Meditations on Middle-Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

his own faith. As my wife Karen says, these elves are like seraphim.
    Scholars, including him, have found that Beowulf is not a pagan tale with monkish glosses, but profoundly Christian from start to finish, even though set in an earlier era. Nine-fingered Frodo can stand side by side with Grendel’s bane.

A
CHANGELING
RETURNS

MICHAEL SWANWICK
     
    N ot that many years ago, when the world was young and all things were as perfect as they were allowed to be, my nine-year-old son, Sean, demanded that I read to him The Lord of the Rings. His friend John Grant, it seems, had already heard it all the way through, and since John was only eight, Sean was suffering a major loss of prestige. Very well, I said, we’ll start at bedtime. And so, for a long and magical run of nights, I journeyed together with my son through the great three-volumed world of Middle-earth.
    It was not my first voyage there.
    A quarter century before, in my high school days, my sister Patricia sent home from nursing school a box of paperbacks (I can see that box now, freshly opened and full of promise) which she had read and no longer wanted. Among them was The Fellowship of the Ring . I picked it up late one evening, after finishing my homework, meaning to read a chapter or two before sleep. I stayed up all night. It wasn’t easy, but by skipping breakfast in the morning and reading every step of the way to school, I managed to finish the last page just as the bell rang for my first class to begin.
    Oh, how that book shook and rattled me! It rang me like a bell. Even today, when I am three times as old as I was then, I can still hold my breath and hear the faint reverberations from that long, eternal night. That reading made me a writer, though it took me forever to learn my craft. It showed me what literature could do and what it could be.
    Decades later, I wrote a story in homage to Tolkien, called “The Changeling’s Tale.” In it, a young tavern boy is swept up by a troupe of passing elves and carried away from hearth and home and all he knows and cares about. He pays a heavy price for the going, but he goes out of love for their beauty, their grace, and their strangeness, into a future of which all he can know is that it’s beyond his imagining. It was an honest story, I hope. But it also carried an autobiographical weight. Will Taverner was as close as I will ever come to a self-portrait. His story is not that different from mine. Long ago, I ran away with the elves, and I never came back.
    I reread The Lord of the Rings with trepidation. This book had shaped and formed me. What if it turned out to be only a minor work, just the first in the endless flood of interchangeable high-fantasy trilogies that have since inundated the bookstore racks? What if all my life had been the mere playing out of a childish enthusiasm?
    All this I recounted during a panel on fantasy at I forget which convention. The audience was full of faces my own age, hair beginning to turn gray, bodies perhaps a little thicker than they once were. Many of them looked apprehensive. They, too, had been afraid to return to Middle-earth. And when I told them of my discovery, that it was still an important work and one that an adult could safely revisit, I saw those faces bloom with smiles of gratitude and relief.
    But Sean did not hear the same book as the one I read to him.
    What he heard was the same book I had discovered that sleepless night in the land of Long Ago and Far Away—the single best adventure story ever written. As an adult, however, I found that during my long absence it had transformed itself into something else entirely. It was now the saddest book in the world.
    This is a tale in which everyone is in the process of losing everything they hold most dear. The elves, emblematic of magic, are passing away from Middle-earth. Galadriel laments the dwindling of Lothlorien. Treebeard reveals that ents are surrendering their awareness and growing increasingly