Closure (Redux)

In my mind's eye, I still look upon the great climax of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. In the last section of that book, entitled The Return of the King, we see the defeat of Sauron, as mad Gollum falls into Orodruin and brings the Great Ring with him into the fires of creation.

The eagles are coming. The hosts of Sauron are scattered. The Servants of the Ring, once feared through all the lands of Middle-Earth — they are turned to shadows and dust.

And yet, as Brian Duffy says in Tim Powers's The Drawing of the Dark, "Much has been lost, and there is much yet to lose."

Certain things have gone on too long. Saruman's foul experiments and his corruption of the halflings have sequelae that must be dealt with. Though he was cast out of the Order and his staff broken, his poisonous tongue still holds power. The snake pit needs to be cleansed, the captives must be freed from the dungeons that they allowed to be built.

Having read the novel, we remember that the true heartbreak comes at the end, when the hobbits return to their homeland and find that it is scarred, damaged, corrupted beyond belief. They must fight to bring sanity and wholesomeness to what was lost and broken. And some wounds, as has been said before, will never heal until the ending of the world.

Middle-Earth

For today's episode of beautiful distraction, we turn to the work of Peter Bird, Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, at the University of California at Los Angeles.

He has a map which juxtaposes Tolkien's Middle-Earth with modern Europe. View it in all its glory: a copy can be found HERE. Don't mind the typos; it's good enough that someone made the attempt. And it all makes a lot more sense. Or is that 'lotr' more sense. Heh.

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Acknowledgement: Never would have found it without this guy. Well, this post anyway. And ignore the stuff about Bali; wrong archipelago.

White Space

In the Annals of Arda, concerning the fate of Al-Istari, the Wizards, it is written that the one whom men called Gandalf the Grey travelled to the Tower of Isengard to meet Saruman the Wise, head of his order. In this part of the account, the Grey One converses with Saruman, and towards the end of their converse, the Lord of Isengard reveals his true thought and ambition:

"For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman the Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!"

I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

"I liked white better," I said.

"White!" he sneered. "It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken."

"In which case it is no longer white," said I. "And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1966). The Lord of the Rings, 1:252. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

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Sometimes, it is necessary to think of white as white, and avoid the perils of both Newtonian optics and Sarumanic thaumaturgy. Simplicity has always been a virtue, despite the frequent mockery of the simple - and in this age of complexity and doublethink (or groupthink), it is an even more important and valuable one.