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Here is my last quote for Back-to-Middle-Earth Month. It is from J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey.

There is an awful lot I would love to quote from this book, which sets out the premise that JRRT was the greatest author of the twentieth century. No arguments from me on that! Although there are some from many critics, whom Shippey shows simply do not understand the reasons behind Tolkien’s popularity.

However, the section I am going to quote from first seems to me to have particular relevance to our little fanfic corner of the fandom, as he speaks to the influence Tolkien had on other writers. While Shippey is talking about published professional authors, I think much of his observations apply to those of us who merely write for love instead of money. Since these are rather lengthy quotations, I will put them behind a cut.
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This quote is from The Tolkien Handbook by Colin Diurez, (who also wrote another favorite book of mine The Gift of Friendship, which was about the friendship of JRRT and C.S. Lewis). In this extract, he is disputing the claim of some critics that the “hobbity” and home-spun opening chapters of FotR are a flaw:

“Considered structurally, however, the opening is not a flaw, but sets the scene of homeliness so important to Tolkien. Out of this humble context, the unexpected heroes Frodo and Sam arise. The charge of a lack of moral seriousness does not hold once the subtlety and range of Tolkien's examination of evil is explored. On character portrayal, it is important to realise that this is not meant to be novelistic. The Lord of the Rings is a heroic romance. Characters are know according to type, and in Tolkien type can be Dwarf, hobbit, Ent and Elf, as well as varieties of the human. And so the discussion can go on.

One mark of the quality of The Lord of the Rings is its linguistic basis. Tolkien makes use of the invented languages in names, and also in imaginative possibility. Language is the basis of the background mythology. Another mark of its literary quality is Tolkien’s success in integrating the wealth of symbolism of his work. Quest, the journey, sacrifice, healing, death and many other symbolic elements are beautifully incarnate in the book. The very landscapes through which the travellers pass are symbolic, suggesting moods which correspond to the stage of the journey and to the phase of the overall story. The terrors of Moria, the archetypal underworld, contrast for example, with the refreshment to the spirit of Lórien. Always, these landscapes are fully part of the movement of the book, aesthetically shaped and integrated.

The

read_lotr_aloud community's contribution to Tolkien Reading Day was to be some readings of favorite passages from members.

Here is my favorite passage of all:

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The first quote for today comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myths: Understanding Middle-earth by Bradley J. Birzer.

I just love this particular quotation, because it shows a side of JRRT that we don’t hear very much about--his sense of humor!

“Tolkien’s jovial personality led him to thoroughly enjoy playing pranks. With C.S. Lewis, he once dressed as a polar bear for a non-costume party, wearing ‘an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug’ and painting ‘his face white’. As Tolkien and Lewis walked home heavily covered in fur, they claimed convincingly, according to another Inkling, ‘to be two Russian bears’. At a lecture in the 1930s, Tolkien told his audience that leprechauns really existed and pulled out a green, four inch long shoe to prove it. Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter noted that Tolkien would chase neighbors away dressed as ‘an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe’. As an elderly man, Tolkien often included his false teeth when paying store clerks. And he loved the slapstick humor of the Marx brothers.”

You know, he might not be as offended as some might imagine by stories about Merry and Pippin playing practical jokes!

And of course, that brings me to a book I must not pass up in quoting: the simply titled Tolkien: A Biography, by the aforementioned Humphrey Carpenter.

In the chapter titled “Oxford Life”, Mr. Carpenter details a typical day in the life of the Professor, from his waking early in the morning, through his meals with his family and his dealings with his students and colleagues. Finally, the end of the day has arrived, and the family is a-bed.

“Edith has gone to bed and the house is in darkness when he gets home. He builds up the fire in the study stove and fills his pipe. He ought, he knows, to some more work on his lecture notes for the next morning, but he cannot resist taking from a drawer the half-finished manuscript of a story that he is writing to amuse himself and his children. It is probably, he suspects, a waste of time; certainly if he is going to devote any attention to this sort of thing it ought to be to The Silmarillion. But something draws him back night after night to this amusing little tale, at least it seems to amuse the boys. He sits down at the desk, fits a new relief nib to his dip pen (which he prefers to a fountain pen), unscrews the ink bottle, takes a sheet of old examination paper ( which still has a candidate’s essay on the Battle of Maldon on the back of it ), and begins to write: ‘When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright.’
We will leave him now. He will be at his desk until half past one or two o’clock, or perhaps even later, with only the scratching of his pen to disturb the silence, while around him Northmoor Road sleeps.”

What a lovely, peaceful picture of our beloved Professor!

Continuing my quotations from books about Tolkien and his work.

Today’s quotes are from Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings by Mark Eddy Smith. The book concerns itself with the lessons we may learn about life from The Lord of the Rings, with chapters on such “ordinary” virtues as “Simplicity”, “Generosity”, “Friendship”, “Sacrifice”, “Humility”, “Trust”, “Wisdom”, “Courage”, “Love” and many others.

The first quotation is from the chapter on “Hope”, and the reason I like it is that it explores the idea of Frodo as “Endurance Beyond Hope”. The passage it mentions takes place when Frodo comes to the Morgul Vale:

“Then they come to the Morgul vale and witness the vast army that issues from it, and his renewed hope utterly departs from him. ‘I am too late,’ he thinks. ‘All is lost. I tarried on the way. All is lost. Even if my errand is performed, no one will ever know. There will be no one I can tell. It will all be in vain.’ In the midst of the mightiest deeds, guilt may steal up to tell us it’s not enough, we didn’t do everything we could have, we didn’t understand how important our task was, and now it’s too late.

Overcome with weakness, Frodo falls asleep even as the hosts are still crossing the bridge. Yet when he wakes he finds that ‘despair had not left him, but the weakness had passed. He even smiled grimly, feeling now as clearly as a moment before he had felt the opposite, that what he had to do, he had to do, if he could and that whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf or anyone else every knew about it, was beside the purpose.’

Hope is not a feeling, it is a choice, and even in the midst of despair we can still choose to carry on. There is no greater hope than that.”

The second quotation comes from the chapter on “Perseverance”. It concerns the part where the two struggling hobbits have come to within fifty miles of their goal. My favorite part is the last sentence in this quote, and I always mentally add "especially if that hobbit is named Sam Gamgee."

“…Sam gives a mouthful of water to Frodo and goes without himself. He cannot sleep for thirst, and at this point he holds his last debate.

Sam is Gollum’s complete opposite, and yet they are much the same. They have the same devotion to Frodo, the same indomitable spirit and the same inner dialogue with despair. They have different answers to their inner voices, and that is the essential difference between them--perhaps the only essential difference. Sam hears his own voice tell him. ‘You are the fool, going on hoping and toiling. You could have lain down and gone to sleep together days ago, if you hadn’t been so dogged.’ His answer: ‘I’ll get there if I leave everything but my bones behind. And I’ll carry Mr. Frodo up myself, if it breaks my back and heart, so stop arguing.’

At that moment the ground shakes, and a flicker of light from Mount Doom lights the clouds. ‘The mountain too slept uneasily.’ It seems to me that Sam is vying in perseverance with the mountain. In a world where all things participate in the struggle between good and evil, even leaf and stone, it is as if the evil mountain is beginning to doubt its ability to prevail against a hobbit.”

I had not been trying to keep up with all of the fic prompts for Back-to-Middle-earth-Month, but this morning's prompt actually gave me a bunny!

How would you define innocence? Write down at least three words or phrases that represent innocence for you.

Here are three phrases that occured to me:

Lack of experience of the wider world; belief that life will remain the same; trusting to others to have the same values as your own.

Trust in the Right

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Gandalf stood outside the tent, puffing on his pipe and listening to the conversation within.

He heard the voice of Thranduil: “Bilbo Baggins! You are more worthy to wear the armour of elf-princes than many that have looked more comely in it. But I wonder if Thorin Oakenshield will see it so. I have more knowledge of dwarves in general than you have perhaps. I advise you to remain with us, and here you shall be honoured and thrice welcomed.”

"Thank you very much", was the courteous response. “But I don’t think I ought to leave my friends like this, after all we have gone through together. And I promised to wake old Bombur at midnight, too! Really I must be going, and quickly.”

Gandalf chuckled at the sound of hobbity politeness, and as the details of Bilbo’s escort were arranged, he moved from his listening post to a spot further out in the camp.

He had known, somehow, that Bilbo was the right hobbit for the job. Outwardly, the hobbit might appear all staid Baggins. But Gandalf had known from the start that Bilbo took far more after his grandfather Gerontius, the Old Took, than was apparent to the eye.

He was very pleased with this outcome. As Bilbo approached, he clapped him on the shoulder, and said “Well done, Mr. Baggins! There is always more about you than anyone expected!”

The look of amazed joy on Bilbo’s face at the sight of the wizard warmed Gandalf’s heart. But there was no time for a reunion now, and he stopped Bilbo’s spate of questions before it began. “All in good time! Things are drawing towards the end now, unless I am mistaken. There is an unpleasant time just in front of you, but keep your heart up! You may come through all right! There is news brewing that even the ravens have not heard! Good night!”

He suffered Bilbo’s brief grasp of his hand, and then watched him scurry off with a quick “Good-bye”.

He stood, leaning on his staff and watching the small figure move out of the lights of the campfires as he was taken to the ford at the edge of the encampment.

Bilbo had been such an innocent little creature when he left the Shire, inexperienced in the ways of the Wide World, never realizing how different things might be, or how his life had changed. He still had grief ahead of him, and Gandalf sorrowed that he could not spare his friend that much. But he was glad to see that Bilbo’s trust that people would do the right thing was still intact. That bit of innocence, he thought, would be rewarded if all went well.

And if Bilbo was no longer quite so innocent as he had been on leaving the Shire, he had exchanged it for wisdom, that would serve him well.

Gandalf turned and went to seek out Thranduil and Bard, his own heart that much lighter for his encounter with Bilbo.

Continuing my quotes *about* JRRT and LotR:

Today’s quotes are a “blast from the past”. Both of them date back to 1969, when The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were undergoing their *first* wave of immense popularity. The books had recently been released in paperback, and there was a good deal of publicity due to the unauthorized publications by Ace Books.

But Tolkien’s books in the authorized edition soon became extremely popular, and references to his world became mainstream years before the waves of popularity due to the movies.

I was still a junior in high school when I bought the following two books. I still own the original paperbacks, though sadly one of them recently shed the back cover, and the pages are yellowed.

The first quote is from Peter S. Beagle’s (yes, the author of The Last Unicorn) Foreword to the Ballantine Books edition of The Tolkien Reader.

“The Lord of the Rings and its prologueThe Hobbit belong, in my experience to a small group of books and poems and songs that I have truly shared with other people. The strangest strangers turn out to know it, and we talk about Gandalf and Gollum and the Bridge of Khazad-dûm while the party or the classroom or the train rattles along unheard. Old friends rediscover it, as I do--to browse through any book of the Ring trilogy is to get hooked once more into the whole legend--and we talk of it at once as though we had just read it for the first time, and as though we were remembering something that had happened to us together long ago. Something of ourselves has gone into reading it, and so it belongs to us.”

The second quote is from the first book I ever bought that was *about* Tolkien: Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter.

(Lin Carter, by the way, was an editor at Ballantine Books, and came to head up their entire line of Fantasy, bringing out for the first time such fantasies as Joy Chant’s Red Moon, Black Mountain and Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels and reprints by such authors as Lord Dunsany, William Morris and James Branch Cabell.)

I selected the quote partly from the irony of it, and wonder what Mr. Carter would have thought if he could have lived to see the phenomenal success of the films--I think he would have been tickled, but not surprised. At any rate, anyone who was reading Tolkien back then will find themselves smiling nostalgically at the following facts and figures:

“For a work of modern fiction seriously compared to Ariosto, Malory, and Spenser, The Lord of the Rings has proved an astonishingly popular commercial success. Sales of the hardcover edition moved slowly but steadily in the country for about nine years. It was not until the trilogy began appearing in paperback editions--the first from Ace Books in June 1965 and four months later Tolkien’s own revision from Ballantine--that Tolkien began to make publishing history. For a 1,300 page trilogy to sell a quarter of a million copies in ten months is certainly extraordinary. As the author of eighteen moderately popular fantasy or science fiction books myself, I can assure you that to sell over 250,000 copies of a paperback set costing from $2.25 (Ace) to $2.85 (Ballantine) is an utterly astonishing fact.”

(By the way, I paid $1.50 for my Tolkien Reader and .95 for the Carter book, and yes, my paperback set of the trilogy featuring the famous psychedelic covers cost less than $3.00 in 1967. Books made a sizable dent in my $5.00 a week allowance that was also supposed to include my school lunches and notebook paper, pencils, etc.)

Continuing my series of quotes *about* LotR and JRRT.

From Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien by Paul H. Kohler

From the chapter “Cosmic Order”--

“But the burden of The Lord of the Rings is that victory for good is never automatic. It must be earned anew each time by every individual taking part. In this effort, says Aragorn to Éomer, man has the natural ability and the obligation to ‘discern’ the difference between right and wrong. Those are opposites, absolutes that do not vary from year to year or place to place or people to people. Those rational beings who would act well on Tolkien’s Middle-earth do not have to stand on the shifting sands of historical relativism. The good is as unchanging above the tides of time as the beauty of Sam’s star over Mordor, and derives ultimately from the character of the One who placed it there.”

From the chapter on “The Free Peoples”

“Tolkien’s Prologue to the The Lord of the Rings elaborates the political, historical and linguistic dimensions of hobbit society in preparation for the greater role it is to play, no longer a child’s tale but in an epic on the grandest scale. Yet at the start of the epic that society is still essentially the same utopia of childhood wish fulfillment from which Bilbo long ago set out to steal treasure. Other races have their sorrows. But before the War of the Ring the whole problem of the hobbits was that they have no problems. Protected by the Dúnedain rangers from the winds of the outside world, they live their tight little lives in their tight little Shire, unknowing and unknown. Scarcely anything in Middle-earth has any idea what a hobbit is except as a figment in old songs. So far as the hobbit race is concerned, the main theme of The Lord of the Rings is to tell how the unknowing come to know, and the unknown become known and honored by other races.”

Here are my next two quotes for Back to Middle-earth Month.

From Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings by Matthew Dickerson

Concerning Merry, at the Battle of the Pelennor--

“Merry is terrified of battle in general and terrified of the Black Rider in particular. He has no love whatsoever for war. He is a Hobbit, and although he is (or is to become) more adventurous and more noble than most of the other folk of the Shire, he is not one to long for battle or see it as glorious. For Meriadoc Brandybuck, the victory comes in overcoming his fear in order to come to the rescue of Éowyn, even if it means doing so in the most inglorious fashion of crawling along on his belly and stabbing the Nazgûl from behind. ‘She should not die, so fair, so desperate! At least she should not die alone, unaided.’ And the glory of the scene is also his love for a king who had become like a father: ‘King’s man! King’s man!’ his heart cried within him. ‘You must stay by him. As a father you shall be to me, you said.’ The glory is the awakening of the ‘slow-kindling courage of his race’. (ROTK p 116). It is his sheer choice to move and act, despite the terror that would have paralyzed him. It is his will not to give in to terror and despair. That this choice is made in the context of a battle, and involves a sword, is not the critical aspect of the heroism (or glory) for we see the same glory in each step taken by Sam and Frodo across the plains of Mordor. Indeed, the battle itself is very inglorious.

Concerning Pippin, at the Battle before the Black Gates--

“In particular, not only is the narrator concerned with Pippin’s role and position as the battle begins, but he tells us just what is going through the Hobbit’s mind during those first few moments. Certainly some of his thoughts are directed toward the present instant: the horrors he is about to face and what he hopes to accomplish against his foes. But much of his thought is turned toward things having little to do with battle: first toward his friend Merry, and then toward “cool sunlight and green grass.” These are the things--friends, sunlight, grass--that are really important in the tale; this and not war and battles, is the stuff of life: the stuff that counts. And this this, even in the midst of a battle scene is what Tolkien’s narrative brings us back to.

Well, March is upon us once more. And you know what that means, right?

"Miss the golden days of the Lord of the Rings fandom? Get homesick for Middle-Earth?

Then this is for you!

You don't need to sign up anywhere to participate. But if you see this on your friends-page and like the idea, please post this text to your LJ to spread the word.

How to participate:

1. Pick a day of the week (or more than one) on which you resolve to always post something LotR-related in March, and let your friends-list know.

2. Go back and read your favourite chapters from the book, or watch the movies again. Let the beauty of LotR inspire you. And then, share the love.

3. Start your subject line with (B2MEM) when you post, and use a "b2mem" tag. This'll make it easy to spot your B2MEM-entries.

No matter if you just ramble about your undying love for LotR, picspam us, post wallpapers, icons, or write fan fic / create fan art, the plan is to get as many LotR-related entries on our friends-pages as possible throughout March.

Sounds good? We've been there, let's go back again!"

I am going to try two days a week: Tuesday and Thursday. And my contribution will be quotations from some of my favorite books *about* Middle-earth and JRRT!

The first one is from The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings by Fleming Rutledge, and is taken from her chapter on The Hobbit
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