of more regal, if not imperial, character: the Eiger, the Monch, and the Jungfrau. Tolkien hiked at the feet of those mountains, before he went to war. And when I stood up from seeing my first elanor, I looked across the great blue gulf of air and saw them there, as perhaps he did (for he would have ridden this cog railway, too): Celebdil, Fanuidhol, and Caradhras the Cruel; Silvertine, Gloudyhead, and the terrible Redhorn. For just a flicker of time, genuinely, physically, I was in Middle-earth.

Reality reasserted itself, but only with difficulty. I remember, a few breaths later, feeling maybe not so much a sense of kinship with Tolkien—that would have seemed impudent—but a strange sense of closure. And if I had been even slightly uncertain about the lasting power of his work, that uncertainty would now have vanished without a trace. I started to wonder if the only way to judge the power of a writer’s work is to look and see how thoroughly it “contaminates” the world in which its reader lives. When the words and images start insinuating themselves into unexpected parts of life, so that suddenly everything seems to refer back to that work, or remind you of things in it, then you know that a secondary creator of unusual skill has been at work
in
you. And when finding a concrete example of something “real,” which the writer has drawn into his own world and made his own, suddenly makes the “real” world seem more magical than it actually is, that’s wizardry of the most potent kind. The fact that The Lord of the Rings is indirectly responsible for (or at least involved in) nearly everything of value in my present life, fades to unimportance beside that best magic—the ability to make reality itself more real, to add something to it that wouldn’t ever have been there otherwise, without one man’s heartbreakingly inclusive imagination. Because of Tolkien, the universe will forever genuinely contain magic, even when all of it passes, and the covers of the book, for the last time, are shut.