This arrived today.
I’m currently bed-bound, after a mini-breakdown. I think it was Monday evening, I kind of, erm… snapped?
Anyway, I’d ordered the book that is the subject of this post a few days ago (see this earlier post). And it’s now arrived.
It seems eerily apt, for me/us, as it’s the sad story of a childless couple.
The above is the artwork that’s also used on the cover. A beautiful thing. As is so much of Tolkien’s creative work, be it art or literature.
The book is only a little over 100 pages. And easily read in a single day. I love it. It’s fascinating to see how Tolkien evolves his ideas.
The book comprises the titular ‘lay’, two shorter Corrigan poems, and lots of other material, directly related to the lay and it’s evolution.
As well as Tolkien’s own writing there’s quite a lot of commentary, describing how the linked ideas that form these pieces arose; their sources, and evolution.
If you love Tolkien, and I certainly do, it’s very absorbing and fascinating. It’s often repeated herein that these works – the lay especially – are from the ‘darker side’ of Tolkien’s creative oeuvre.
Well, yes. But at the same time I think they also underscore a deep vein of melancholy that characterises pretty much his entire output.
I think I also love Tom Waits and Jack Kerouac a great deal because there’s so much wistful nostalgia for vanishing worlds in their work. And Tolkien, whilst ostensibly operating in a different milieu, I feel partakes of a very similar ‘rear-view mirror blues’ aesthetic.
Whether it’s the loss of the innocence of one’s own youth, or the changing of whole cultures, there’s very often a deep sadness underlying a lot of Tolkien’s work.
His work as a philologist in itself situated him in the citadel of academia, as the chill winds of history blew through the bones of the dead languages he studied.