expedition of a rootless academic

Just returned from six days in the blazing south. Spent most of it working with Diana Glyer on final corrections/changes/consistencies in her book on the Inklings, which is going to the publisher next month. Earned my keep when I figured out where an unattributed quotation from C.S. Lewis had come from. Day after day of gory detail, sitting in a wicker chair with a huge binder of annotated draft text spread on the desk before me, as the author (seated on a hardwood stool that she likes but I don't) made alterations on the computer to my left. Jumping up every few minutes to look something up in one of the wallful of Inklings reference books behind us. Is this not fun? For me it is, actually, thank you.

I also taught Diana's class. Teaching a college credit course was a new one on me; I'd never before taught anything more complicated than a freshman how-to-use-the-library session. In this English department, special courses on individual authors are taught ad libitum as professors want to do them and the Powers That Be approve them, and this semester they approved her Tolkien course. My job as guest lecturer was to introduce the students to The History of Middle-earth, twelve intimidating-looking volumes containing, as far as most casual LOTR readers are concerned, God knows what. My qualification for this job was, as I told the class, that I've read them all.

So I outlined on the whiteboard the longitudinal history: the way the development of the story through Tolkien's life interacts with the internal history of the imaginary world. Compared the early versions with the 1977 Silmarillion which they'd already read (but didn't remember as well as they did LOTR: "What was Earendil going to Valinor for? Does anyone know? Class?") I told them about Tolkien's best strong women characters, Andreth and Erendis (completely ignored by the authors of a supposedly definitive study of the Inklings and women). I gave them lots of quotations to read aloud, at which they did pretty well.

Things picked up when we got to the LOTR drafts. That at least rung changes on a story they know. Had them read the first draft of the Frodo-meets-Aragorn scene, in which Bingo Bolger-Baggins meets a strange weatherbeaten hobbit wearing wooden shoes, name of Trotter. But he says almost exactly the same things that Aragorn says. (Return of the Shadow, p. 137-8)

I read them the inadvertently funny first outline of the Cracks of Doom scene, in which Sam pushes Gollum into the pit, more like a draft of Bored of the Rings than Lord. Amazing how close Tolkien came to writing the parody of his own novel, and how completely, in the end, he managed to avoid it. (Sauron Defeated, p. 4-5)

And the stunning end of the fragmentary LOTR sequel, "The New Shadow" (The Peoples of Middle-earth, chapter 16). A hundred years later, an old man of Gondor is sitting in his garden, musing over evidence of a rising cult of evil. He figures that, as one of the few people who remembers the War, he's suited to investigate this. "Scent has a long memory," he says to himself. "I think I could still smell the old Evil, and know it for what it is." Then this happens:

The door under the porch was open; but the house behind was darkling. There seemed none of the accustomed sounds of evening, only a soft silence, a dead silence. He entered, wondering a little. He called, but there was no answer. He halted in the narrow passage that ran through the house, and it seemed that he was wrapped in a blackness: not a glimmer of twilight of the world outside remained there. Suddenly he smelt it, or so it seemed, though it came as it were from within outwards to the sense: he smelt the old Evil and knew it for what it was.

WHAM! I slammed the book shut as hard as I could, because this is where Tolkien stopped writing, and we will never know what was to happen next.

Also on my agenda, a visit to sartorias to, finally, present her my cumulative Mythcon lecture/CD-program on Tolkien and music: music that inspired him, music that he inspired. Sat at her writing desk manipulating the computer's CD-playing program and reading while we listened to clips from Gabrieli and Sibelius and Weber and the Tolkien Ensemble and Caprice and Johan de Meij and Craig Russell and Carey Blyton and ... well, a lot of stuff.

This was actually my first visit since the family moved to the biiig new house in the same twisty little maze as the old house. There is room! There is a closet that goes back and back and back, and then turns around and goes back some more. Big enough to hold a shoe collection the size of Imelda Marcos's, which I gather that at one time it did. And the library loft, filled with cases of books and a cozy chair. This means comfort. Great soup for dinner, too. All aspiring Mythies should have the likes of a sartorias for a friend.