Read Online Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber - Free Book Online
Authors: Karen Haber
Tags: General, Fantasy fiction, english, Literary Criticism, European, Science Fiction & Fantasy, American, History and Criticism, Middle Earth (Imaginary place), Scottish, irish, Books & Reading, Fantasy Literature, Welsh
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Nazgûl. This is, no doubt, heresy of the purest ray serene, but, like the Arians or Nestorians of early Christendom, I had some texts on my side.
Consider: The Fourth Age is to be the Age of Man, with the elves and other ancient races vanished or much reduced in power. The Nazgûl, proud men ensnared by Sauron’s schemes, are the great bane of mankind. When Merry hamstrung the Lord of the Nazgûl, he did so with a blade from the Barrow-downs, a blade specially made with charms against Sauron’s chief lieutenant, who had been the Witch-king of Angmar in the north. But when Owyn struck the blow that finished the Ringwraith, what sword did she use? Only an ordinary weapon of the Rohirrim. And when the Nazgûl’s spirit left him, it “faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up and was never heard again in that age of the world [italics mine].” Not in the Third Age, certainly. But what of the Fourth?
I may also note that, having thus been disembodied, the Lord of the Nazgûl was not caught, as were the other eight of his kind, in the incinerating eruption of Mount Doom after the Ring went into the fire. And, in a footnote to letter 246 in Carpenter’s collection, Tolkien, who had been talking about how Frodo would have fared had he faced the remaining eight Nazgûl, writes, “The Witch-king [the Lord of the Nazgûl] had been reduced to impotence.” Tolkien does not say the Ringwraith was slain, so I have, at least, a case.
Such was my reasoning. I should also note at this point that I was already trying to become a writer. I’d tried to write three different novels, and had actually finished one (none of this work, I hasten to add, came within miles of being publishable). The summer of 1967 was among the blackest times of my life. I had no idea how to cope with academic failure—thinking I could excel without studying much, as I had in high school, was a contributing factor, and not such a small one, to my flunking out of Caltech.
And so I plunged into a new novel. It was, of course, an exercise in hubris, complete and unadorned. I realize that now. I did not realize it when I was eighteen. There are a great many things one does not realize at eighteen, not least among them being how very many things one does not realize at eighteen. Taking some of the arguments from the Caltech dorms, my own growing interest in history, and my belief that the Lord of the Nazgûl survived, I dropped a couple of centuries of Caesar’s legionaries (and one obstreperous Celt) into what I imagined Gondor would be like during the Fourth Age.
God help me, I still have the manuscript. The one thing I can truthfully say is that I meant no harm. (I take that back. I can say one other thing: I am not the individual mentioned in letter 292 of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien , the chap who not only aimed to write a sequel to The Lord of the Rings but sent Tolkien a detailed outline of it. That letter dates from December 1966, before part of the same bad idea occurred to me.)
I wrote it. I finished it: something close to 100,000 words, far and away the longest project I’d ever undertaken up till then. Even had all the inspiration come from my own mind, I couldn’t have sold it. Neither the style nor the characterization—such as that was—measures up to anything anyone else would ever want to read. To this day, though, I can say the plot was not disastrously bad. I had a tolerable story, but I didn’t yet know how to tell it or where to set it.
AMON HEN, THE SEAT OF SEEING
The Fellowship of the Ring
Chapter X: “The Breaking of the Fellowship”
A dozen years passed. I did a lot of the things most people do going from eighteen to thirty. I found something that interested me and pursued it. (In my case, it happened to be the history of the Byzantine Empire, which I admit is not a subject reckoned universally fascinating.) I fell in love several times. Sometimes
Consider: The Fourth Age is to be the Age of Man, with the elves and other ancient races vanished or much reduced in power. The Nazgûl, proud men ensnared by Sauron’s schemes, are the great bane of mankind. When Merry hamstrung the Lord of the Nazgûl, he did so with a blade from the Barrow-downs, a blade specially made with charms against Sauron’s chief lieutenant, who had been the Witch-king of Angmar in the north. But when Owyn struck the blow that finished the Ringwraith, what sword did she use? Only an ordinary weapon of the Rohirrim. And when the Nazgûl’s spirit left him, it “faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up and was never heard again in that age of the world [italics mine].” Not in the Third Age, certainly. But what of the Fourth?
I may also note that, having thus been disembodied, the Lord of the Nazgûl was not caught, as were the other eight of his kind, in the incinerating eruption of Mount Doom after the Ring went into the fire. And, in a footnote to letter 246 in Carpenter’s collection, Tolkien, who had been talking about how Frodo would have fared had he faced the remaining eight Nazgûl, writes, “The Witch-king [the Lord of the Nazgûl] had been reduced to impotence.” Tolkien does not say the Ringwraith was slain, so I have, at least, a case.
Such was my reasoning. I should also note at this point that I was already trying to become a writer. I’d tried to write three different novels, and had actually finished one (none of this work, I hasten to add, came within miles of being publishable). The summer of 1967 was among the blackest times of my life. I had no idea how to cope with academic failure—thinking I could excel without studying much, as I had in high school, was a contributing factor, and not such a small one, to my flunking out of Caltech.
And so I plunged into a new novel. It was, of course, an exercise in hubris, complete and unadorned. I realize that now. I did not realize it when I was eighteen. There are a great many things one does not realize at eighteen, not least among them being how very many things one does not realize at eighteen. Taking some of the arguments from the Caltech dorms, my own growing interest in history, and my belief that the Lord of the Nazgûl survived, I dropped a couple of centuries of Caesar’s legionaries (and one obstreperous Celt) into what I imagined Gondor would be like during the Fourth Age.
God help me, I still have the manuscript. The one thing I can truthfully say is that I meant no harm. (I take that back. I can say one other thing: I am not the individual mentioned in letter 292 of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien , the chap who not only aimed to write a sequel to The Lord of the Rings but sent Tolkien a detailed outline of it. That letter dates from December 1966, before part of the same bad idea occurred to me.)
I wrote it. I finished it: something close to 100,000 words, far and away the longest project I’d ever undertaken up till then. Even had all the inspiration come from my own mind, I couldn’t have sold it. Neither the style nor the characterization—such as that was—measures up to anything anyone else would ever want to read. To this day, though, I can say the plot was not disastrously bad. I had a tolerable story, but I didn’t yet know how to tell it or where to set it.
AMON HEN, THE SEAT OF SEEING
The Fellowship of the Ring
Chapter X: “The Breaking of the Fellowship”
A dozen years passed. I did a lot of the things most people do going from eighteen to thirty. I found something that interested me and pursued it. (In my case, it happened to be the history of the Byzantine Empire, which I admit is not a subject reckoned universally fascinating.) I fell in love several times. Sometimes
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