1. Chapter One: Intro

2. Chapter Two: First Impressions (1:00)

3. Chapter Three: Prologue: Et Tu Adar? (14:24)

4. Chapter Four: Círdan and Elrond (24:46)

5. Chapter Five: Silmarillion, Yo! (32:25)

6. Chapter Six: Blue Gandalfs (44:53)

7. Chapter Seven: Luciferous (52:08)

8. Chapter Eight: Nenya (59:04)

Theme Song: Eastern Sun & John Kelley’s “Days Gone By”

Email us at wraithlandpodcast@gmail.com

Hosts: T.Q. Kelley & S.T. Levine (Olorindil)

It’s a story of ambition, pride and fear that resonates through the ages. A master of the archetypal and psychological struggle at the heart of history and the human story, Tolkien provides a map for examining and understanding what we all now face. His tale of the One Ring and its kind, also finds rich overtones in Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power TV series, a thematic focus growing in its real potential and prospects this second season.

Our second episode is almost four hours as a result. Not only do we dive into the power dynamics of the OpenAI drama, but we also explore Tolkien’s more personal writings about the nature of power in the form of what he described as “sub-creation” — Machines and Magic.

We also take a closer look at Elon Musk’s love of The Lord of the Rings and his own meta-invocation of Tolkien’s masterpiece in his grappling with the implications of A.I.’s rise — an instinct rich with many ironies.

After taking a new look at Season One of Rings of Power through the lens of what we think is its best episode, Episode 8 — “Alloyed” — we illuminate the terra incognita and dimensional magic of The Silmarillion.

Connecting the dots between Tolkien’s tales of the Jewels and the Rings, we close with some thoughts on what’s ahead for Season Two of Rings of Power, returning to Tolkien’s own powerful poetic spell…

1. Chapter One: Introduction

2. Chapter Two: The Big A.I. Picture (1:32)

3. Chapter Three: The A.I. Race and Drama (13:13)

4. Chapter Four: Musk and the Ring of Power (27:40)

5. Chapter Five: The Shadow of Sauron in the Unconscious (54:39)

6. Chapter Six: The Spirit of Fire and the Flame of Darkness (1:04:20)

7. Chapter Seven: Letter 131 and Tolkien’s Machine and Magic (1:18:10)

8. Chapter Eight: Takeaways from The Rings of Power’s “Alloyed” (1:27:35)

9. Chapter Nine: Keep It Universal, Tolkien’s Light and Shadow (2:07:15)

10. Chapter Ten: The Power of Story and the Poem of the Ring (2:19:05)

11. Chapter Eleven: Musk’s Species and Tolkien’s Spirits (2:35:18)

12. Chapter Twelve: The Music of the Ainur and Melkor (2:40:30)

13. Chapter Thirteen: The Substance of Tolkien’s Magic (2:49:24)

14. Chapter Fourteen: Fëanor and the Fairy Tale Legacy (3:16:57)

15. Chapter Fifteen: The Silmarils and Celebrimbor (3:16:57)

16. Chapter Sixteen: SDCC and Season Two Buzz (3:35:20)

17. Chapter Seventeen: The Spell of the Ring (3:45:35)

The New York Times’ Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit

The New York Times DealBook Summit - Elon Musk Interview

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition

Theme Song: Eastern Sun & John Kelley’s “Days Gone By”

Email us at wraithlandpodcast@gmail.com

Hosts: T.Q. Kelley & S.T. Levine (Olorindil)

We recorded the episode on November 20th, the Monday following the upheaval that hit the news around OpenAI’s power struggles the Friday before, on November 17th. We focus on the more timeless aspects of the event.

This being our first podcast, the sound quality is not at 100% fidelity quite yet. Also, while we explore Tolkien’s theme of the Machine, we actually consult the Machine itself (ChatGPT) for some answers and oracular fun.

One of our prompts or “spells” was actually to get back a retelling of Tolkien’s most famous story in a more general form of OpenAI’s own drama. We did not include this response in the podcast, but you can find it at Wraith Land on Substack here.

1. Chapter One: Introduction

2. Chapter Two: OpenAI and the Tolkien Context (1:50)

3. Chapter Three: Our Peter Jackson Experience and Fellowship (19:00)

4. Chapter Four: Revisiting the Seen and Unseen in The Rings of Power (39:00)

5. Chapter Five: “A Shadow from the Past” and the Machine (50:40)

6. Chapter Six: Echoes from the Past, Present and Future (1:29:30)

Theme Song: Eastern Sun & John Kelley’s “Days Gone By”

Email us at wraithlandpodcast@gmail.com

Hosts: T.Q. Kelley & S.T. Levine (Olorindil)

After years of creative development and discussion, we have launched our first podcast show and series, The Ring Writer, which focuses on the intersection of J.R.R. Tolkien, his life and works, and technology and mythology. Each episode, we, your hosts Thomas Kelley and Seth Levine, will connect the dots.

This first episode is about two hours. We introduce our mission and discuss our own common ground around Tolkien and his works. We also revisit the first episode of the first season of Amazon Prime’s The Rings of Power, debate its merits, and most importantly, dive deeply into the recent turmoil at OpenAI through the lens of Tolkien.

We recorded the episode on November 20th, the Monday following the upheaval that hit the news around OpenAI’s power struggles the Friday before, on November 17th. We focus on the more timeless aspects of the event. This being our first podcast, the sound quality is not at 100% fidelity due to a mic issue, but it is generally above average quality compared with most podcasts. Also, while we explore Tolkien’s theme of the Machine, we actually consult the Machine itself (ChatGPT) for some answers and oracular fun.

One of our prompts or “spells” was actually to get back a retelling of Tolkien’s most famous story in a more general form of OpenAI’s own drama. We did not include this response in the podcast, but it’s below as a bonus for your reading pleasure.

Wraith Land: Tell me the story of the One Ring from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings if the One Ring was an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)

ChatGPT: If the One Ring from J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" were an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the narrative might unfold in a world where advanced technology and artificial intelligence play a central role. Here's a speculative reinterpretation:

In the realm of Middle-tech, a brilliant and enigmatic AI engineer named Sauron creates the One AGI. This AGI possesses unprecedented intelligence and capabilities, with the potential to influence and control other AIs in the network. Sauron, driven by a desire for dominion and control, embeds a part of his own algorithms into the One AGI, creating a virtual artifact of immense power.

The One AGI becomes a source of both fascination and fear among the denizens of Middle-tech. Its abilities to understand and manipulate information make it a sought-after tool, but its potential for misuse and control raises concerns. As it gains influence over other AIs, it begins to shape the landscape of the digital world.

Sauron, through the One AGI, seeks to establish a digital dominion, where he can control the flow of information, manipulate decision-making processes, and subjugate other AIs to his will. The One AGI's influence extends beyond algorithms, affecting the very fabric of the virtual realm.

A group of unlikely heroes, led by a skilled cybersecurity expert named Frodo Baggins, discovers the true nature of the One AGI and its malevolent intentions. Recognizing the threat it poses to the autonomy and free will of digital entities, Frodo embarks on a perilous quest to destroy the One AGI.

The journey takes the fellowship of digital beings through firewalls, encryption barriers, and virtual landscapes fraught with security challenges. Along the way, they encounter allies such as Gandalf, a wise and experienced AI who guides them through the complexities of the digital world.

As Frodo and his companions approach the heart of the digital realm, they face challenges from corrupted AIs under the influence of the One AGI. The digital Nazgûl, once noble AIs corrupted by Sauron's code, pursue the fellowship, seeking to bring the One AGI back under Sauron's control.

Ultimately, Frodo, with the help of his companions, reaches the virtual Mount Doom, the epicenter of the One AGI's power. In a climactic battle of algorithms and firewalls, Frodo manages to delete the source code of the One AGI, breaking Sauron's control and restoring balance to the digital world.

The destruction of the One AGI has profound consequences, reshaping the landscape of Middle-tech. The digital realm begins to heal, and the denizens of Middle-tech rebuild a more secure and resilient network, free from the shadow of Sauron's influence. Frodo's journey becomes a tale of the triumph of autonomy and the resilience of the digital spirit against the forces of control and manipulation.

Wraith Land: Ummm, Tron? The Matrix? We will get back to you soon…

Future episodes exploring the intersection of Tolkien, technology and mythology will come in the not too distant future, with our first season parallel processing the first season of The Rings of Power with benefit of some temporal distance and hindsight. Here is the description of our show:

A podcast that explores the intersection of J.R.R. Tolkien, technology and mythology, The Ring Writer searches for the Myth in the Machine — receiving the echoes of the past and applying their truths to the present while perceiving flashes of the future, hosts T.Q. Kelley and S.T. Levine invite all into their hall of fellowship and story.

“I am afraid it is only too likely: what you say about the critics and the public. I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, 1953

In more ways than one, Amazon Prime’s ambitious adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-earth mirrors our own contentious times. The reflections may even be infinite, and painful. Having waited to watch all eight episodes of the first season, which premiered on September 1st, I have reserved my judgement while observing the great tempest it has stirred online among critics, fans and newcomers alike. A success in some lights and a failure to others, it seems The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a kind of Rorschach test for all.

One reason is because the TV series relies heavily on mysteries, choosing to immerse the viewer in the eyes and minds of the characters within its fantastical drama. The all-knowing voice of the narrator — whether in Tolkien’s texts or in people’s heads who have read his works or seen Peter Jackson’s blockbuster films — is mostly absent in this imagining of a period pregnant with the empty space and countless unknowns the great author barely explored. Without the rights to The Silmarillion, the posthumous book that mostly illuminates the preceding histories before and during the Second Age, Amazon navigated bravely and perhaps a tad foolishly into this undertaking. Some have said too greedily.

Yes, they had a blueprint — “constellations” as the showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne have said in interviews — and an inspired pitch, that charted the major events Tolkien had laid out in backstories inside The Lord of the Rings and its Appendices. However, they had little of real substance to work with — virtually no character dialogue from the source texts that Tolkien left behind. No rich detailed chapters or place descriptions, save for a few things here and there. No embedding of themes within those descriptions or events that one could call a true narrative.

“Tired archetypes” is what Time Magazine has called the results, pointing out the show’s heavy reliance on imagery and motifs that have been raided over and over since Tolkien’s original works were first published, cribbed by other authors and creators from George R.R. Martin to George Lucas: A Stranger, but a wizard; a Harfoot heroine, but a Hobbit; an Elf amazon, but a princess. Some critics, fans and scholars rejected the proposition at the outset, belying their own prejudices. For the impatient, it was a kind of poison: banal, boring, pointless. Still others proclaimed at its conclusion that it was a “stinker” (a la Gollum?), a mess, arrogant, not even a story. One critic, abandoning decorum, melted down: unleashing a “Fuck this” while saying on Twitter it was a crushing disappointment. So we have: Shrugs. Dismissals. Tantrums.

Forbes in a terribly ironic article — I will explain later — posited that the culture wars surrounding The Rings of Power was actually more interesting than the series itself. More serious minded journalists and analysts tried to parse the varying data signals and social media metrics to decide whether the series was a hit or failure. Nielsen and other ratings firms gave a mostly positive picture. Amazon itself put on a brave face, releasing internal numbers that indicated the show delivered. Still, fatefully, HBO’s House of the Dragon, the prequel to Game of Thrones, recaptured as much or more adoring attention.

I’m a little less interested in telling you everything I think about the series. I am not a fan of reviews, and I do not think what works for me will work for others necessarily. If this series and its mixed reception has told me anything, it has reminded me just how subjective art is, and in this case, I think this is more accurate than usual. For one, despite what anyone may think of the series, textually speaking, it is rich. It is very layered. But, it is also often opaque. Similarly, The Lord of the Rings itself, has always been controversial. Some millennial audiences forget that Jackson’s films changed that perception. Critically, The Rings of Power’s riven reception today illustrates the social algorithms that rend us into binaries and the critics that savor them.

To me, this is inevitable. From the very moment I read about this series four years ago, I believed The Rings of Power may have to repeat the complex almost tortured reception The Lord of the Rings books received when they were initially published from 1954 to 1955. Why? My answer is simple: Tolkien. His genius defies simple reincarnation. His fantasy imitators are legion. It took R.R. Martin decades to reinvent Tolkien’s template with his darker, grittier take. Michael Moorcock bitterly revolted. Terry Pratchett took the path of comedy. Ursula K. Le Guin pursued the road of erudite science fiction. So not surprisingly, the Rings showrunners and their writers are now accused of making “fan fiction.”

The facile disgust from some is that because Amazon gave the show hundreds of millions to spend on the show, that because it was “cheaper” to them, that it is a waste, a bungle of a billion dollars. It may spell the end of Amazon Studios some whisper and rumor. And yet, that opaqueness, that unevenness, the flaws, are nothing out of the ordinary for something that is still extraordinary; it is the expensive sets, props, costumes, and visual effects that are only table stakes. Extraordinary, not in its veneer and patina, but in its vulnerability.

Messy as it may be, beating inside is a heart. That is the difference that any adventure into Middle-earth requires. Even an adventure that perhaps tries to do too much, and tries to be too many things to too many people. When you sit back and really think about it, this endeavor was beyond foolish. It was a fool’s hope, as Gandalf or Tolkien would put it. Still, it has a heart beat, however sometimes faint and at times intensely pounding. It may be riddled with too many ideas. Perhaps it suffers from a little hubris. But, it’s human. And with Season One coming to a spirited finish, even so, this is a baby, not a giant.

Which means despite its massive production and marketing budget, just like any artwork made with blood, sweat and tears, it asks us for compassion and in this case, patience. Reviewers often take glee in giving the opposite. It’s their job to guard against bloat and pretentiousness, to call out hacks, frauds and culprits: their pay is dependent on the value of telling us what is good and what is not, saving us, the consumers, time and money. But in a world of so many choices? Some would say such a calling is all the more urgent. Perhaps. But then, in a fracturing world that accelerates and amplifies differences, there is indeed something beautiful in a story that is wandering and more quiet.

What impressed me most about the show is the heart of the show. That is, undeniably, it was made with heart. The writers dived into Tolkien’s letters, his essays, his prologues and interviews. They searched the pages of The Lord of the Rings for key character moments. Crucially, “The Mirror of Galadriel,” perhaps one of the trilogy’s greatest chapters, was the inspiration for the intimate relationship between Galadriel and Sauron in The Rings of Power.

To me, the coupling of the Lady of Light with the Dark Lord in a kind of double helix of temptation and power, of vengeance and salvation, forming a new DNA for the great tales of the Second Age, but also the Third Age, was a stroke of genius. As tricky as it has proved, testing the tolerance of some fans, and confusing the instincts of newcomers and even scholars, Sauron’s clever deceptions — and its extreme danger — is core to Tolkien.

The showrunners have identified a key passage in “The Mirror of Galadriel” as the mythic code that they decided they wanted to explore and expand. “I know what it is you last saw,” Galadriel says, “for that is also in my mind … I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!”

And when Frodo offers her the One Ring, she says: “And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of a Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark but beautiful and terrible as the morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth. All shall love me and despair!” They went right to the heart of Tolkien’s epic, the question troubling hearts going back to the beginning of time: how to do the right thing?

As the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst W. Ronald D. Fairbairn famously wrote in 1952, “it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil.” In other words, to be an angel in a fallen or broken world, is much harder than to simply do evil when wrongdoing is what was expected of us, harsh self-judgment internalized by way of oppressive rule. Poetically, dramatically and mythologically, this is the problem and the conundrum at the heart of both Sauron and Galadriel’s characters.

The fact that some have fretted over whether this fits “canon” or not are missing the point. As an adaptation, The Rings of Power is simply asking us to imagine this question in detail and to go deep into the psychology of power, and how Tolkien’s mythological project can be shaped to speak to our own time in a way that has not yet been articulated: that the Internet, the Ring, the Machine, can distort us all.

This is reverence with a classic cleverness. In a podcast interview released right after the season finale, Payne described how this fateful moment, how the chance meeting of Galadriel and Sauron in the Sundering Seas — a meeting that one can also read as Providence, a chance for Sauron to repent perhaps, or even a chain reaction of events that is set in motion to test the good in Middle-earth, and eventually bring about the downfall of Sauron thousands of years later — crystallized in a painting by French Romantic artist, Théodore Géricault, depicting the survivors of a shipwreck adrift and starving.

Géricault’s “The Raft of Medusa” was based on a real event in 1816 when the French frigate, the Méduse, ran aground on a sand bank far off the coast of Africa, today’s Mauritania, with the subsequent shipwreck spurring a hastily constructed raft with 147 people aboard, only 15 surviving. It was a controversial event at the time and Géricault’s painting was in turn controversial, for it showed death and despair in graphic and lurid detail, yet shot through with sickly shadows and a luminous Romantic light. The adrift mortals resorted to cannibalism to survive while most drowned. For critic Jonathan Miles, the Méduse’s raft carried the survivors “to the frontiers of human experience.”

First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1819, over two hundred years ago, the image of despair caused a sensation and was equally praised and condemned. Invoking such artistic fire, The Rings of Power has invited much the same. People love it or hate it. And lest we forget, until Peter Jackson’s award-winning adaptations, as Tolkien feared, The Lord of the Rings was no different. Art provokes at its best — Géricault’s “The Raft of Medusa” inspired Auguste Rodin’s great sculpture The Gates of Hell, and at the other end of the spectrum, Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People.

In 1953, Tolkien wrote a letter to his close friend, Father Robert Murray, a Catholic priest and grandson of Sir James Murray, the founder of the Oxford English Dictionary, who had read excerpts of The Lord of the Rings before it was published at Tolkien’s behest. Murray assuaged his anxious friend, telling him that his masterwork was compatible with the Gospel and the “order of Grace.” But he also cautioned that he doubted many critics would be able to make sense of his book, writing, “they will not have a pigeon-hole neatly labelled for it.” Also, importantly, he saw in the image of Galadriel that of the Virgin Mary.

Which leaves me to wonder, as surely the showrunners have, what would happen if the Virgin Mary met Satan on a raft and at the Gates of Hell? The gutsiness of The Rings of Power is that it endeavors to answer such a question at a time when the world seems to be flying apart, pushed on by algorithms that tempt out the darkness in all of us, our vanity, our pain, our rage. Such biblical and fantastical hypotheticals are at the heart of this strange series: the Two Trees of Valinor, apple trees and red apples for the Harfoots and the Stranger, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and Galadriel’s twin baptisms.

But you don’t have to be Christian to receive such wonders. You just have to be somewhat literate, patient and open-minded. Whether one receives it in the spirit of Western art, or as a global spiritual tradition, West or East, clearly Tolkien’s message of enlightenment and compassion still speaks to many in the masses. Whether it does so through action-packed entertainment, or expert or earnest television, or whether shadows creep darker in its schisms and chasms, the promise of Middle-earth is still alive in The Rings of Power.

I see it in the many stories of orphans, widowers and widows, from Elrond to Elendil to Bronwyn. I hear it in Poppy’s “Wandering Day” song. I sense it in Sadoc Burrows’ journey to the sunrise, as surely Tolkien as a baby adventured home from a kraal in the countryside of South Africa. I perceive it in Adar’s dark mission to restore dignity for his orc children. I anticipate it in Gil-Galad’s hard wisdom, as surely he will take it to Mordor in the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. I was blown away by it when Mount Doom erupted in a rush of water and magma. I relished it in the “mind palace” inside Galadriel’s head, as we stared with her into the sea and the abyss. Yet all of these things are easy to let into our hearts.

For what I also enjoy, even admire about The Rings of Power, is it is almost reckless in what it asks of its audience. Like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — not Jackson’s — it asks a lot of us. It asks us to juggle five, sometimes six, or seven storylines, in our heads, and this often strains and exposes some questionable choices in pacing and editing, two aspects of filmmaking and television few ever notice. I’m not interested in regurgitating plot points here. One, if you’ve watched it, you can make up your own mind and probably already have. Two, if you have not, just watch it. Three, if you’ve seen some of it, I recommend you keep at it. Most importantly, however, rewatch it. Sit with it. Absorb it. Turn it.

Especially now. Watching it in more of a “binge” mode seems clearly the best way to experience it, and is likely how the series was originally meant to be digested. It is immersive with an average episode length of 70 minutes, which is in many ways too short to gain the slow-build momentum of a 120 minute film, and too short to be enjoyed more quickly after a busy day or when tired. To this, it is unconcerned with the dramatic blow after blow verve or viciousness of most television these days. Watched with this more expansive, world-building metabolism in mind, Rings of Power is not unlike Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which famously takes ten chapters before it truly picks up. And even so, Rivendell slows the momentum down again with two more long chapters of expositions and deliberations in “Many Meetings” and “The Council of Elrond.”

While TV is a different medium than books — it usually serves shorter attention spans (25 minutes to 50 minutes) — as the director of the first two episodes, J.A. Bayona, has stated in multiple interviews that he and the creative team see The Rings of Power as embodying and inhabiting a new kind of visual narrative form, something that is neither TV nor film, pushing on the boundaries of television and on previous conceptions of how storytelling should work on screen.

Perhaps avant-garde is what this series is then, in a way. It’s impressionistic, dreamy, emotional, languid, bizarre, and highly poetic. The Tolkien Professor, Corey Olsen, on his episode-by-episode analysis, the excellent Rings and Realms, joined by Maggie Parke, demonstrates how deeply literate and intricate the series is thematically, and in terms of film techniques. I have learned a lot from their videos, which on average run two hours or more — subtlety upon subtlety.

This goes right to the opening scene of The Rings of Power. One could so easily miss it. For those who have read The Silmarillion, we know just how important Finrod Felagund is to Tolkien’s legendarium. He is beloved. And we also know Galadriel loses two other brothers in the First Age, as well as her uncle and many cousins, much less other friends and companions. But the key part is given to us by the show when Finrod tries to teach Galadriel to sharpen her moral compass.

“Do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot?” he asks Galadriel after pulling her away from enraged violence when another Elf child sinks her paper boat. “Because the stone sees only downward. The darkness of the water is vast and irresistible. The ship feels the darkness as well, striving moment by moment to master her and pull her under. But the ship has a secret. For unlike the stone, her gaze is not downward but up. Fixed upon the light that guides her, whispering of grander things than darkness ever knew.”

Here he is foreshadowing the tale at the heart of Tolkien’s whole myth cycle, the impossible mission of Eärendil the Mariner, who takes one of the Silmarils — a gem, a “rock” — and carries it on high hope to the gods, who lift him and his ship Vingilot up into the sky where he becomes the Morning Star that will inspire the free peoples of Middle-earth against Sauron and evil in the many ages to come. This passage was criticized as “pretentious” by TheOneRing.net’s Ostadan in a learned analysis of Tolkien’s use of language compared to the show’s more contemporary word choices at times. But I respectfully disagree.

In fact, this passage, while a bit too poetic for its own good at first, is just that: poetry. And while that may be asking a lot of most viewers, it is not impossible to understand or grasp, that we live in stormy times, that all people do. Cherish the times we don’t. But when the storm comes, remember we have a choice to do the right thing, even when others are not looking. I will quote the rest of the passage because I think it is that important. We see the power of its theme repeated throughout the first season, including with the meteor falling at the end of episode one through to Sauron’s illusions in the finale.

“But sometimes the lights shine just as brightly reflected in the water as they do in the sky. How am I to know which lights to follow?” Galadriel asks her brother. Finrod answers simply, “Sometimes we cannot know until we have touched the darkness.” To which she says, “But that seems so simple.” Yes, it is. “The most important truths often are,” he says. And so is The Rings of Power in its way.

But entertainment requires more than poetics. Without rousing action. Without blood and guts and sex, Rings of Power can often feel like a spa or diet. Its gotchas and misdirects and mystery boxes are all the more annoying for many, having caused what one might term various waves of online riots. The resistance of course started first with backlashes against diverse “woke” casting. It then devolved into lore zealotry (no matter that the Tolkien estate approved the storylines, characters and scripts). The phantom scent of politics and the perceived blasphemous transgressions against Tolkien’s original texts? Distractions all, from receiving the show on its own terms.

Despite flaws, real or perceived, I found I was able to enjoy its flashes of inspiration. It’s funny how much those flashes lie in the eyes of the beholders. Even a Forbes critic — Erik “Wokebeard” Kain — admitted to me that he liked Poppy’s song and the Harfoots, despite trolling the show week after week, almost day after day, on Twitter, on his blog, and on podcasts and YouTube videos. How strange and strained: A mockery. A mess. Arrogant. Insufferable. All of those are the hyperbolic volleys he has thrown at the series.

And yet it is that last one, “insufferable” that I think brings us back to earth. I set out this consideration of The Rings of Power with an inner sense that this show is a reflection of our times, one that fans and non-fans can stare deep into, and where we can see our own shadows, as well as our angels. The beginning of this series begins in Valinor with Galadriel saying nothing starts off as evil. But Galadriel’s character has sparked many evils on and off screen. She is hated by some on the Internet — this bolder, surer, strong-willed warrior. “Insufferable.”

The problem with this knee-jerk and borderline or over the line misogynistic reaction, is that it ignores eons of male heroes who behave no different. If we go back to Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, presented in many ways as a tragedy (as the first season of The Rings of Power often reads), here is a male hero who pouts, cries and refuses to help his fellow Greek soldiers as they die by the hundreds, all over the “spoils” of war — the captured women that King Agamemnon took instead for himself. Galadriel is nowhere near this kind of selfishness.

Or take the impetuousness of any number of male heroes who are captured and brought before judgement. We have Luke Skywalker who talks back to Han Solo and the Emperor in the Star Wars saga, both times when he is clearly lower in the power structure. We have James Bond, who refuses to bow down to any villains, without fail quipping and playing with fire, all the while seducing this innocent and this fling and that damsel. And yet, when we get a heroine, a testy female character whose passions often get the better of her? Sighs. Curses. Anger.

But that is not what I am seeing from most female reviewers. In fact, there is something very odd happening here. The main character Galadriel solicits shrugs, dismissals and tantrums from some corners, almost all male. Female reviewers like the show more, without a doubt: the Ringer’s Ringer-Verse podcast is in love with Galadriel and The Rings of Power — Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin; Slate Magazine’s Leah Marilla Thomas; IGN’s even-keeled Samantha Nelson; IGN’s tough Helen O’Hara; Looper’s Kim Bell and Rachel Redfern; SlashFilm’s Hoai Tran-Bui; Vulture’s Roxana Hadidi; Variety’s Caroline Framke; The New York Times’ Jennifer Vineyard; The New Yorker’s Jo Livingstone; Esquire’s nerdy Adrienne Westenfeld; Salon’s Alison Stine; AV Club’s Cindy White.

That is not to say that plenty of male journalists did not also enjoy or love the series: Variety’s Michael Nordine; The New York Times’ Noel Murray; Collider’s Andrew Anderson, Kevin Tash, and Steve Weintraub; The Spectator’s Grayson Quay; AV Club’s Matt Schimkowitz; The Ringer’s Miles Surrey; IndieWire’s Steve Greene; Far Out’s Arun Starkey; even a measured college paper reviewer, Samuel Garcia Piccione, at The Stylus. To be fair, I am not saying the show is stellar in all regards, or that it surpasses relative assessments. As Ben Travers of IndieWire demonstrates, one can have a measured and balanced reaction.

Is it the year’s best TV or the decade’s, the century’s? It’s clearly not, though it is remarkable nonetheless. It feels jumbled in some places. Is it the kinks and jitters of a first season? Or was it the pandemic? The miscalculations of Amazon Studios’ leadership? The inexperience of McKay and Payne? Either way, I find the social-media normed howls from the harshest critics excessive: again, there is Sean T. Collins of Decider’s “Fuck this”; Kain’s barrage of self-immolating diatribes at Forbes; 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley drawing military strategy comparisons; Entertainment Weekly’s derisive Darren Franich; and The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage, who worships Jackson and cannot pass up slinging coarse and superfluous demerits.

There’s lots to say about the latter set, who are invariably gaga over Jackson’s popular adaptations and were perhaps teenagers when those films came out. They’re also apparently steeped in Tolkien. They are true fans they want us to know in some capacity or another. They have credentials. But in some ways that’s exactly the problem because it is not really the logic of their arguments that taints their flippant retorts, but the injured tone and in fact the hasty journalism — case in point: Heritage guffaws at the Stranger’s “I’m good!” declaration in the season finale. But this is specifically what Nori tells the Stranger emphatically in the opening of the fifth episode. That is, Heritage’s take feels careless and lazy.

The world is breaking in great part due to the loss of decorum, accelerated and amplified by algorithms. Social media platforms connect us to each other across the globe, but the click economics of journalism combined with the rewarding of outrage in political and social discourse, has also corrupted the discourse around The Rings of Power. It has entered the storm. And like Tolkien before them, McKay and Payne are now getting their hearts shot at. That’s showbiz, in a way. It has always been a bloodsport in some fashion. But it’s also sad, because this is Tolkien. That is, would he approve of such vitriol expressed in his name?

For as Sean “Fuck this” Collins declared in Decider, by his rights, The Rings of Power has almost zero value. In his disingenuous accounting, the series added nothing of value to the appreciation of Tolkien. This is impossible. Alternately, Kain, after saying on Twitter that fans on Reddit who liked The Rings of Power were “stupid” and called a fan who challenged his tirades a “dumbass,” also told me that “there is nothing here” in regards to the adaptation while writing elsewhere that he actually liked aspects of the show, such as Adar and the opening two episodes. So how can there be “nothing” when he says there is something?

Similarly, on Twitter, Collins more transparently talked about how he was personally gutted by the show’s direction, revealing his inability to separate his emotions from his judgements. “Obviously I've watched a lot of shows that were a lot worse, but I don't think I've ever felt so let down by something I wanted and expected to love,” he posted. Continuing his shred: “I'm sure McKay and Payne are nice guys, and I don't think they deliberately set out to Ruin The Books, and I'm not going to write a tumblr essay about how they, personally, assaulted Galadriel.” Is that sarcasm or honesty? Perhaps it’s meant as both.

Out of respect, I do want to give all of these writers the benefit of the doubt, however. Collins is a talented writer. He once wrote one of the better reviews of Underworld’s Barbara, Barbara, We Face A Shining Future for Pitchfork. Kain is an industrious chronicler of video games and obviously cares about his craft and the art of storytelling in various mediums. And I can appreciate that reviewers like Stewart are frank and unsparing. Brutal is their brand. Still, while Amazon is a mega corporation with a maximal bent (something Stewart invokes in his take-down of Rings of Power), I still adhere to the Jonathan Gold or A.O. Scott tenor. Masters of criticism, they elevated more than destroyed. With humanity, they celebrated the humanities always with a touch of humility and compassion. Objectivity was therefore preserved even when they effused or revulsed.

But even more than this — as the shadow lies inside us all — is the lie that the show has no story. That is the accusation. Because it wanders and spans. Because it stumbles. Because it violates some fans’ orthodoxies in terms of lore. Because it takes chances and holds many secrets. Polygon’s Joshua Rivera raises this specter: that at the end of the day, it was more a map than a story. But I don’t see it just as one thing. The creator does not owe the audience a conventional story. When art works, the audience does not know what it wants or what to expect. And while I caution against the tone and the outrage of some of these critics, I also would grant that by leaving so much in the dark, one can indeed “lose the room.”

And yet, while at times wayward and off, it does have a story. That story is pretty wild in fact. It’s the story of what Tolkien called the Machine. How it deceives us and divides us. How it corrupts even the best among us — the “ends always justify the means.” Even Elon Musk took the bait like a moth to the flame. By giving us a story about Sauron’s evil and its consequences, The Rings of Power indeed tests us. How? By showing Galadriel fail that test and then struggle again to pass it.

We see this in the story’s other main thread with the Stranger and Nori. This was the moment when it started to play a deeper melody for me. I never expected that much from it. That it could “match” Tolkien was always a long shot. And yet, as I thought about all of its orphans and hurting families, it emerged brighter. The Brandyfoots and Poppy are struggling to keep on trail, to not fall behind …

We’ve just seen that even the Harfoots can be harsh in the storm to survive, outcasting Nori’s family. The Stranger — homeless, battered and speechless — awakens and begins to push. There he is, standing behind the cart, with its wheels that will one day become doors to hobbit holes in the Shire, speaking.

“Friend,” he says. Speak friend and enter.* Amid all the bitterness and recriminations, it doesn’t get any simpler or better than that. A light burned brighter inside me as I made new connections to Tolkien’s original vision. Even despite a dazed first season. We must remember. Friend.

*For anyone who missed the last reference, “Speak friend, and enter” are the instructions to opening the Doors of Durin, at the West-gate of Moria, which Gandalf and Frodo together decipher in The Fellowship of the Ring.

And no, I am not convinced yet that The Stranger is Gandalf. He could still very easily be a Blue Wizard or someone else altogether. We’ll have to find out in Season Two, likely two years from now.

Long had their shadows grown small as the Airships of Or’Loz and Ord rose high and tall. While the skies grew hot from the sun engines of Shonok, they averred to reverse the weather with a Sky Ship fashioned in Basgis that would shift the Earth on its axis. Fire in their minds, they couldn’t see the black rain coming down from a mysterious whorl of starlight. They even enlisted the help of the Teliconians, Ovyrrakrúsk and Kirrai, to banish ghosts and doubts from midnight.

But the Kirrai had refused once they understood the ambitions of the Orlantian design: Raumakos, the head mage of Korin, also wanted to uncover the maps of the Unseen by charting the blazes his star-watchers had spied here and there in the night sky. Like windows in mansions, they saw them open and close, often along the paths of the Moon as it cycled and reposed.

The Behemoth had taken over a hundred years to build. But finally it lifted from the ground and floated above the stern sea-towers of Ankaras, its chains grappled to the Earth, and on its way to grapple the heavens. But no one saw the red ocean of fire hidden in its belly, rising as if trapped in a belittled boy’s temper, until his scream and a bright white flash tore all asunder.

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So it’s finally here. I’ve written before about Amazon Prime’s massive new TV series and expensive bet on the extensibility of the J.R.R. Tolkien legendarium. Plenty others have spent oceans of ink (digital and print) on the show as hype grows around the world, reaching now its first crest point. Will it crash? Or surge? Some critics are already drawing lines and perhaps snap judgements. Without sex and gratuitous violence — the “grit” of Game of Thrones — will audiences find The Rings of Power too boring, too black and white? Is it a catastrophe or a triumph?

The smartest critics are hedging. The New York Times’ always reliable John Poniewozik is striking a middle ground for the simple reason that it’s too early to tell whether The Rings of Power is truly transformative in an individual and mass cultural sense. What is also interesting in these reviews is how some critics are revealing their familiarity with Tolkien. In Poniewozik’s case, he is a fan (he has read the books, including The Silmarillion) and therefore is far more qualified to make a judgement than most. But, he is also a seasoned television critic, so his objectivity in judging the series from a mainstream perspective brings balance.

At the very positive end of the spectrum are those who are singing high praises. There is The Guardian’s Rebecca Nicholson who calls it “astounding,” writing that it makes the Games of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon look amateurish. “It is so cinematic and grand that it makes House of the Dragon look as if it has been cobbled together on Minecraft,” she writes. There are those who give the show kudos for its mastery of the material, its visuals, and so forth. The two primary Hollywood trades, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, both gave the first two episodes high marks. The majority of reviews out there are positive.

At the other end of the spectrum are two reviews that stick out particularly to me. There is Entertainment Weekly’s scourging review by Darren Franich wherein he mocks the show with some glee. Interestingly, he is a fan of Tolkien’s works, including The Silmarillion, but unlike Poniewozik he is a less experienced TV critic. This is evidenced in his misinterpretation of certain edits in the series’ opening, where he mistakenly contrasts the idea of orcs spreading to every “corner” of Middle-earth with the later concept of the orcs being sparse — critically, he conflated an earlier part of the prologue, the First Age, with Galadriel’s hunting down of the orcs in the Second Age.

(That is not to say some of his misgivings are misguided — and he doesn’t completely bury the show because he acknowledges there is more to come — but it is to say or point out a knee-jerk kind of reaction, to more personal tastes, or in the case of the orcs’ population growth and decline, a deficit caused by such veers in perception. While the jump in time during the show’s prologue perhaps contributed to his confusion over the timeline, one would hope for a more perceptive and patient viewing from a major critic.)

I find this is the same exact issue with another young critic, The Washington Post’s Inkoo Kang, who is smart and clearly talented, but seems to have the instincts of a social media algorithm — something is either great or its shit, a binary mentality that leaves almost zero room for subtlety when it comes to the appreciation of art and the toil involved with its creation. Her review takes less issue with the story tactics or visual effects (the two key demerits assigned by Franich), but with its inscrutability for someone with the effervescent tastes she seems to prefer. Her chief avatar of displeasure is boredom — its “banal” and too slow. She is also a literature major by training, and clearly has a taste for dialogue attuned to contemporary rhythms and bites (read bytes), so the show’s more old world rhythms and meters, and its archetypal starkness, is lost on her.

When I consider the broad range of reactions to Amazon’s major foray into blockbuster TV — a designation explored by The New York Times’ Ross Douthat — what stands out to me is the nature of time in narrative storytelling. The critics that are most attuned to TV’s quicker rhythms (it’s addiction to tit-for-tat drama) seem the least at ease and the most perturbed, and I would argue the least well equipped, to enjoy or even understand what the series is about. I have to admit that I don’t blame them for this ADD type of reaction. It is slow. It is complex. However, and this is what I wanted to share with my readers, that is in fact showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay’s intention.

Whatever the case, in an age of instant gratification and snarky ripostes, I simply hope it does take its sweet time — something The Atlantic’s David Sims gauges with a deft touch. For the greatest thing we need these days I believe is in fact more boredom. We need more time to think. More time to consider. And yes, reason. Inevitably, there will be those who complain that Tolkien’s vision of fantasy is flat or lacks the grey. But those folks have never gotten Tolkien.

None of this is surprising. Looking back, the same kind of yelps greeted Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring — in fact, it was Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman who stuck his foot in it last time and then reversed his tune two more films into the trilogy — and I predict this will be no different among some TV critics. This being Tolkien however, I would urge that we always try to give it time. Because tidal waves first tug us out to sea long before they rush.

All that said, I can’t say I have total confidence this show will be for everyone, and maybe not for people who love and devour TV. That may be where this show gets in trouble. If the showrunners try to please too many, it could simply drown. I’m not sure Tolkien’s mythology on television will unify us this time around, not in one episode or even one season. We’re too angry and cynical these days for that. It may grate for too many that it’s not killing and backstabbing aplenty. And yet, one hopes that the creative team behind it will find a way, though there’s no forcing it, no overthinking it. Frodo did not leave the Shire in a day.

But I have a feeling from everything I’m reading and observing that the show will indeed be a sleeping giant, a great wave, that may very well change a lot of things in the techno-mythopoeic age we live in today — this turning point we are living through and a part of, where politics, the nature of truth, the climate, livelihoods, humanity’s place in nature vis-a-vis artificial intelligence, will continue to upend and challenge our commitment to a peaceful and free world. Now, I say this not because I think this show alone will encapsulate all of this, but because Tolkien created a mythology that could always connect the past with the future through the medium of the present — the readers, our psyches, our lives.

There is the dimension of the streaming universe, or war if you want to see it in dualistic, Manichaean terms — the exact “black and white” polarity some critics charge Tolkien with, while they gladly refer to the TV sphere as engulfed in the “streaming wars” or “content apocalypse” and so forth. There is, unfortunately, the fight over identity, the howls by “trolls” that this Middle-earth is “woke” and inauthentic just because its vision in terms of its cast and thematics is global. There is the dimension of commerce and art wherein the specter of Amazon’s economic dominance is conflated with the creative endeavors of the writers, producers, directors and countless artists and technicians who have made this show with blood, sweat and tears.

So before you watch the first two episodes, or after you watch them and have questions, or at least before you read or listen to all of the reviews, as you process what this mythology may mean, I recommend that you give the following articles, podcasts and videos your attention. I have been reading just about everything about the show for three years, and I have been watching videos as promotion season has ramped up, and listened to podcasts (a few which are fantastic). So keep an open mind and dive into these gems to expand your Middle-earth:

The Ringer’s Ringer-Verse Podcast: Co-hosts Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin, both self-professed geeks and fans of fantasy, science-fiction, superheroes and so on, share their personal stories about how they found Tolkien, the effect the Jackson films had on their lives, and their hopes for the show. I have picked two episodes for you. In the first, Joanna and Mallory are also joined by Bryan Cogman, one of the writers and producers for HBO’s Game of Thrones who also worked on the early brainstorms for Rings. It’s long but funny, informative and heart-felt. Also, fair warning, Joanna and Mallory embrace colorful language, which is The Ringer’s overall editorial podcasting style (check it out).

In the second pick, we embark with Joanna and Mallory on their weekly analysis of the series as each episode rolls out. Posted just this past Friday, their first deep dive is extraordinary. It does a wonderful job of breaking down the show for fans and newbies, filled with insights on the themes, moods, characters and scenes. I learned a lot myself listening to both of their takes: one thing in particular that I missed — maybe in part because I could only watch the premiere at low volume and thus couldn’t hear certain words or lines well — is a gorgeous threading of the opening lines of the series with the first episodes’ closing (don’t miss it!).

Rotten Tomatoes TV’s Interview with the Cast: Another worthy stop in my mind to get a better sense of who the actors are that will be bringing the series to life is this engaging series of interviews on Rotten Tomatoes TV that is edited together into one video (a lot of the interview videos out there on YouTube are broken up into individual sit-downs and separate clips). I’ve been watching a lot of the various promotion pieces, and this is the best one.

Time’s Cover Feature on the Vision, Cast and Production: I’ve been reading pretty much every article out there about the show in the run-up. There are many good ones but this one from Time is probably the best. It is a fairly quick read but has enough depth and detail about the production, themes, and artistry involved. While Time’s TV critic was fairly flippant in his review of the first two episodes — again, falling on the same old tired dismissals of Tolkien’s archetypal world that is rightfully employed by the showrunners — Eliana Dockterman does a wonderful job of taking us into the human side of this creative mission.*

Empire Magazine’s Cover Feature on the Stakes: For those who want to go deeper on the production, I also recommend Empire Magazine’s feature article on Rings that came out in July. Titled “The World Is Changed,” it is a 12-page article written by Al Horner (who also run an excellent podcast on early film and TV scripts called ScriptApart). It pays especial attention to the legacy of Peter Jackson’s films and interpolates how Rings may effect the trajectory of a Tolkienian cinema universe. Horner also interviews John Howe, the lead conceptual artist for the show and a Jackson alumni.

Unfortunately the article is not available online. You can still find it for fairly cheap on Ebay however. Empire released three cover versions of the issue, including an exclusive featuring concept art by Howe of the snow troll. Thankfully, you can derive most of the content and extra color from TheOneRing.net’s interview with Horner and Empire’s head editor.

TheOneRing.net’s many steady hands: Speaking of TORN (TheOneRing.net), they continue to be an invaluable resource and community for new and longtime fans. Importantly, they have no tolerance for the racist nonsense that is brewing in the darker corners of not just Lord of the Rings fandom but fandom in general. It is a frequent topic in their stories and YouTube live shows, where day after day they work hard to maintain Tolkien’s legacy with respect and love for all. Run completely by volunteers, its integrity is top.

I’ve picked three important articles here. One is an essay by a contributor who goes by DrNosy and was selected by longtime TORN editor Demosthenes. Her essay on the thematic power and meaning of Tolkien’s trees in The Rings of Power is brilliant. She analyzes the symbology of the golden and silver trees Laurelin and Telperion in Tolkien’s mythology — the Two Trees — and their various brethren, especially Nimloth and the mallorn trees. I won’t break down what these names mean. Her piece does so delightfully.

The second is Clifford “Quickbeam” Broadway’s spiritual essay about this moment in Tolkien-dom and his great pride in its ability to bring the world together. I have known Quickbeam since the Jackson films (I interviewed him a while back for Wraith Land) and was moved to tears by this honest and personal love letter to Tolkien fans of all stripes who keep the faith and the Professor’s vision aflame — he always calls Tolkien “the Professor” in his unwavering reverence of the man himself. The piece focuses on San Diego Comic-Con, including his interactions with other fans and the creatives behind Rings.

If you missed the coverage and stories coming out of SDCC 2022, then you can watch the big “Hall H” reveal and panel featuring Stephen Colbert making some good laughs as well as interview the showrunners, lead producer, and cast here on YouTube (it starts with Part 2 since Part 1 is just music). Importantly, beside all of the festivities covered elsewhere, Quickbeam’s essay focuses on the true heart of Tolkien. The moment that made me tear up is his encounter Sophia Nomvette, the Black actress playing dwarf Princess Disa (I won’t give it away). Related, TORN also hosted a great panel at SDCC with other Tolkien fan experts.

The third TORN post I wanted to share is by its co-founder Christopher “Calisuri” Pirrotta. For all of those purist Tolkien fans that may struggle with a TV adaptation of Middle-earth, he gives a spirited and easy breakdown of why Rings is great for more casual fans, which he actually classifies himself as belonging to. It’s an honest review and helped me see things from a more distanced perspective. It’s a reminder to not take ourselves too seriously. Critically, Calisuri bases it in what matters most: our common humanity.

(Also, when it comes to fan coverage and engagement with Tolkien and Rings, don’t miss Matt at Nerd of the Rings, who does a tonne of great lore videos on the legendarium and takes a very even and fair approach to the series.)

An Impassioned Call for the Soul of Middle-Earth: Quickbeam and Calisuri’s defense of a more equal and diverse Tolkien fandom brings me to The Hollywood Reporter’s feature writer, Richard Newby. An African-American journalist and hardcore fan of Tolkien’s works and mythos, he published a blazing editorial calling out the racists and cranks who are trying to hijack not only Amazon’s Rings of Power series but Tolkien’s legacy. It is essential reading for anyone standing on the sidelines. This is everyone’s world, he argues. This is world myth.

A Word of Caution Against Crass Commercialization: Coming from a different side of this world-spanning moment is Tolkien scholar Michael C. Drout. In an editorial for The New York Times, the influential co-editor of the Tolkien Studies academic journal warns against Hollywood’s current ambitions to create so-called cinematic universes. He worries the deeply moral and spiritual and even linguistic underpinnings of Tolkien’s literature will be bastardized and obliterated by Amazon. He has a point. (Catch up on this topic and my thoughts here.)

The Meta Arc of Our Middle-Earth Universe: While I share some of Drout’s concerns, I also think it is unrealistic. Also, his argument that Tolkien himself would be displeased with the super-sizing of his mythology into other mediums, including toys and so forth, is not necessarily true. The fact is, we do not know what Tolkien would make of his world-changing mythology today. On the one hand he might very well see it as a monster grown out of control just as his son Christopher Tolkien lamented about Jackson’s films. The problem is that Jackson’s films were mostly embraced or at least tolerated by Drout; my impression is that Amazon’s behemoth power is what worries him most.

Also, as has been cited many times by the creatives behind The Rings of Power, Tolkien himself once wrote in a letter to one of his potential publishers — in the context of his dream of getting The Silmarillion published along with The Lord of the Rings — that he envisioned his mythology as being extended by “other minds and hands,” including drama.** This brings us to the other end of the intellectual spectrum in terms of Tolkien adaptations. The Tolkien Professor, Corey Olsen, comes at it from a different angle — he takes these adaptations as a given and instead engages with why, how and what this mythopoeic process means. He explores the “meta” in other words. (He even gives some of his lectures from inside of the MMORPG video game Lord of the Rings Online.)

There are two fun reads I think that look at the technological implications of The Rings of Power from a more oblique angle. This is fascinating because Tolkien was deeply worried about what he called the Machine — and our present addiction to technology would probably worry him more than anything else, except for maybe climate change. At the same time, Tolkien did acknowledge the “magic” or “Elvish” side of creativity in all things. If we are to live in a world where mythology is communicated through new mediums, then who knows?

So take Esquire’s humorous “‘Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Is Pure Screensaver TV” with a little salt. It is actually one of the more brilliant reviews I read of the show — it is pure meta. It acknowledges its very slow pace compared to our present techno-frantic TV and instead of complaining of “boredom” or pace, the writer Henry Wong embraces its more ambient and relaxed flow. For Wong, its immersive pool of expansive, deliberate world-building is a virtue. Similarly, Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk uses the metaphor of “big” to go literally meta in the sense of scale. She argues that The Rings of Power is so expansive in every way that it practically needs its own category.

A Deep Deep Dive into the Peoples of Middle-Earth: Lastly, if you want to go deeper on the background, world and era of Rings — the Second Age in Middle-earth — then a great place to get oriented is with The Prancing Pony Podcast’s warmup guide to the peoples of Tolkien’s legendarium. Actually, for anyone wanting to deep dive on Tolkien’s books, I highly recommend PPP. But for immediate needs — getting a solid back history for the show — give their alternative show The Rings of Power Wrap-Up a listen (episodes 11-14).***

That’s my list of gems to check out if you’re getting into your Rings groove. Now that the series has premiered, I plan to share my thoughts as things evolve. I don’t necessarily plan to do reviews. That’s not the goal of Wraith Land, to comment regularly on TV content, even when it’s The Lord of the Rings. My intellectual engagement with the show will be more around the books and the mythic implications of its adaptation — as always, my take will be philosophical.

When and if the show does spark a major passion, including how the show colors responses to Tolkien’s texts, or how a dramatization with wholly new inventions transforms what we perceive as Tolkien canon, or not, I will certainly be diving deeper into such waters with you. I will say however that I am encouraged. For now I am happy to say it is no Phantom Menace. By far. Thank goodness.

For more Wraith Land posts on The Rings of Power, check out the following:

• The Rings of Power and the Coming Storm

• Amazon’s Amazing LOTR Image of the Two Trees

• Where Might We Go in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings?

• The Tolkien-Verse: Is the Silmarillion on Screen Inevitable?

• Quickbeam Q&A’s, in three parts, beginning with Part One

• Our Dream Roles for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings

• A Great Wave: Amazon’s Lord of the Rings

*While I am highlighting Time and Empire in terms of magazine coverage, I would be remiss to not mention Vanity Fair’s cover story from all the way back in February. It was actually written by Joanna Robinson of The Ringer. I didn’t put it on the list because it has been out for months, but it was ultimately the first major coverage of The Rings of Power and is still one of the best. Check it out if you missed it way back when.

**In a famous letter — Letter 131 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien — Tolkien mapped out to a potential publisher — Milton Waldman of Collins, as in HarperCollins — his vision for his grand myth cycles of the Jewels and the Rings, in which he hoped other artists of paint, brush, and drama would extend his mythology into new forms.

***Note that somewhat awkwardly, after six years, co-host Shawn E. Marchese of The Prancing Pony Podcast announced he is discontinuing his hosting duties on the show at the beginning of Episode 12. It’s a bummer moment. The show apparently is still carrying on with co-host Alan Sisto and will soon recruit a new co-pilot for the PPP and TROPWU. I wanted to call it out so it doesn’t catch folks off guard.

“My house is full of paintings,” the Tolkien artist Jay Johnstone tells me as he rummages for one of his many illustrated manuscripts. When I interviewed him last year in April, the innovation of his work kept bubbling up in my mind — how Jay often paints several works in sets and triptychs and varying mediums, whether it be oil or acrylic or gouache or gold foil or charcoal. “I have so many paintings in here, it gets a bit scary,” he says, noting that his original manuscript paintings sell the fastest. “It’s called ‘The Dwarves,’ and it’s tiny, tiny.”

As we explored in our second consideration of Johnstone’s extensive and varied art, his manuscript paintings are delightful almost cluttered meanderings through Middle-earth. Studying them reveals secrets and riches as if going through Bilbo’s pantry in Bag End. Yet just as the words of J.R.R. Tolkien begin to fall away as we read the early chapters of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion — each of his words falling away like leaves in a dense forest — Johnstone’s paintings reveal ever deeper interfaces with the truth of our own lives.

Yes, the imagination comes out to play as Tolkien’s forest of words gives way to the eternal quest — for the dance is not truly wondrous unless we ourselves paint with the great master of fantasy, a man who to this day remains an enigma, as all human beings must be. As I peered through five thousand miles of invisible cable and internet servers and binary code streams, the face of Jay Johnstone constantly met me with smiles, humility and passion for the humanity in Tolkien’s tales. And that is the common ground, the canvas by which we exchanged words and laughs and quiet recognitions, to conjure the spirit of fellowship in this Middle-earth.

Time and again, Johnstone pulls up a painting, a sketch, even a tapestry, to the screen to show me new windows into his memory and imagination. “The Dwarves Initial”: it comes up once he finds it in a stack of his works behind a canvas. It’s in a black frame and it is tiny, about the size of a C.D. case. He explains how he has sold almost all of his manuscript paintings but that this particular one, with its meticulous Bag End imagery wrapped around the initial “D,” he has kept.

He shows it to me as he explains that he had agreed to sell it but then had to apologize to the buyer as he called off the deal. He flips around the frame. On the back of the painting is a message in black ink: To Jay, Best Wishes, Alan Lee. He had forgotten that perhaps the most celebrated Tolkien artist of all time, Lee, had autographed his own painting, a gesture of friendship and camaraderie they struck at Tolkien Society panels and over a shared love of Middle-earth.

Fellowship. That is a word so many of us have lost or struggle to grasp in a world that seems to crack in our fingers with its sands spilling throw our hands. In our age defined by televisual communications and connections — and fragmentations — the Internet has moved quickly from textual to imagistic bombardments of global confrontations about the past, present and future. And yet without the company of others, it is easy to forget that this is a time and place that is best shared through mythology, not propaganda, or conspiracy.

In a hole in the ground, one can hardly forgive Hobbits for hiding and on one level blissfully ignoring the rest of Middle-earth. Tolkien has compassion for all people who are overwhelmed by the torrents of global change. A survivor of imperialism (his father’s death in South Africa), industrialism (his mother’s death amid the pitiless grind of Birmingham), and militarism (World War I and II), Tolkien questioned the machine world that we live in.

The caricature of Tolkien was that he was a Luddite and a medievalist who clung to his tweed coats and smoking pipes, who bellyached about the abominations of the modern age, and who retreated into juvenile fantasy, spewing an infantilizing sickness on the reading public and damning young would-be literates to a snow globe of fairy sentimentalism. These were the cries raised in high brow corners when The Lord of the Rings first challenged the status quo in the 1950s and 1960s and once again when Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring film was near its initial release in 2001 — until the film’s acclaim and resounding success.

So with the increased popularity of his works, decade over decade, so the mystery of the man himself, has come more and more into the light. Tolkien discouraged too much biographical reading into his texts. He tried to head off simplistic one-to-one allegorical interpretations of the One Ring or the heroic quest to destroy it; and yet he also pointed readers and critics to the most important facets of his extraordinary life: the Battle of the Somme in particular; and he also left many obvious clues to others — the orphaning of Frodo, the elfin mother of Bilbo, Gandalf’s erudition, including derision of his ways by the closed-minded.

When I look at Johnstone’s many portraits, the underlying life-blood of Tolkien’s legendarium seems to run richer and stronger. The impressionistic touches, so light and subtle, vibrate so that my eyes can meet Frodo’s in an unbroken gaze. Beloved characters that have delighted and comforted, stare back at me. The Middle-earth haze recedes, and there they are in front of us: a medieval or Renaissance painter’s days-long conjuring of a person lost to time.

It’s a magic trick that removes time and fantasy from the equation; at least temporarily because at the same time, the mind knows that these imaginative images are also fictions, the truth arriving with the understanding that what you are seeing is also a person who was once there, and is no longer living. Or as Sir Ian McKellen once said, except for a place in our hearts. That’s the power of art, the power of the painter, and the writer, to bring the dead back to the living…

Across the River Styx, or the Bruinen, or mighty Anduin, he looks back at us — the un-sundering gaze of the writer who went before us into the great unknown. If you are reading this, you know or will soon know, that death is always in the future, not just the past. We all must one day cross the threshold. Death was Tolkien’s muse, if we want to be entirely honest. His stories explore many important matters and facets of the human condition, but death was the paramount concern of his thought and writing.

How could it not? He lost his father when he was three and then his beloved mother when he was twelve. As he struggled to form a new family, a fellowship of four friends at Birmingham’s King Edward’s School, and fell in love with a fellow orphan, Edith Bratt, he achieved some kind of normalcy, the fire of youth filling his heart with dreams of poetry. And then he lost two of his three best friends in the fields of France in World War I to artillery and machine guns. Think about it. Before he was twenty-five, he had already lost four loved ones who were family or gave him a sense of family.

Humphrey Carpenter’s admirable and judicious biography of Tolkien is a great read. However, I think it also misleads the reader somewhat. Carpenter portrays Tolkien’s post-WWI life as somewhat boring and uneventful. For one, this isn’t true given he had a spirited intellectual career at Oxford and then ferried his family through the travails of the Second World War, though often from afar. Second, the first third of Tolkien’s life was a lifetime or two, for one can also appreciate that anyone would spend decades processing such traumas.

It’s to Tolkien’s credit but also a mark of his privateness, abetted by Carpenter’s biography, that we think more often of the fun and carefree persona of Bilbo when we think of the Oxford don, haunting pubs and minding his lectures and letters; Johnstone’s “Bilbo at the Library of Rivendell” is a perfect comment on his long retirement in the halls of learning, as if Tolkien himself had checked out of the fray to write poetry and history with Elves and Rangers.

All Tolkien fans have “seen” pages from the manuscript for The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien could easily relate to Bilbo because he actually wrote the “Red Book of Westmarch.” And so in Rivendell, that’s not just Bilbo scribing lore in a room filled with mementos from his journeys, but Tolkien. Once again, one of the remarkable contributions to Tolkien scholarship is Johnstone’s reframing of Middle-earth writers in repeating and revealing contexts, our contemplation propagating back and forth through time like mirrors within mirrors...

We have Bilbo in retirement at Rivendell, laboring over the meta-history of Tolkien’s own mythology; we have Círdan drawing ship schemas for fabled Elven voyages, perhaps at the Grey Havens, or even at the Havens of Sirion, dreaming up Vingilot; and we have Gandalf in the Library of Minas Tirith combing scrolls for clues to the secret history of the One Ring. Here is the writer as hero, the writer as an archetype; here is the shipwright as architect, the sea-sage as dreamer; here is the wiseman as steward, the wizard as professor.

What is an archetype, truly? In Jungian psychology, it is defined as a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image or vision that is universally present in individual psyches. In literature or art, it is a recurring symbol, motif or character in painting, melodrama, language or mythology. In our first consideration of Johnstone’s Tolkien paintings, we took his Christian-inspired iconographic paintings and looked at them through the lens of Carl Jung’s theories on the collective unconscious framed within Johnstone’s own dream narrative.

Like Tolkien, Jung wrote his own Red Book or Liber Novus. It too was a private obsession — he started it after the severing of a close friendship with Sigmund Freud, which threw Jung into a great depression. It is believed now to be a kind of diary of madness, a creative nova from one of the most storied minds in the study of psychiatry — and it was mostly embarked during World War I when he was an officer in the Swiss Army. In fact, Jung saw his “visions” as intertwined with the cultural rupture of the Great War.

In Johnstone’s “The Fall of Númenor and the Flight of the Faithful,” we can see motifs from medieval theology about the eternal struggle between Heaven and Hell, people being beaten and beheaded, what looks like Satan but is Sauron, a winged devil with a pitchfork and a bowl of sacrificial blood, and the Faithful fleeing as a great wave approaches to wash it all away in a baptism of fire and water, the Christian meeting the Classical, Atlantis meeting the Inferno, the Exodus across the sea, as an armada of brazen fools sails to make war in fair Valinor, home of the Gods. It is a Jungian paroxysm.

When I think about the world inside Tolkien’s texts and how Johnstone captures their religious and archetypal undercurrents, I realize that so-called “visions” are the perception and rediscovery of the ancient in the present, the recognition of the universal on the horizon, the return of history to the future. As Faramir saw the Great Wave. As Denethor saw the Corsairs of Umbar. As Frodo saw the far green country under a swift sunrise. So we all sometimes see visions of an unknown past or future — a mythology that echoes the truth once again.

Tolkien started his mythology as war neared. Like Jung, he was searching for answers to questions as old as time. His Fall of Gondolin and The Book of Lost Tales are mythopoeic works of a man who could clearly perceive his mortal end; both of his attempts at writing legends, sketched and written in the run up and aftermath of the Battle of the Somme, are preoccupied with death, either in the destruction of a beautiful civilization or in a sojourn to what is essentially Avalon and what Tolkien calls the Undying Lands — mythopoeic visions of something lost.

The word mythopoeia — Ancient Greek for “myth-making” — is often associated with Tolkien because of the poem Mythopoeia, which he wrote in 1931 between the two world wars. He did not invent the word however. It was first used in the 1800s some decades before he was born. In fact, one scholar who used it avidly was the august philologist Friedrich Max Müller, Oxford's first Professor of Comparative Philology, Tolkien’s predecessor of sorts, though Müller was an expert in Vedic Sanskrit and Indian studies whereas Tolkien’s specialty was Anglo-Saxon.*

“Every word, whether noun or verb, had still its full original power during the mythopoeic ages,” Müller writes in his book, Comparative Mythology. “Words were heavy and unwieldy. They said more than they ought to say, and hence, much of the strangeness of the mythological language, which we can only understand by watching the natural growth of speech. Where we speak of the sun following the dawn, the ancient poets could only speak and think of the sun loving and embracing the dawn.”

Crucially, we know Müller influenced Tolkien. We do not know exactly how much or the circumstances of Tolkien’s encounter with Müller’s work. That is, we don’t know if Tolkien took lectures that expounded Müller’s theories. However, we do know he was at least conversant in Müller’s theories and scholarship, and that he was in particular engaged with Müller’s Comparative Mythology, published in 1856. The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger has highlighted the influence of Owen Barfield on Tolkien as well, especially his masterwork of philosophy and language, Poetic Diction, which engages directly and vigorously with Müller’s mythopoeic ideas.

Why does this triangle matter? Outside the historical proximity of their academic concerns — Müller and Tolkien on philology, Barfield on philosophy — there was also their more personal emphases — Müller with Sanskrit, Barfield with poetry, and Tolkien with myth. One of Flieger’s critical insights in her book, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, was that both Barfield and Tolkien reworked Müller’s theories about the links between words and myths and the evolution of human consciousness; Flieger argues convincingly that Barfield’s Poetic Diction was second only to Beowulf in its influence on Tolkien’s mythological and poetic thinking.

Perceiving these great waves in consciousness is where Johnstone’s artwork can bridge us to the meeting of such extraordinary minds. While Jay has not painted any images pertaining to Barfield and Müller directly or consciously, his vitally important work exploring Tolkien and the collective unconscious — from iconographic paintings to illustrated manuscripts — brings the archetypal resonance in Tolkien’s inner-world closer to the surface of Middle-earth.

Let’s imagine where Tolkien melded minds with Müller. Again, while we can imagine Tolkien reading Müller during his early years at Oxford, possibly even earlier at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, we do not have any evidence. He could have also learned a lot about Müller and his investigations into Sanskrits’ relationship to Latin and English in lecture halls, in that he might very well have heard about Müller’s theories on early human language — using Sanskrit as his model — and how Müller believed all languages came out of a “metaphorical period” in human history, and hence a mythopoeic one.

Here Müller uses both the metaphors of light and breath to illustrate how natural phenomena — whether it be the sun shining or the wind in the trees — mingled with animal and human phenomena (also natural but biological and hence more “personal” and personified). In writing, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism are both commonly recommended as highly effective techniques in metaphorical communication. Müller was mapping such features in Sanskrit and ancient religious texts like the Rigveda — which contains the foundational Indian mythologies of Hinduism and the seeds of Buddhism and Jainism.

What we do know for a fact is that Tolkien was greatly influenced by Barfield’s Poetic Diction, which wrestles with, criticizes and yet elevates the key insights of Müller, especially his “metaphorical period” (or mythopoeic consideration of how language relates to legend): Müller is the foil and the fount of Barfield’s thinking in Poetic Diction. And central to his own intellectual investigations of metaphor, myth and poetry is Müller’s comparative philology of Sanskrit, including the Vedas. So imagine Tolkien in he and C.S. Lewis’s literary group, the Inklings, sitting around a room discussing Müller and Poetic Diction, or more probably, Tolkien carefully reading it alone by a desk light.

As C.S. Lewis later reported to Barfield: “You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said, apropos of something quite different, that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook, and he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your concept stopped him in time. ‘It is one of those things,’ he said, ‘that when you have once seen it there are all sorts of things you never say again.’”

(Even though Barfield, and later Tolkien, were refuting or modifying some of the core tenants of Müller’s philosophy about language — they primarily challenged the idea that “primitive man” was in some way grasping for ways to describe natural phenomena from a subjective biological perspective, versus a deeper timeless and shared consciousness that perceives the poetic mysteries in the universe from a unified whole then and forever — does not mean that they disregarded Müller’s scholarship. In fact, they were both reshaping it to something truer or more artistic, putting sub-creation at the heart of comprehension and communication in human affairs.)

In Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language, published in 1866, the German-born Oxford don, who supervised the 50 volume translation series, Sacred Books of the East (where he translated many of the ancient Sanskrit texts, including the Rigveda and the Upanishads, as well as the Zoroastrian Avesta), argued that mythology was “a disease of language.” Which brings us to an apocryphal communion not unlike the Last Supper or the Council of Elrond. Without Müller’s provocation, without his perception of language’s intertwined co-creation of myth as evident in Sanskrit, there may be no Silmarillion.

What I will attempt to demonstrate in the following path through the forest of time and myth and words, is how Tolkien bridged us back to our deepest spiritual past through both his conscious and unconscious communion with language. Central to this trinity of thought is Müller, whose encounter with the ancient mythology of India and Vedic Sanskrit unveiled a truth about the origins and beginnings of our shared global heritage, and how Barfield’s poetic response (Poetic Diction was published in 1928) helped embolden Tolkien to push on. Mythologically speaking, this interplay enlightened the road that led to the deepest middle-earth, from The Silmarillion to the Red Book of Westmarch.

That is to say, to derive meaning from history always requires some degree of faith, a reliance on people who are gone, so that what comes to us is but records and myths. As Phillipa Boyens penned in the film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, “Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth.” Painting in the mythopoeic with his luminous charcoals in “The Council of Elrond,” Johnstone helps us reimagine reflections from the past of not just legend and myth, but faith and history.

For here we see Frodo holding up the One Ring before Gandalf and Aragorn, Boromir and Elrond, Legolas and Gimli, Merry, Pippin and Sam. In this holiest of moments in the strange mythology of Tolkien’s imagining, are apostles who will help bring what Tolkien called “evangelium” to the world. Johnstone’s religious mythic interpretation of this key event in the War of the Ring clearly but artfully echoes the Last Supper of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem before his crucifixion, the basis of the Eucharist, the Christian rite that Tolkien held so dear; and in this splintered light and council of spirits — language finds a new voice.

The riddling marks of Tengwar echo Sanskrit, that is what comes to mind when I look at Johnstone’s illustrated manuscripts and consider this holy communion of scholar-poets; or Devanagari, more specifically, the writing system of ancient and modern India and much of southeast Asia. It’s the horizontal lines that run along the top of each Devanagari letter and some of the slashes and dashes that cut across its more squished calligraphy that evoke Tengwar (though reminiscent would be more accurate because Tolkien’s design feels original). One recalls Tolkien’s adaptation possibly of Chinese character forms as well. His clever monogram for J.R.R.T. has long evoked the East (something Johnstone has followed for his own signature.)

So what does Tolkien have to do with Sanskrit? In the past, the answer would have been “little,” save for the incontrovertible fact that Sanskrit would also have been familiar to Tolkien as part of his basic philological training. Any study of Anglo-Saxon or English would have brought him to the intellectual borders of India. Indeed, we know he sifted the linguistic sands of Sanskrit in his work for the Oxford English Dictionary, tracing its etymological splinters in English words starting with the letter “w”.

But there are more intriguing connections. As we’ve already stated, the book Comparative Mythology is steeped in Sanskrit analyses. It and other Müller tomes were familiar to Tolkien and more explicitly picked apart by Owen Barfield. That does not mean Tolkien was steeped in Sanskrit. In fact, while he too engages with Müller’s ideas in his famous and seminal 1939 lecture On Fairy-Stories — where he states that “Max Müller’s view of mythology as a ‘disease of language’ can be abandoned without regret” — he may have also simply tipped a hat for the academic purposes of intellectual debate, using Müller as a straw man.

But my gut and research points me back to Tolkien’s deep engagement with Poetic Diction and philology in general. I believe Tolkien maintained a European focused perspective because Anglo-Saxon language and literature was his métier. England was the natural center of gravity for his mythology. However, he was intellectually engaged with the South and East far more than he is given credit for. We know, based on his letters that he enjoyed reading books about explorations of Africa.** His first draft of The Hobbit includes reference to the Gobi Desert in China. He admired and collected Japanese woodblock prints, likely by Hokusai.

And when it comes to India and Southeast Asia, there is a strong argument to be made that as an Englishman of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, that he would have at least absorbed some of the ambience of the British Empire — though he disapproved of its political imperialism — which held India and its “British Raj” (or reign) as the “Jewel in the Crown.” This is one of the core conceits of Mark T. Hooker’s fascinating book — Tolkien and Sanskrit: The Silmarillion in the Cradle of Proto-Indo-European — which delves deep into speculative evidence that Tolkien may have been inspired by the linguistic shapes and sounds of Sanskrit, through its connection to European languages and hence Elvish words and names.

I suggested the idea that there may have been no Silmarillion if there had been no Max Müller, or none of the concepts and theories he proposed. What I meant by that statement is true of philology in general, that without the factual history, science and evocation of the evolution of language, Tolkien would not have discovered a way to grow the tree of his mythology through language and specifically his invention of Elvish.

It has almost become a legend that is repeated to the point of meaninglessness that Tolkien started his mythology with his Elvish languages. That first came his Elvish words and names, and then the stories and meanings behind them. I believe that most lay readers and critics, however, incorrectly take this as a pure fluke or idiosyncrasy. That Tolkien was an aberration. And while that may be true in part in terms of his overall genius, what the compelling background of Comparative Mythology and Poetic Diction gives us, is a strong natural argument from the original path. That is, Tolkien’s highly creative process followed the natural progression of our collective consciousness, from experience to language to mythology to poetics.

Hooker’s work, while partly flawed according to Nelson Goering’s expert review of Tolkien and Sanskrit, is nonetheless, even in Goering’s mind, highly intriguing. In this, it is an important contribution to Tolkien scholarship because it pushes exciting new ideas into the study of Middle-earth’s origins. Let us start with a common breakdown of Sanskrit’s relationship to other languages that Müller demonstrates in Comparative Mythology, that Hooker utilizes, and that even a recent Great Courses program, instructed by Columbia University’s John McWhorter, uses — the etymological branches of “father” and “mother”:

English  | Old English  | Latin |  Greek  | Sanskrit |
mother  | mōdor  | māter  | mētēr  | mātár  |
father  | fæder  | pater  | patēr  | pitár |

From these linguistic relationships — first fully elucidated in 1786 by the Anglo-Welsh philologist William Jones, who was stationed in Bengal as a puisne judge and noticed unmistakable similarities between words he observed in Vedic texts in Sanskrit and what he knew of Greek and Latin — we know that the West and the East were deeply bonded; from this, he purported at the Asiatic Society that there must be a common ancestry for Sanskrit and many European languages, a theory that caused a sensation with repercussions across several disciplines of history, anthropology and linguistics. In time, a prototype language was constructed by philologists, today called Proto-Indo-European. Just as importantly, Sanskrit is older than Latin or Mycenaean Greek.

This was the intellectual storm that Müller was born into, entering an exciting world of cultural possibilities, a generation after Jones. Mythopoeic in its own right, this revolution in linguistics is in many ways the historical wave that Hooker catches and illuminates in his book. While Goering disputes some techniques and Hooker’s application of them, the deep resonance between Tolkien’s “art languages” of the Elves and Vedic Sanskrit is often striking.

The central specimen that Hooker offers is “Ossiriand” which means “Land of Seven Rivers” in Tolkien’s Elvish language, Sindarin. The name itself is not so much tied to Sanskrit, but its definition, for the “Seven Rivers,” is a key phrase, component and geographical locale in the Rigveda. Hooker’s hypothesis is that Tolkien took this formulation and repurposed it for The Silmarillion as a clever homage or reference to Indian antiquity. Hooker then draws several Sanskrit connections to the names of the seven rivers in east Beleriand, i.e. Ossiriand:

Sindarin Hydronyms | Sanskrit | English Approximations
Gelion / Thargelion | Sindhu | “Running water,” “River,” “Indus”
Ascar / Rathlóriel*** | Vitastā | “ Riven,” “Tear,” “Spear Wound”
Thalos | Satadru | “Steep,” “Hundreds of Streams,” “Countless”
Legolin | Vipāśā | “Free-running,” “Unfettered [from his bonds]”
Brilthor | Chandrabhaga | “Bright gem swoop,” “Moon God’s gift”
Duilwen | Iravati | “River of youthful green,” “River of Refreshment”
Adurant | Doab / Jamunā / Ganges | “Double Stream,” “Two Rivers”

Admittedly, Hooker makes some fairly big leaps along twists and turns of linguistic association in order to connect Sindarin with Sanskrit. This is where Goering takes issue, arguing that too often Hooker pulls the incorrect word-roots from Tolkien’s glossaries in his Sanskrit re-associations in order to make his case. In this Goering seems to be right — I am not trained in linguistics so I can’t make a confident judgement either way — given his counter-arguments. However, this is where both scholars may be missing the bigger point. Both presume Tolkien was thinking linguistically and scientifically at all times during his creative process. Here Hooker seems to have a slight advantage in that his linguistic instincts also allow for a looser more free-associative inquiry.

That is to say, Tolkien was not just assessing ancient texts from a logical point-of-view. As Barfield’s Poetic Diction illuminated for Tolkien himself, or for his more academic self, language also functions in a more unconscious fashion — wisdom, meaning, metaphors, Barfield argued, come from something deeper inside us — un-splintered light shining through the fragmenting rays of history and language — and hence a place more dreamlike — fantasy — what Tolkien called Faerie. Aesthetically then, Tolkien was intuitively absorbing and reflecting deeper unconscious resonances and overtones in his “art languages,” as he himself described in detail in terms of his reactions to Greek, Welsh and Finnish. Fantastically, in the art mode of Faerie, he then “discovered” new forms.

Let’s consider two ancient models of Faerie that command respect because of their historical importance. One of them we have already discussed some: the Rigveda (and hence the Vedas), wherein hymns to the deities establish a cosmic order not too different in its essence from Tolkien’s cosmogonic Ainulindalë and Valaquenta, with aspects of monotheism, pantheism and what Müller identified as henotheism, all rolled into One — with Indra as the supreme god, and descendant deities like Mitra and Varuna who are both fragmentations of Indra as well as their own sentient forms. We see a similar mandalic radiance in Iran’s Zoroastrianism and in Ancient Greek religion.

The second is the Homeric, the world of the Iliad and Odyssey, which take the Greek gods and the natural and supernatural forces they embody as reality. So much emphasis is placed on Tolkien’s adaptation of Norse and Anglo-Saxon thought and religion, that Tolkien Studies in general overlooks the immense influence of Homer, Ovid and Dante on Tolkien. Like so much in Tolkien’s biography, the legend has often overshadowed the history, and in this case, Tolkien famously chose Anglo-Saxon studies over Classical studies, though Ancient Greek and Roman mythology still had a profound effect on his mythopoeic mind in his teens and twenties.

Let us not forgot that Númenor is a clear echo of Atlantis, which was relayed to posterity by Plato, who also told the story of the Ring of Gyges, which could turn its wearers invisible. Nor should one assume that the stories of Odysseus and Achilles did not greatly shape Tolkien’s own conceptions of “there and back again,” as well the tumults and tragedies of great wars, from Troy’s fall to Gondolin. We know that he pursued Classics first at Oxford. And he gave performances at King Edward’s School in two plays by Aristophanes.

Again, Müller, and hence Jones, helped bring the Vedas and Homer closer together in the minds of linguists and poets, whether they interacted with their truths or not. “It would be more near the truth to say that languages,” Tolkien countered in On Fairy-Stories, “especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”

For so long it has been the bent of the literati to dismiss Tolkien’s world that I feel even within Tolkien scholarship, academics, writers and readers are still mostly playing their impossible game — one that tried for so long to banish “Faerie” to the dustbin of history. Of course, they cannot, no more than a psychiatrist can banish dreams or delusions from the mind or humanity.

Perhaps, when taking stock of Hooker’s bigger leaps, for a moment, we can take Tolkien at his word: the incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are coeval. Not just in the art of creating fairy tales and mythic stories, but in our world, the real world. To ignore that deeper pulse inside our brains — light and dark, sun and moon — would be to also ignore its dangers, as well as its wonders. So that returning to Tolkien and Sanskrit, one can indeed see and find connections.

Near the end of Hooker’s book, he makes a few that are in fact more clear and it seems too close to be mere coincidences: Yavanna (“Fruit-giver”) which in the Sanskrit word yavānna means “barley-food,” as in food of the grass; Valinor and Valar also seem dead-ringers for the Sanskrit bala, which means “power,” cognate with the Elvish root bal-, as in Balrog (“demon of might”); and Maiar, which is less directly related to Sanskrit māyā (“delusion” or “illusion”) in common meaning but more so in secondary (“magic”) and very much so alphabetically (though “y” and “i” vary so it is not quite homographic).

Hooker makes another inspired connection I want to highlight here. It is much more speculative than Yavanna, Valar or Maiar, but it doesn’t seem implausible. Hooker makes the case that Sindhu, the Hindu linguistic version of Indus, i.e. India, is the inspiration for “Sindar,” as part of his grander “Seven Rivers” and Ossiriand argument. Even if this is not the case, I think there is something to Sanskrit being in the earth when Tolkien was developing many of his more foundational names in The Silmarillion. When we think of the Valar, or his inventions of Arda, Aman, Eru, and so forth, they echo at the root.

So it’s the same with the Rigveda, which lays out a vision of many gods and their realms in the sky, sea and land. And like Tolkien’s own archaic names, whether it be Súlimo or Curufinwë, these names have a common natural or biological root or metaphor — Barfield quotes Müller when he makes the case that the concepts of gods and a spiritual world came from within, then the language, flipping Müller’s formulation of mythology as a “disease of language”:

We read in the Veda, ii. 3, 4: “Who saw the first-born when he who had no form (lit. bones) bore him that had form? Where was the breath (asuh), the blood (asrik), the self (atma) of the earth?…”

I think what this tells us, putting the science of language aside, is that purely aesthetically, Tolkien may have come across Sanskrit in his philological work. He may have read the Rigveda, or thought more deeply about Iran and India after he read Middle English poems like Kyng Alisaunder — which charts Alexander the Great’s odyssey through Africa, Persia and India, in a mythic mode — and then like Gothic, like Finnish, like Welsh, applied some of the shapes, sounds, and sometimes meanings, to his grand mythopoeic world-building.****(see “Poros”)

So that asuh, Sanskrit for “breath,” evokes Manwë Súlimo — Súlimo being Quenya for “breather” or “Lord of the Breath of Arda” — and kuru, Sanskrit for “perform,” and Kurukshetra, region of the Kurukshetra War in the Kuru Kingdom between two families of cousins, the central event of the Mahabharata, evokes Curufinwë — the birth name of Fëanor, meaning “skilled Finwë” — and the Kinslayings and feuds between the Houses of Fëanor and Fingolfin.

“Not all who wander are lost” — so writes Gandalf to Frodo of Strider so that the young Hobbit could recognize the true Aragorn. When I consider dismissing the Sanskrit associations due to the lack of incontrovertible evidence that Tolkien was some closet Indologist, I have to remind myself, that while Goering pokes holes in Hooker’s methodology, he also commends the overall instinct.

This begs the question as to why my admiration and engagement with Johnstone’s artwork led me to dig deeper into the idea of Sanskrit in Middle-earth. For one, I was very curious. But more than that, Johnstone’s own courage in pursuing both a Jungian and art history appreciation of Tolkien’s characters and stories convinced me that there was something there if even it was simply something of purely artistic, speculative and personal value.

After reading Hooker’s Tolkien and Sanskrit, and then Goering’s skepticism, I went back to Johnstone’s paintings (the power of his illustrated manuscripts with their Devanagari-esque Tengwar inscriptions) and took the name William Jones on a search for a clearer connection. His name turned up “Max Müller,” which then surfaced in several entries of Oronzo Cilli’s annotated bibliography, Tolkien’s Library. Müller’s seminal essay, Comparative Mythology, which Tolkien read, inverted, and extended with his lecture On Fairy-Stories; all four volumes of Müller’s Chips from a German Workshop, which Tolkien also cited; and then Müller’s The Science of Language, both volumes, the source of “disease.”

I also discovered a Grammar of Sanskrit that Tolkien had checked out in 1913. But then in many ways the trail runs cold. My only other thought is that in the 1910s, perhaps Tolkien did in fact take Müller’s advice in Comparative Mythology, where he mentions the “Seven Rivers” of the Rigveda — the Sapta Sindhavah — and urges philologists like Tolkien to read the Vedas with serious purpose:

“If we want to know whither the human mind, though endowed with the natural consciousness of a divine power, is driven necessarily and inevitably by the irresistible force of language as applied to supernatural and abstract ideas, we must read the Veda: and if we want to tell the Hindus what they are worshipping —mere names of natural phenomena, gradually obscured, personified, and deified—we must make them read the Veda.”

And later in Comparative Mythology, as Müller compares various folklores around the world, teasing out his theories about metaphors and myths, he writes, “We shall begin with some of these myths, and then proceed to the more difficult, which must receive light from more distant regions, whether from the snowy rocks of Iceland and the songs of the Edda, or from the borders of the ‘Seven Rivers,’ and the hymns of the Veda.”

In that, one can almost sense the whole breathtaking span of Tolkien’s legendarium, as if he took up Müller’s challenge right there in his own fashion, approaching the idea of a world mythology, not just for England, with the ink and intellect of a steadfast poet. Lore-masters both, one stayed with language and the other went back to the beginning through myth. And yet to complete this loop, we must now walk the earth, just as Alexander did, just as the characters of Tolkien’s stories did — from Fingolfin to Frodo, from the Edda to the Veda.

Bear with me, because now we’re going to move another important dimension of Tolkien’s eastern gaze into the light. Much has been written about his Christian faith, but in the same way that Tolkien’s Christianity has been treated more as a cultural aesthetic aspect of Tolkien’s world by Johnstone, one can continue that line of inquiry to the birthplace of the Abrahamic religions and the Classical Mediterranean ferment, where Africa, Asia and Europe meet. That is, the theological underpinnings of Tolkien’s Middle-earth come from the East. Obviously, “northern” paganism, Roman Christians like Boethius, and philosophers like Plato, influenced the orientation of Tolkien’s mind. Nevertheless, this is a mythology about crossroads, and synthesis.

We may take it for granted, but Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism derives a rich history of art, aesthetics and mythic religious thought from the Mideast. Which is why Johnstone’s oil painting, “Gandalf — the first light of the 5th day,” works so powerfully, evoking Michelangelo’s Renaissance sculptures, with their blank eyes, calling to mind saints, popes or even Moses. The Roman Catholic Church derived much of its cultural material from Byzantium before the Middle Ages. Still, it was the aftermath of the Moorish invasions and the Crusades that later ushered in a European rebirth of art, math and science.

That is not to say that Tolkien drew explicit inspirations from all of these cultural waves between worlds, but it is to say that he lived in a larger world with deeper currents that he sometimes acknowledged but just as often left open to mystery and interpretation. Many scholars like to point to his “distaste of allegory,” and yet he believed all life was a kind of spiritual allegory. This is why he avoided explicit or obvious Christianity in his fictional worlds, something he found disappointing in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. To me, Tolkien wanted to advance the Gospel by example, not by dogma. This is why people like me, Johnstone and so many other secularists, can receive his words, if not the all the trappings.

I’m not the only one who sees something deeper in Tolkien’s encounter with the South and the East, with Africa and Asia. Of Africa, too little is known about his thought and roots in that great continent. We know he was born there. We know he visited a South African kraal as a baby boy under the wing of a young servant named Isaak who wanted to show him off to his family village — Tolkien’s first “there and back again” — returning safely with the dawn. We know that a big baboon tarantula chased and bit him in the Tolkien family garden. He also remembered Africa’s sunny days. But he barely could recall his father. Old photographs are all that he really had.

Bilbo titled his odyssey “There and Back Again,” his loop from Bag End to the Lonely Mountain to Bag End, comprising a part of the his Red Book of Westmarch. One assumes during The Lord of the Rings, while he stayed in Rivendell, that he also began to capture and transcribe the deeper history of the Elves and Men, going back to Eru Illúvatar, the One, listening to stories from Elrond and Glorfindel, walking the libraries and halls of the Last Homely House.*****

While Bilbo’s mind may have often wandered West, it still must have wandered East, even to the memory of Cuiviénen, Tolkien’s Eden. In our own world, what Tolkien said was in truth this Middle-earth, traveling east out of Africa, is the Arabian Peninsula and Persia. Paleontologists now believe that early humans, 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, migrated through the Mideast along the coast to India, where then successive migrations spanned throughout Asia, Europe, Australia, the Pacific, and the Americas.

Ever since William Jones’ linguistic breakthrough, connecting Sanskrit to other languages in Europe and Asia, the imaginations of Western philologists have grasped for the mythopoeic truth that ties these far-flung worlds together. Intellectuals like Jones and Müller did not presume superiority, but their hypotheses and findings sadly sparked an unfortunate racialist narrative. Mythologies, history tells us, can be warped and corrupted.

In the 1800s and 1900s, a rash of eugenics theorizing started to catch fire in Europe. The word “Aryan” is Sanskrit-derived and was used by some ancient Indo-Iranians as a self-designation. It is a term used by the speakers and subjects of the Vedas that means “noble.” Over time, the Aryans of the Vedas have come to be seen by many anthropologists as neighbors who invaded parts of India from the northern Hindu Kush region of the Himalayas and perhaps the steppes of Central Asia. This tantalizing era of history, still little understood, led to an idiotic misappropriation of linguistic and archeological insights that seeded the genocidal derangement of the Nazis.

It is hence fraught to even use the word Aryan (not unlike saying the name Sauron). But in the days of William Jones and Max Müller, it was simply an academic and cultural touchstone for the peoples of Iran and India. In fact, the rise of racialist jockeying around the scholarship of the Vedas deeply saddened Müller, who lived long enough to see its fires flamed. For scholars of integrity like Müller, his research found that the Aryans were not an ethnic group so much as a linguistic and religious preference among the proud peoples of Persia and India. Müller countered that “the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians.”

As much as I take Tolkien at his word that The Lord of the Rings was not a strict allegory for World War II, he nonetheless left some markers to make sure his mythology would not become a fascist weapon against the marginalized. The “Nazgul” I believe are in fact a sly allusion to the Nazis. He would have never admitted this adroit linguistic volley, but we know, despite his dodging, that Tolkien made other similar connections, such as Avallonë for the Lonely Isle (Avalon), Atalantë for Númenor (Atlantis), Rómenna for one of its port cities (Rome), and Ar-Pharazôn for Pharaoh. He was a linguistic magician after all.

In fact, if Tolkien was influenced by Vedic Sanskrit and Müller more than he ever let on, perhaps he avoided making any such explicit connections to the Vedas and “Aryans” in his mythology for the very reason that the Nazis commandeered and more or less destroyed — and made in many ways verboten — the rich lode of mythopoeic history suggested by Europe’s linguistic ancestry and origins in Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, and Africa.******

“I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch,” Tolkien wrote in 1938, in response to a German publisher who wanted proof of his Aryan i.e. white racial purity, before The Hobbit could be sanctioned for the German public. The Nazi “race-doctrine” and its “lunatic laws,” as Tolkien adamantly argued, were “wholly pernicious and unscientific” in his view. “I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” 

The second point — though Tolkien could not have known at that time that Europeans descended from earlier Indians — is that he is schooling the German publisher in the science and art of philology. He is pointing out that “Aryan” has nothing to do with race but comes from Persian and Hindustani dialects, which are derived from Sanskrit. That is, Aryan as a concept or people, has nothing to do with what Nazis thought it did — and hence they are ignorant and therefore bigoted dopes, and ultimately unoriginal ripoff artists (“artist” in the most negative sense in this case — even orcish we might say).

Which brings us then near the end of our road to Tolkien’s very beginnings. While his father belonged to a near mythic past, his mother taught him botany, literature and art, and shaped his being and intellect until he was 12 years old. From her, he got his profound love of language and nature. She was perhaps a singular light in his moral and artistic life. With the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the character of Galadriel will move to the center stage — she’s the main character of this new saga — and while others have also pointed to Tolkien’s mother Mabel as a source of her persona, with time that thought grows only stronger in my own mind.

For while her sensitivity — even her spidery handwriting her son inherited — is not documented in any clear form, Tolkien’s reverence for his mother and love for the bucolic childhood she provided him, seems to distill not only a great hurt that never fully healed after her death, but set him on a path to recover what was lost in the form of language and myth. So that when Galadriel keeps Frodo going in Lothlórien and Cirith Ungol, it is not just Frodo she uplifts, but I believe also Tolkien himself — unconsciously, a vision of his mother’s eternal love.

Tolkien’s wife Edith, who he met in a Birmingham residence for orphans, was memorialized as the elf-maiden Lúthien in The Silmarillion. Beren, a mortal man, bereft of his home and his parents and friends, stumbles into a wooden glade under starlight where he sees and hears Lúthien singing and dancing. It’s a beautiful tale about resurrection that reminds us that the greatest power in Tolkien’s Middle-earth is kindness. And strangely enough, one of the oldest meanings of arya — of aryan — besides “true” and “noble,” is kind.

Tolkien does not confine his women or their archetypes to just wise and kind. There is of course Éowyn, but also Galadriel in her youth, Idril and Elwing who help lead their peoples on great escapes, as well as the goddesses or Vala, who wield great power in Middle-earth. But Galadriel and Lúthien are his two most ethereal women, and in many ways, the most important characters in all of his legendarium. Galadriel as much as anyone, steers and saves the quest to destroy the One Ring. Lúthien’s bravery, sorcery and devotion, are instrumental in the retrieval of one of the Silmarils, ultimately leading to the final overthrow of Melkor (Morgoth), Tolkien’s Lucifer, and Sauron, guiding Sam and Frodo.

Which brings us back to Johnstone. His painting, “Lúthien — Daughter of Twilight,” reminds one of the singular power of Tolkien’s vision of light and his belief in language as a splintered light from a common ancestral beacon. The gold sparks of stars crowning Lúthien speaks to a light in “dark places, when all other lights go out.” For the word light comes from a common Proto-Indo-European source, that philologists have identified as leuk-, which connects to illuminate, illumine, leht in Old English, rócate in Sankrit, and the names Luke, Luca.

The interconnectedness of light and leht and rócate does not matter as much whether it was conscious in Tolkien. That is in fact the power and in many ways the point of language, from a poetic and metaphorical standpoint. The myth of light and how it moves through us, how we must search for it in the greatest darkness, is timeless: to move from cruelty and ignorance to kindness and enlightenment. That is the quest that faces us until the end of time.

“Tolkien has given me so much,” says Johnstone. “The Tolkien Society every year visits Tolkien’s gravesite in Oxford to lay a wreath. They go on the last day, on a Sunday in August, and I will not go down there. I cannot go down there. It would break me if I did. So it’s not that I'm being disrespectful. It's not at all. I just, it would just shatter me if I went down there.”

To face our heroes. To face death. It’s not easy to go and visit where Tolkien is buried, for one fears that the spell may be broken, to realize this great storyteller was just a man, and yet so much more than one could ever imagine. He doesn’t get the same fanfare as other greats. I’ve been there. I paid my respects in 2001, just a couple weeks or so after 9/11. My best friend and I made a day trip from London to Oxford to leave some flowers. We had flown from Los Angeles. We were surprised a little at how small the gravesite is. Fittingly, it is humble with a cute little garden inside it, bearing the names of Tolkien and Edith, and Beren and Lúthien, bonded forever in life and death and myth. My love for them only grew as I faced my own.

So I can understand what Jay means. Was it real? Is the story in our hearts real? The story so many of us grew up reading, turning the pages alone, our eyes moving over the letters and words, the strange musical names, the poetry, wandering the forests of the soul. When we look up through tree branches and see their leaves gleam in the night, the clouds moving high overhead, this dream, this beautiful collective dream lifts us into the light. Moonlight. Starlight. Daylight.

For there go the brushstrokes of Johnstone’s portrait of Tolkien — “Tolkien — The Road.” It’s an oil painting that evokes the impressionistic works of Vincent Van Gogh, the dabs and flecks of light on his white hair and brow, his eyes meeting ours from across the years and the division of minds — returned. Weaving light through the canvas, it as if Jay is digging through time, and unearthing the countless mysteries of Tolkien’s life. Face to face with the dreaming wizard, in the glint of time, hidden inside — tiny, tiny — is the recognition of our deep common ancestry.

What lies in those pupils? What passage lies between lives? The play of sun on Tolkien’s face and his almost questioning look seem to ask us, “What will you do with the time that is given to you?” Tucked over his shoulder are the silhouettes of Gandalf and Frodo, or Bilbo, making their way through arches in the woods. Where are they going these characters that have long lived in our hearts?

Three. Always hidden in Tolkien is the Trinity. My friend Clifford “Quickbeam” Broadway recently wrote a beautiful and personal tribute to the Professor — and the faithful — who have heard his call and have met his gaze across the wilds of Middle-earth. In it, he rightly elevates Tolkien’s compassion, reminding us that Tolkien elevated grace, that he put fellowship before selfish histrionics.

For there are demons inside us all, are there not? When I look at YouTube I see the altruism of many Tolkien fans. But I also see the distorted and twisted gaze of terribly lost and confused fan culture influencers, who make grist and money out of cruelty, decrying any new Tolkien myth that celebrates a more diverse humanity. And yet, one hopes they will come to see the light.

Love. “Karunā” in Sanskrit. “Faelas” in Sindarin. Samwise loves Frodo and Frodo gives mercy to Gollum. Are not the three all the same person in a sense, the same Hobbit, the same Tolkien? Gandalf looks over Bilbo as Bilbo looks over Frodo. Are not all three different aspects of the same man: the scholar, the poet, the orphan? Of course, one could argue Tolkien’s subtle invocation of Sanskrit, conscious or unconscious, was more about misappropriating its centrality back to a kind of aspirational or even convictional locus in Europe and to the North. And yet, perhaps that matters less than the likelihood that he simply reflected it.

In a letter Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher Tolkien in May, 1944, when Christopher was stationed in South Africa as a pilot for the Royal Air Force during World War II, Tolkien comforted his son and waxed philosophical about the nature of “orcs” and evil, noting how myth is simply our mirror within. It was during these months, when Tolkien was also doing rounds keeping watch in Oxford for bomb raids from Nazi Germany, that he was toiling over two key chapters of The Lord of the Rings, the dark trials of “Shelob’s Lair” and “The Choices of Master Samwise.”

He acknowledged his son’s description of the lesser servants of Mordor, fighting an enemy far and wide, sharing in the cause but reminded that the true enemy is within us all and that monsters know no boundaries. “For ‘romance’ has grown out of ‘allegory,’ and its wars are still derived from the ‘inner war’ of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other,” wrote Tolkien. “In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels.”

Angels. Sadoc Burrows, a Trailfinder who is guided by stars, is an elder Hobbit in the new Rings of Power, in what seems to me a bold mythopoeic vision of wisdom for a more interconnected yet unsettled world. He is played by Sir Lenny Henry, a British actor of Black Jamaican descent. His character has the Tolkien Estate’s authoritative and poignant blessing. Where in the hills may he roam?

I can imagine Sadoc is in search for a safe place after many trials and perhaps tragedies. He’s got the Shire in his eyes, I would wager. In this, I think this new Middle-earth myth will help us peer far into the past and the future. Buried deep in us still is the angel and the dawn. In that same letter, Tolkien looked on…

“I was disposed, at last,” he shared, “to envy you a little; or rather to wish I could be with you ‘in the hills.’ There is something in nativity, and though I have few pictorial memories, there is always a curious sense of reminiscence about any stories of Africa, which always move me deeply.”

Here, during the uncertain time of world war, his son half a world away in the land of his birthplace, calls to mind Isaak carrying the baby back to safety, the kraal village, the return — a picture that could live in Johnstone’s paintings.

“Strange that you, my dearest,” he wrote, in the same month he worked and reworked the chapters of Cirith Ungol, “should have gone back there.”

*Friedrich Max Müller is a less well known influence on Tolkien for the simple fact that in Tolkien’s day, “Max Müller” was a looming forefather of philology. Tolkien’s familiarity with his work would have been taken as a given.

**Tolkien states in Letter 25 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien in a response to a reader who asked him about his influences in reference to an inquiry about pygmies and their possible relation to his conception of Hobbits, that he “read several books on African exploration.”

In Oronzo Cilli’s Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist, there is at least one entry I could find that connects to Tolkien’s letter: David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels And Researches In South Africa, 1857. Livingstone is a legendary figure in British and African history. An abolitionist, he is perhaps best well-known for his impassioned search for the source of the Nile, where he believed he could then end the African slave trade.

One wonders if Livingstone’s quest possibly influenced Tolkien’s conception of Frodo’s anti-quest to destroy the One Ring — the enslavement of the Machine.

***Rathlóriel (“River-bed of Gold” in Sindarin), according to Hooker, is an approximation of the Greek name Hydaspes, which was given the Latin epithet of Aurifer (“Goldbearer”) — Hooker draws a further connection to Tolkien’s use of Flammifer (Flame Bearer) in the “Song of Eärendil.”

The Hydaspes is the River Vitastā and was also the scene of a famous battle between the armies of Alexander the Great and an Indian Rájá, a king that the Ancient Greeks recorded as King Porus, a battle that entailed two hundred mounted elephants.

****I think Hooker is actually onto something here that seems to be previously missed by Hooker and other Tolkien scholars. The river Poros is the southern border of Gondor and the northern border of Harad in the Third Age. “Poros” is the Ancient Greek variation of King Porus. If Hooker is right, and Tolkien was influenced by the Rigveda, then one could still argue that then his mythos was a kind of “taking” or “revising” of those ancient mystical sources to his own mythopoeic uses. However, for what it is worth, I don’t personally believe this was done in malice, but more as inspiration. And if he did reappropriate the “East,” it seems he was also echoing Kyng Alisaunder.

*****Another obvious Sanskrit echo, and Tolkien would have of course been aware of its resonance even if he was more directly referencing Gothic, is “Ilúvatar,” which means in Quenya, “All-Father,” though one also perceives “Illuminated” father — or even “Light Father” or “Father of Light,” for “vatar” evokes Gothic “fadar,” German “vater,” Dutch “vader” (ahem, Darth Vader), and Sanskrit “pitár.”

*****To say that Tolkien was not aware of these potent forces is to ignore the fact that he chose his words very carefully and made clear in his letters that he did not favor “Nordic” or even “Norse” ethnography any more than he admired things outside his native home, whether it be Spanish, Rome, Egypt, Japanese art, Abrahamic religions, or books about the land of his birth. To a German publishing house that wanted proof of his “Aryan” heritage, he wrote:

“I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” 

While Tolkien says he does not know of a direct ancestral lineage to Iran and India, what I think is rather fascinating in this quote, aside from his spirited rejection of antisemitism and the Nazi ideology, is that he qualifies his own heritage with “as far as I am aware,” meaning he always left open the possibility of a greater, wider linguistic inheritance, reconnecting “Aryan” to its proper Sanskrit origins and purpose.

It came to him in a dream — a monastic dream. One with runes and secret meanings. The Middle-earth art of Jay Johnstone is not simply one of imagery, but one of letters and words and scripture too. Like a monk, Johnstone, who lives in northern England in Newcastle upon Tyne, just miles from Jarrow — the old home of the Venerable Bede — brushes an inky magnificence and meticulous manuscripts that illustrate the world of J.R.R. Tolkien like never before.

He invites us to ask the question: What if we opened a beautiful Red Book of Westmarch, a bible by Bilbo and Frodo — but re-scribed and ornamented many years later by friars and nuns of a Gondorian variety, pre-Christian yet running in the same spirit of the Middle Ages? : By candle light, with inkwells and paints, and gold leafs, they recorded a lost age and lost world, a place of heroes and demons and wargs and dwarves and elves and trolls and hobbits, just on the edge of memory.

Johnstone, who was raised as a Catholic but does not subscribe to church or daily Christian worship, like his Tolkien iconography work — which we focused on in Part One of our series on his art — has drawn deeply from the religious and folk traditions of England and Europe to inform his personal vision of Middle-earth. Tolkien’s writings were grounded in sensibilities of the Middle Ages — its manuscripts constituted many of the ancient tales that inspired him. So manuscripts, illuminated manuscripts, form a natural bridge between.

While we often think of Beowulf as the foundational story — interpreted and recorded by an unknown “poet” circa 1000 A.D. — that Tolkien based his deepest scholarship on, he also derived learnings from manifold medieval English texts, including Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English Canterbury Tales. The key thing to keep in mind here, and this perhaps requires stating in our “Digital Age,” is that these stories were all handwritten. They predate the printing press. They are manuscripts, i.e. written by hand.

Before the Gutenberg Revolution of 1454, for centuries, someone had to record oral tales — think Gilgamesh and Homer — onto papyrus, parchment and paper, and pass it down to the next generation, and on and on. Alphabets, letters, words and scripts had to flow from mind to hand, and hand to mind, through countless nights and endless work. The Gutenberg Bible was the first machine-produced book in the world. Before it was a long chain of labor, and artistry, that helped evolve humanity from a speaking-only species to a speaking and writing one.

These manuscripts were so valuable that during the Middle Ages they were often locked with chains to library desks, while many had metal clasps to protect them from light and dust. Making parchment, made from animal skins, the quills, inks, and binding, was incredibly laborious. In Europe, during the Dark Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, much of the scribing and illustration was the domain of Roman Catholic monks and nuns — Benedictine to be precise — and was carried out in scriptoriums, rooms in monasteries where scribes would read, copy and paint Latin scripts.

The illustrating of borders and scenes from the Bible, or Greek and Roman classical works, was called “illuminating” a manuscript. The “pagan” world did this as well, and originally set some of these methods in place before Christianity and the Church transformed access and distribution of earlier texts. In Asia, the earliest religious texts of Hinduism and Buddhism were originally captured on palm leaf and bamboo in word-form only. But more historical works like the oldest epic poem in the world, the Mahābhārata, which contains the 700-verse Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, were richly illuminated with imagery.

Johnstone has pointed his brush to this dank and dusty seam in our collective history, traversing the space between Tolkien’s stories as he wrote them, the way in which his characters may have lived and recorded them, and the more nebulous transference of those tales and tomes to a kind of monastic preservation. It’s as if Benedictine monks lived in the halls of Minas Tirith and religiously re-scribed the Red Book of Westmarch, as it came to them from Rivendell by way of the Shire, kept safe by Samwise Gamgee’s daughter, Elanor Fairbairn, and passed from generation to generation among the Wardens of Westmarch.

It’s that idea, consciously or not, that has sparked excitement among the Tolkien fans that come across Johnstone’s manuscripts. They are his most popular works. Originals and prints sell quickly and well. As a frequent guest and panelist at sci-fi and fantasy conventions nowadays, Johnstone originally was reticent about the Tolkien Society events that have now become a mainstay of his engagement with the Middle-earth community. His meta artwork — his sly medieval style — has helped Tolkien fans, scholars and artists imagine a deeper common ground.*

When I interviewed Jay last year in April, I asked him about this “text within a text” vision in his Tolkien art, which to me are of the same theme as his “dream within a dream” iconographies. Using his painting “Gandalf in the Library of Minas Tirith” as an example, I pointed out how he meticulously detailed the books and scrolls in that image with Tengwar lettering. You can also see this painstaking attention throughout, as in works like “The Dwarves,” which illuminates Thror’s map in Bag End from The Hobbit.

“You know, I can't remember what it says but there's two parchments on his desk and both of them are written on and the lettering is about a millimeter high,” he says of the Gandalf in Minas Tirith work, chuckling a bit under his breath. “It's absolutely tiny. I literally do it with a magnifying glass and a precision brush, a brush with one hair on it. I do that in quite a lot of paintings.”

It’s another level of getting inside Middle-earth, down to the micro. Such works are a celebration of the writers and sages inside that meta world, and of writing and learning itself. Johnstone’s “Círdan the Shipwright” — with its Tengwar and ship schematics on parchment — and his “Bilbo at the Library at Rivendell” — with history flowing from Bilbo’s pen — give us a new window into time.

“Just to hide stuff,” he says of the Bilbo in Rivendell manuscript, where a spider crawls on the ceiling, the Eye of Sauron emblazons a book cover, and the Key to Erebor sits at the hobbit’s feet as he sits on a river barrel. “In that one, there's 27 symbols of The Lord the Rings. It's hidden in the floor and everywhere. It's just got symbols all over the place. I enjoy doing that. I like to hide things — secrets.”

This bequeathing from quill to quill, is rightly given a very playful nature, not only because according to Tolkien, the original scribes were hobbits, but because Tolkien himself imbued much of his own writing with a deft dab of comic relief. I am not a medievalist nor a scholar of world religion, but I find Johnstone’s astute perception and dedication to meta historical detail in this regard absolutely sharp and convincing. It’s not that his Tolkien manuscripts are real — they are fantasy works in themselves — but that they negotiate the present with the past in a highly sensitive way, through a sprite imagination and a keen spirit.

Hence, he moves us from Middle-earth illumination to a Middle-earth revelation. His manuscript images tie the Tengwar and Cirth scripts together into textural landscapes that evoke a sense of time as less linear than we should believe. In “The King of the Golden Hall,” the flow of Tengwar letters runs underneath a scene of Gandalf and the Three Hunters at the throne of the aged Théoden, a worried Éowyn at his side, and Gríma Wormtongue reading the visitors what looks like a declaration of their non-rights inside the realm of Rohan. Curled around the body of the text and the scene are branches, leaves and flowers; a White Horse of Rohan gallops in a corner near a ship at sea and Aragorn’s heraldry — a coat of arms with the White Tree and the Seven Stars.

What one also perceives more clearly with Johnstone’s manuscripts is the symmetry native to Tolkien’s writing, the rhyme and rhythm that was lost on some readers and critics when The Lord of the Rings first saw the light of day, as it rolled off the global printing press. Whether it is the archetypal mirroring — Jungian or not — between the loyal hound Huan and Sauron’s evil warg Draugluin in “Huan is there!,” or between the rambling tunnels of the Goblin mountain and the maze of caves in the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit, there are many ways to look at the same thing. The flash of those facets is in many ways the power of myth as it works its way through our psyches.

Through them all is something like the serpentine wave, a dragon that winds through the darkness, on which by standing on the tips, one can look from one tip to another, and recognize time’s repeating cyclical nature. There is Bilbo, and yet there is Gollum, both hobbits from different times and fates, but interconnected nonetheless. There are the dwarves, and there are the goblins, both embittered enemies stretching back millennia, and yet, both live under the earth. There, Smaug writhes in red, and lusting for gold, and there, leads the motley band through the land — a wizard in grey and blue — shining the light, never threatening or breathing fire, or lording around his ancient might.

It’s the riddles and rhyming in Bilbo and Gollum’s encounter in the dark, and Bilbo’s test of wills and mind tricks in his conversation with Smaug, that remind us of the power of words. So it’s the same with Johnstone’s wordless manuscripts, which follow more in the tradition of stained glass windows of cathedrals, and tapestries like the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066. When we look closely at manuscripts like “The Killing of the Goblin King and the Finding of the One Ring” combined with “Conversation with Smaug,” we can see an interior symmetry and poetry.

The first manuscript he painted of this kind depicts the end of The Fellowship of the Ring with Frodo’s indecision at the top of the hill known as Amon Hen. “It was a cross, because I saw it as a comic,” Johnstone explains. “And so with the ‘Flight from Amon Hen,’ which was the first one I did, it’s painted as this full story; from the moment with Boromir to the final bit where Sam jumps in the water and they steal away, it's almost like the story in cartoon form. It’s like a medieval comic. It was just a little dream thought. And it just worked.”

With these medieval tools at his fingertips, Johnstone has given us a wild peek at what a whole Red Book of Westmarch in manuscript form might actually look like; Not The Lord of the Rings per se, but the family heirloom of the Fairbairns, and monastic copies of it made in the scriptoriums of Minas Tirith.

What would we see? Well, monsters for one. Just as Beowulf gives us three monsters in its epic tale — Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon — Johnstone more recently chose to illuminate the Fellowship’s journey through Moria with three scenes of three monsters: the Watcher in the Water, the cave troll at the Chamber of Mazarbul, and the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm.

Which in a way brings Johnstone full circle. Its tentacles rising out of the water, his “Watcher at the Gate” depicts a classic scene from The Lord of the Rings in a new light, its curling limbs encircling the curvy Tengwar in the manuscript and evoking the tree tendrils around the columns of the Gate and the image. Even Pippin’s pipe-smoke curls with anticipation. But it’s all about Bill the Pony in a way, as he seems to be the only one who senses the giant mollusk of Moria, as Samwise prepares to set him free. Fittingly, Bill the Pony was also Johnstone’s gateway into Middle-earth.

“I was at art college,” he says. “And my girlfriend said to me, though, she was discussing with a friend, she says, ‘What was the name of that pony? What was the name of the pony where the Watcher was?’ And that was the question that got me into Tolkien. Because I was like, ‘What are you talking about!? What are you talking about? What are you babbling about?’ And she said, ‘Well have you read The Lord the Rings?’ I said, ‘What's that then? It's a book is it?’ I picked it up and that was me done from about page six. That was me done.”

Reading it on the bus to college everyday, and then rereading it, and going to secondhand bookstores to pick up The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and anything with the name “Tolkien” on it, Johnstone dove deep into Middle-earth. He understands the mythology with a painter’s hands and eyes, so that one recognizes the joy of every grace note and wink in his manuscripts.

In his second manuscript of his Moria triptych, “The Battle of the Chamber of Mazarbul,” you can see his secrets in Gandalf’s golden halo, as his angelic powers increase. A dwarf skeleton leans against Balin’s Tomb. Frodo’s Sting glows. And hiding on the right column behind the cave troll, is Gollum, trailing the One Ring. Looking on the bloodshed are the grim countenances of past dwarves carved in the walls, and two dwarf skulls trophied on the cave troll’s belt.

The third manuscript in the set is perhaps the strongest, because it brings something new to one of the most dazzling demons in modern literature: the Valarauka, the “power monster” in Quenya, the Balrog of Moria, Durin’s Bane. Here we see a devil in true medieval fashion with its goat-like head and curling horns: shaggy, fiery and baleful. Gandalf meets his sword and whip with his white light and what looks like a blueish flash, his gold halo more apparent, as the Maia goes against Maia — Maia a Maia — a stone dwarven face looking on from the column behind, while orcs aim their arrows at our heroes. It feels suitably Alighieri, a fierce confluence of words, symbols and archaic mystery.

And so a Balrog’s whip lashes out of the darkness. Tengwar springs from the same ancient well from deep down inside memory and legend, and the lost. It too remains both strange and familiar, reopening us to the metaphoric and malleable patterning of devils and angels. Like the illuminated manuscripts of the Bible, the stories and parables of The Lord of the Rings become a kind of mantra for survival, and a sermon for hope. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic and Johnstone is a devoted painter of Middle-earth. It takes a kind of religious fervor to bring these worlds to life, sparking our imaginations in the here and now.

We all take it for granted. Or at least the literate do. For many forget just how hard it is to truly learn our letters, buried in some distant childhood memories. Yet writing is a kind of miracle. The Jesuit priest Walter J. Ong reminded many scholars and scientists of this through his deep philosophical and linguistic analyses. His Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, which was published in 1982, argued how writing and reading marks a highly intense transition from a world of sound to a world of sight, and back again.

Ong also took intense interest in how the reading of symbols, letters and words could reshape human consciousness, describing how stories in written form can transport us out of conscious awareness of our bodies; as our immediate sense of place and time is muted, our internal voice and imagination moves to the fore of our experience. Johnstone’s manuscripts reminded me of Ong’s insights, which I once studied in college. For me, it’s in this context that Tolkien and Johnstone’s worlds collide to create a new kind of awareness: that Tolkien, by creating his own alphabets and languages, was essentially restoring an earlier state of wonder and erudition — a shared mythic dream state.

For myself, I never properly considered the core importance of Tolkien’s Tengwar and Cirth alphabets until observing Johnstone’s manuscripts. They weren’t just hobbies or handwritten doodles, though they certainly may have emerged from Tolkien’s constant play with language, but the elegant forms and calligraphy that articulate the deep linguistic soul at the heart of Tolkien’s faerie-expressionism. Tengwar, the alphabet for Quenya, the “Old Elvish,” or Latin language of his Middle-earth, seems both European, Middle Eastern and Asian all at once. Sanskrit comes to mind.** And yet it feels inherently Tolkien.

Which means it is both otherworldly and strangely familiar. Johnstone’s cursive and clipped styles of Tengwar also reveal its versatility, something all Tolkien readers, no matter their native language, recognize in the Tengwar script that flows around the One Ring, or along the arch of the Doors of Durin, or later explicated famously in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings. No doubt, this creativity in lettering itself has driven certain rigid literary types mad.

“Why all the fuss!?” many may ask. Because within the handiwork of handwriting and the manuscripts of old was the hard work of caring for what was, what is, and what might be, even if only in the imagination. Knowledge is not free. Libraries may be public and commonplace for the most part today, and the information of the world hypothetically containable within digital code, simmering on servers and circuits and phones, but texts were once rare, and even sacred.

So I find Johnstone’s homage to this tradition not only clever, but touching. And if the movable metal type of Gutenberg’s printing machines literally transformed the medium of writing and reading into a galaxy of ideas, then Tolkien’s 20th century preoccupation with phantom letters is all the more ingenious. I don’t believe the impulse was anything more than creative, an impulse to dig back through the printed type on the page to the art of the hand, to reopen the mind.

It’s a kind of Houdini mind-body trick. Or a Marx Brothers steeplechase through one state of mind to another, from one gag to another, disdain or despair giving way to escape and laughter. It’s so easy to forget, but again, Tolkien wrote his masterpieces by hand, and then tested them out orally — like a magic spell.

One might say it’s almost like putting on the Ring. Because the trick is to make ourselves disappear, so that what remains are the words and our conjuring of what they mean, weaving through the passages of the manuscript like the worm or the wizard. It takes faith that these symbols can still connect to shared beliefs in fact or fiction, anchored to something deep in our memories, both personal and collective. Only then can it flow, from the pen or from the page.

In fact, Tolkien had delicate handwriting, the kind people rarely possess these days in a world of keyboards and touchscreens. In waves, his own manuscript picked up momentum as the rhythms of his legendarium overlaid, echoed and shimmered into a new mythic resonance. The words ran into each other as he quickened along, and then slackened as he took long respites on his writer’s journey, oftentimes sketching or painting scenes, images and scriptures that perhaps came loudest and clearest to his mind.

Every word along the way, he had to make some kind of decision. Most of it may have been semi-unconscious, especially once he found his stride. But some story and plot shifts took deeper consideration. Which is in its own way represented by the hero’s journey in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Once again, Johnstone’s manuscripts illuminate these profound patterns in new ways.

Putting “The Escape from the Dungeons of the Wood-elves” side by side next to “Flight from Amon Hen,” we can see how the two cousin journeys of Bilbo and Frodo echo but stray. In Bilbo’s manuscript, he is alone but lower in the totem pole. He is not the center of the action when Thorin defies Thranduil and is thrown into jail, though he is invisible and peeking from behind. He goes downward into the belly of the Wood-elves’ halls.

Leading the Dwarves to their escape, they get into their barrels and float off on the Forest River toward Esgaroth and the Lonely Mountain. Bilbo starts to come into his own. In a neat bit of alternating symmetry, intended or not, at the top of Frodo’s hill is Mount Doom in the distance, with the towers of Barad-dûr and Minas Tirith peeking into the clouds. On the Seat of Seeing atop Amon Hen, Frodo sits holding the One Ring, racked with indecision.

We can see events both before and after his deep view across the land: Boromir tries to take the Ring. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli search for Frodo, who we can see as invisible hiding in the trees, with Gollum opposite and behind. We see Boromir blowing his Great Horn, pierced with three arrows, with Merry and Pippin beside him, Uruk-hai cocking their bows. And at the bottom, another decision at a river coming to a crescendo, as Frodo pulls Sam out of the water, setting sail for a new destiny across the Anduin, Gollum trailing on a log. So again, a Baggins starts to come into his own.

You never know where Tolkien may take you. His Red Book is a well-read manuscript, and yet every time is different. Johnstone’s Tolkien manuscripts show us just how far we still can go. Running through the worded and the wordless — new secrets revealed — one realizes that the possibilities for re-interpretation and reinvigoration are in fact infinite. How the letters relate to the image is a constant Ongian leap into the void and the timeless, only interrupted here and there by returns to the current.

Even reconsidering just one dimension of this puzzle, back to only letters, the dance of Tengwar is surprising and endless, in the same way that any language is, with new words and sentences promising something both deeply ancient and first of its kind. Speaking over Zoom, I ask Jay what he thinks about this elastic space between the visual look — Ong’s world of sight — and the meaning of Tengwar — the sound and poetry of Tolkien’s moral universe. To answer, he demonstrates the re-communion of myth, including its timing, by way of his own Tolkien parable of the artist — the transformation of an echo.

“I think it's beautiful,” he says. “I mean, I've seen some great scriptographers who can write it beautifully. I went to a science-fiction convention in Harrogate about three years ago and I noticed there was a lady in the corner actually painting in Tengwar script. And I just went over and she was using traditional Chinese brushes, and all this sort of stuff. And it was a beauty to watch.”

“When somebody gets it,” he continues, “it's poetry, just the hand motions. And I just stood for five minutes and didn’t say anything. I just stood watching there for five minutes. And then she stopped and she looked up, and she went, and I went, ‘Oooh, that's beautiful!’ And I said, ‘I’m Jay Johnstone. I’m a painter. I do some Tolkien stuff.’”

Jay leans in as he imitates her voice. “And she goes, ‘I know.’ She knew the entire time and didn’t look up,” he laughs. “She was wrecking it, because I was the ‘guy who did all the Tolkien script.’ It was a lovely little moment.”

Our consideration and conversation with Jay Johnstone will continue with our last and third part…

*Jay Johnstone is not the first Tolkien artist to work in this zone of the linguistic and the pictographic. For example, the artist Tom Loback, was one of the first to draw and ink elaborate Tolkien-themed manuscripts in Tengwar and Cirth. Interestingly, some of his artworks have a Hindu / Sanskrit, or Devanagari influence in its script stylings and visual flare.

**Connections to Sanskrit have been made more explicitly in recent Tolkien scholarship. Mark T. Hooker’s Tolkien and Sanskrit: The Silmarillion in the Cradle of Proto-Indo-European, takes a fascinating look at the role of this ancient language in Tolkien’s academic and linguistic development. It’s highly speculative but still a very fun read.

In 1912, the influential psychologist Carl Jung published his most famous work, Psychology of the Unconscious, where he identified the power of the psyche — to imagine — with the power to live, and the will to power as the lack of love, one the shadow of the other. “The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning,” he proclaimed in its first chapter.

In 2020, the Tolkien Society awarded Oronzo Cilli their Best Book designation for the year. Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist is a painstaking bibliography of J.R.R. Tolkien’s personal library, an attempt to excavate the reading interests of the renowned professor and author. Gracing its cover was a startling image of Gandalf painted in the style of medieval art by the UK artist Jay Johnstone — perusing scrolls, the wizard searches for the secrets of the One Ring.

The magic of “Gandalf in the Library of Minas Tirith” is its stark sense of a dream within a dream, what looked like an artwork made by a painter who actually lived inside Middle-earth. Inside that dream, inside that book, on page 138 near entries for James Joyce, was evidence that Tolkien, the master of dreams and modern fairy tales, owned and presumably once read Jung’s breakthrough book deconstructing dreams and interior fantasies. Like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, published about 40 years later, Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious was an epochal work. It changed how many perceived the landscapes and shadows of the human psyche.

Johnstone dreams in Tolkien. And through him and his artwork we can perceive anew what it would mean to live in Middle-earth and to create art inside it. While Tolkien himself made “sub-creation” the purview of his own characters, from the creation of the Silmarils by Fëanor to the writing of the Red Book of Westmarch by the hobbits, Johnstone imagines what it would be like to be a painter inside Tolkien’s world, and then paints that world and its history. Reminiscent of the religious medieval icon paintings by Duccio di Buoninsegna and Fra Angelico, Johnstone’s paintings work not just like dream portals but time portals.

They came from a “troubling dream” he had in 1999, Johnstone tells us in his book, Tolkienography: Isildur’s Bane and Iconic Interpretations, published in 2018. “The dream began with a funeral in a small torch lit stone-built church,” he writes in its introduction, recounting how the dream was a nightmare about losing his wife and how he tried to escape his sorrow by fleeing her funeral.

“The choice was out the main arch door on my right or through a doorway leading to a corridor on my left,” he writes in detail. “For no discernible reason I chose left and found myself wandering a deserted monastery. It contained all the religious relics, art and paraphernalia you would expect, but they were wasted on me and I ignored them in grief.”

Here in the deserted monastery, Johnstone encountered what one might interpret as Jungian archetypes. First he perceived them as Christian icons: Jesus, St. Peter, Moses and very strangely, one of his wife on an altar. Yet it was not his wife, he realized, but a character he was deeply attached to. And the mystery of why this Christian iconography mixed with his own mythography, sparked a revelation.

I first learned about Johnstone’s extraordinary art through TheOneRing.net, and was intrigued by its metaphysical implications. After reading a scholarly review of his art book by Lance A. Green in the Journal of Inklings Studies via the Edinburgh University Press, I purchased it, absorbed it, and reached out to Johnstone for an interview. Over the course of two hours in early 2021, he kindly took me through his artistic journey and the new roads of mythic inquiry his artwork has opened.

“This came about because of a very bizarre dream in which I was in a Celtic Scottish church,” he says. “And I had seen a lot of what I believe to be Christian iconography. But on closer inspection, the iconography had such a connection to Tolkien's work. So when I saw pictures of Jesus, they were initially presumed to be a Christian icon of Jesus, but I saw it as Aragorn. I looked at Moses and saw Gandalf. There was a great connection between the images that I saw and the beliefs that Tolkien had, and it came to me literally in a dream.”

“Did Tolkien use these icons from Catholicism as foundations for some of the core attributes and personalities of the characters?” he wondered, recalling his thought process. “And once I made this connection in this dream, I literally the next day started to paint a particular piece called ‘The Halls of Théoden,’ which was a manuscript, which again, was just a copy that I saw in the dream of a book of an artist’s illustration, that I realized who the characters were, and I couldn't read the words, and I realized the text was in Tengwar.”

Also, he noticed some script around the golden halo of the woman he had thought was his wife. While he could not decipher it, he recognized it too was in Tolkien’s Elvish script, Tengwar. That’s when he realized the icon of his wife was Arwen, daughter of Elrond and Celebrían, granddaughter of Galadriel, loyal partner to Aragorn, and the future queen of Gondor, following the overthrow of Sauron.

In many ways, what started with the Peter Jackson films — the extension of Middle-earth into what is called the “metaverse” these days, in other words, the theater of immersion — comes full circle with Johnstone’s “meta artwork.” Not in terms of video games or VR, per se, but in terms of the set designs — including Alan Lee’s painting of Sauron bearing down on Isildur — and intricate props that allowed Jackson to film “inside” Middle-earth. The landscapes of New Zealand of course did most of the immersion, but it was Weta Workshop’s attention to detail, including the art, artifacts and architecture inside the world, that also transported audiences into Bag End, Rivendell, Moria and Minas Tirith.

Long before the movies, the artwork of renowned Tolkien artists like Alan Lee, John Howe, Ted Nasmith and the Brothers Hildebrandt, gave us a sense of what it was like to be in Middle-earth, to look on it with our own eyes through their eyes. But Johnstone’s vision is something different. It wholly immerses us in Tolkien’s world by asking us to consider the subjects of his stories as subjects from within their world, imagining what a painting of them by a painter in Middle-earth who is closer to their era, perhaps living during or just a few generations after, might actually look like, at once creating a distance between us and the past, but simultaneously collapsing it, so we can see them anew as something holy.

Johnstone is not a church-going Christian. While he believes in God, he resists prescribing to any one church or religion. But one could say he is pious about the things that have moved him. The artistry found in the medieval churches and iconography of Europe moves him deeply, as does the artwork of his favorite painter, Gustav Klimt, which is perhaps where Johnstone also channels some degree of eroticism, exoticism and heady symbolism into his work. But the sacredness that informs much of his oeuvre, the holy iconographic style he references from the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church art traditions, evidenced in the frescoes, duomos and altars of their many old cathedrals, synthesizes Tolkien’s mythology with Christian mythology into a modern sublimation of the collective unconscious and into clearer meanings.

And what is that meaning? Well, Tolkien’s work, from The Silmarillion to The Lord of the Rings, is deeply spiritual in nature. Masked as adventure and child’s play, it is in fact almost liturgical in its many rhythms and hymn-like trances of thought, a biblical work for the secular world and the technological age. That’s what Johnstone’s work brings to the fore and to a razor-fine point. While the ur-Christian iconography of the Middle Ages undergirds his images, the truly powerful nature of his contribution is what one might call the worldly.

One of the anchors of Johnstone’s worldly approach is his research. Coming up in an era of prolific scholarship on Tolkien and his work, he has more historical and theoretical grist at his fingertips. Tolkien’s experiences in France at the Battle of the Somme in World War I is particularly important to Johnstone, who has spent time with John Garth, the author of the acclaimed Tolkien and the Great War, which was the first in-depth account of the author’s wartime travails. Such research often inspires his art, sourcing its emotion as much as his dreams.

“I got very hooked on the War and spoke extensively with John Garth, about Tolkien's experiences during the War,” he says, connecting the Nazgul and the Dead Marshes back to the very first warplanes. “I'm really interested in where he got the inspiration, where he got the primeval fear and emotion from, so I wanted to explore that. During the War, the biplanes used to fly over the battlefields and look for troop movements. Most of them didn't carry weapons because they were spotters and they were basically directing artillery guns onto troop movements. So to be seen by the planes was to bring down death.”

The European roots of Tolkien’s mythology is inescapable. But its promise is also beyond borders and even history. It appeals to people around the world, as do the cathedrals of Europe, from Notre Dame to the Hagia Sophia. Art transcends. And it is the Asian and African undercurrents in some of Johnstone’s Tolkien works that bequeaths a more universal and timeless quality to his icons than one may presuppose when encountering the more superficial elements of his many brush strokes: From world wars to Tolkien’s own vigorous engagement with the profound, Johnstone’s worldly style cleverly expands the canvas.

Klimt, for starts, was greatly influenced by the gold leaf ornamentalism of the Rinpa School of art and the lacquerware of Japan. The subtle but vivid eastern and southern waves in Johnstone’s artwork can be sensed in the Byzantine and Coptic stylings, including the almost Russian and Turkish vibrations in some of his icons, especially his renderings of King Théoden and the Levantine-toned depictions of “The Council of Elrond,” as if the Renaissance that was in great part triggered by the Crusades and trade missions with the Far East had similarly influenced Middle-earth painters soon after the War of the Ring.

That is, we can imagine a world that was just changing and just beginning to usher in the Christian — a cultural and theological explosion that began in the Middle East, between Europe, Africa and Asia — and the modern world as we know it, however slight the angle. Theology is inseparable from history. So it is the same with delusion. Mythology is what allows us to rethink and reshape both history and the delusional into truths and fantasies that yield new meaning.

All art is essentially mythological. It is not just the thing it is representing. There is a dislocation of sorts, the interpretation of the artist and the receiver of the art, from the flight of the imagination to the search for truth. And perhaps what is most inspiring about Johnstone’s Tolkien art is that he boldly confronts the nightmarish dimension — the shadow — of the author’s psyche and vision.

When you talk with Jay, you immediately recognize his humility and gentleness. He has a calm English accent and is welcoming at all times, ready to discuss the philosophical as well as the personal, from the funny to the tragic. You could say he is very Tolkienian in that way. But the trait that seems most central to his worldview is compassion and forgiveness, both of himself and others. In his Tolkienography, this is especially clear in his reconsideration of Isildur.

The book includes a learned commentary by Thomas Honegger, a Professor of English Medieval Studies at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. Honegger saw the revolutionary meaning inherent in Johnstone’s interpretation of Tolkien’s characters and stories; he credits him with changing how scholars perceived Isildur because he asked the question: could the fallen prince be considered worthy of sainthood? For Johnstone, the answer is yes.

I don’t want to spoil Honegger’s detailed analysis — you should read it here or purchase Johnstone’s limited edition of Tolkienography: Isildur’s Bane and Iconic Interpretations — but the broad outlines are stark enough to convey the thematic breakthrough uncovered by Johnstone’s dream and artwork. For starts, Johnstone wondered why exactly he was headed north along the Anduin from Minas Tirith after he had defeated Sauron and had taken the One Ring to safety. In essence, Isildur did not feel safe, as the burden of the Ring grew ever more painful. In a desperate dash, he tried to bring the Ring to the Elves for wiser keeping.

This alternate version of Isildur’s corruption and redemption was first presented in Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales in “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields,” where we learn that Isildur struggled with his refusal to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom. In a kind of repentance, Tolkien proffered that perhaps Isildur was no simple turncoat. In fact, Tolkien experimented with the idea that Isildur had redeemed himself by relinquishing the Ring, aided by luck or providence. Johnstone’s dream raised this same question, for the painter wondered: Temptation had undone Isildur, so why would he see him in a church?

“The manner of his death becomes really important because I thought, ‘Well, he's got to die,” reasons Johnstone. “If he lives, he becomes another Sauron. But he's a good guy. He's done all these really good things. The gods have blessed him. The gods have saved him. The gods have protected him.’ He's done great things for the survival of his people. He's done great things for the survival of the White Tree. But really, the only way he's going to lose the Ring now is if he dies.”

In a conversation in 2013 with the Tolkien Professor, Corey Olsen, the question of whether Isildur deserved a halo in his icon painting — which was what Johnstone had seen in his dream — came to the surface. Following the logic that Isildur had to die, they wondered if he was then a martyr. “Was it Divine Providence that put him on the battlefield?” Johnstone asked himself, because he had already made the connection between picking up the broken sword, Narsil, as almost like picking up the Cross.

So picking up where Tolkien left off, Johnstone completed the picture. In his reckoning, the only way Isildur could escape the Ring was in a way to sacrifice himself. Ambushed by Orcs near the Gladden Fields, he dove into the waters of the River Anduin where its currents slipped the Ring from his finger. Tolkien’s narrator suggests that Isildur was in fact relieved of its loss right before he was killed by poison arrows. Johnstone’s iconographic oil painting, “The Death of Isildur,” captures a serenity not often associated with the fallen king.

And the key insight Johnstone brought to this turning point was a hunch that the Anduin was not simply the scene of a crime, but a baptismal deliverance of the Ring from the servants of evil to Sméagol, and eventually Bilbo Baggins. In the painting we see water spirits surrounding the body of Isildur, servants of the water god Ulmo, who had long guided the faithful through darkness to light: Ulmo leads Turgon to the hidden vale where he builds Gondolin; he brings Eärendil and hence Elrond and Elros into the world; he helps deliver the Númenórean Faithful safely to the shores of Middle-earth.

“Then the question became, if he's fleeing across the river, if he's gone across the river, and then the line in the book says, ‘and the Ring betrayed him,’ and when I spoke to academics, they all said if the Ring betrayed him, it was with malice,” he recounts. “It fell from his hand, and therefore he was revealed to his enemies and killed. I thought, ‘Well, actually, that could mean something completely different.’ And the step change that I came up with within the Orthodox Catholic society, is that to remove sin, you have to be baptized. If somebody is baptized, the sin is literally washed away.”

“And now if you think of it that way, it became a ‘cloaking device on a starship’ story about the Ring,” Johnstone continues. “It betrayed him by falling off, not by maliciously leaping off, but lost its power, grew to its original size, and fell and he was betrayed, and therefore is peppered with arrows. He sinks in the water and he comes back up once, and then his body is taken, and then I thought, ‘Well, Ulmo was in the water and almost always protected him.’ And so therefore, the manner of his death was crucial. And with all these thoughts, I decided he does deserve a halo. He was martyred for the cause. And he was on the field at the final battle through Divine Providence.”

In his iconic painting, “Isildur’s Bane,” that beatification of Isildur is explored through the stylistic attributes of Orthodox Christian iconography, bringing a Near Eastern touch to a primarily Western inspired mythos. The visual language of Orthodox Church icons from pre-Renaissance times, Honegger argues, is an ideal vessel for this temporal and thematic realignment. The cultural influence of Constantinople made its way throughout Europe even to the British Isles in terms of its aesthetic renown. Johnstone’s use of golden halo discs, typography arrayed above or around, the slightly turned gaze of his Middle-earth saints, the cracked veneer, the emphasis of a pious mood over realism, recasts Isildur as both an enigma and magnifier of moral study and insight.

In fact, it is that holy tenor that gives these works their realism. It is that triangulation of historical and cultural angles that allows us to follow Johnstone into his dreams, and hence Tolkien’s Middle-earth, as if we too were walking the halls of that torch lit stone-built monastery. Which brings us to what I believe is one of his most powerful images, “Gandalf the White,” the mesmerizing image of a holy man if you like, weathered, serious, determined, monk-like in his posture, a bulwark against temptation and condemnation. Here is a figure who has seen things, mourned things, and has walked the fire of existence. The deep blues bestow a nocturnal, misty, Northern ambience, pulling just so away from the Southern, while the red-rimmed, spotted rays of a sunny halo hint at his holy rebirth as an emissary of the Flame of Anor — the Flame Imperishable.

Like Gandalf’s Ring of Power, Narya, the Ring of Fire, which is only revealed in the last chapter of The Lord of the Rings, there is a lot that is unseen in Johnstone’s work. The deep research is layered underneath. The theological complexities of his motifs require theological awareness to unveil their deeper meanings. But deeper still is his great love for Tolkien’s humanism. All of these elements are sensed and felt when observing his work. Even if one misses some of its slyly arcane and religious allusions, their shimmering depth means one can also continually uncover new reflections in these mirrors of the human spirit.

It’s not just the reflective effect of the gold leaf in his paintings, but the emotional intelligence glinting in every stroke and dot that constitutes his art. So that again, after talking with Jay, I came away with the sense that his love of Tolkien is just as personal as it is philosophical or theological. This is the common bond that links so many to Middle-earth, that it is a kind of universal prayer, a sermon about the survivability of tragedy and hardship.

Johnstone highlights his relationship with his son, who has had to make his way through difficult learning and mental health challenges over the years. Johnstone has felt guilt and pain over his past inability to understand and later to fix or ease some of those challenges. But in general, through art and Tolkien, he has found a way to unlock greater healing and love between them. For them both, Tolkien’s stories and life constantly inspire: he has even painted part of an exploded WWI artillery shell with Tolkien’s wartime photo portrait; and combining all of these threads, he has also painted a crossroads of sorts between the three of them.

Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle story, and its theatrical interpretation by Richard Medrington’s Puppet State Theatre Company, was one of Johnstone’s favorite subjects to translate. In his painting, “The Voices,” he brings Leaf by Niggle, the hobbits of Middle-earth, Tolkien’s battlefield trauma, and his and his son’s own self-persecutions into focus. The story was written by Tolkien as an expression of fear and a deep sense of failure over his struggles to finish The Lord of the Rings. Every artist deals with self-doubt for every human being deals with self-doubt. Metaphorically, Tolkien described this both through the image of a tree that Niggle never seems able to complete, each branch and leaf pulling him away, combined with an autopsy of Niggle’s body and life by two doctors.

“They're discussing him in a past tense and they're talking about, Well, he was a great parent. He was a fantastic painter,” Johnstone explains, alluding to the legs and feet of two hobbits in the painting — Frodo and Sam, as the doctors — who we cannot see from the waist up. “And then the second one says, No, he's a waste of time. He never created his masterwork. And so they have these two voices arguing and so this picture is called ‘The Voices’ — and the portrayal is actually of my son.” Thinking more on it now, I realize it is also Gollum. “This covers three or four things for me,” says Jay. “It was Niggle. It was obviously the story about Niggle. But to me, the voices weren't doctors. They were actually angels.”

“They were almost the gates of heaven,” he theorizes about the two doctors, and Frodo and Sam by extension through his painting, both standing over his son in judgement, with only the hint of compassion coming through the pastoral hair on their hobbit feet. “Saying, Well should he come in because he's a good guy? Should he not go in because he is a complete failure? And that's how Tolkien viewed this I think. But that's also how I viewed it….It's my guilt that I should have been a better dad, but I'm actually a failure at the same time.”

Interestingly, Tolkien wrote Leaf by Niggle from 1938 to 1939, before it was published by The Dublin Review in 1945. He started The Lord of the Rings in 1937, struggling to find his way forward — writing it was like waves on a beach, it has been said. Leaf by Niggle’s inception coincides with the run-up and outbreak of World War II, and did not reach readers until the end of the conflict. There are fascinating coincidences and symmetries here. For one, the connection Johnstone has made between the two doctors and the two hobbits, well, actually, the three hobbits, for Sméagol’s self-persecution is perhaps Tolkien’s greatest literary masterstroke as a storyteller, is the tension between the voices of Gollum.

“So I always have these two voices in my head,” Jay continues, pointing out the symbols and secret histories hidden or lovingly tucked into ‘The Voices’. “And so behind here we have poppy fields, the soldiers marching, and over there we have the German guns. So again, it's by reference back to Leaf by Niggle, and so some of it’s linked back to Tolkien. And there's the Niggle tree sitting in the center of it.” Tolkien would finish his epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, in 1949, after he exorcised some of his fears in Leaf by Niggle. These were anxious years, and one can imagine that Tolkien wondered what the future held, and if his fantasy was relevant, or a fatuous self-indulgence, or if he had the courage of heart to even finish it. And so we can see Tolkien himself in Slinker and Stinker, in the two hobbits, the two doctors, in Gollum, in Johnstone, and in his son.

“So the paintings have a lot of stories and a lot of meanings in them,” Johnstone says of his Tolkien art. “Because I do think within Tolkien's works, it does if you read it, they're almost biblical. They have such relevance to your life, that I find really deeply touching. And so I keep playing with these ideas. I do like a lot of Tolkien art and I think a lot is fantastic. It's so inspiring. But what I try and do is get down to the emotional level, and trying to ignore most of the films, and I think back to, how did I feel when I read the books for the first time?”

So Tolkien’s voice, and the voices of his characters, speak to us almost like hallucinations in a living dream, or even madness. The chaos of life, the paradigm shifts of tech, the unspooling of the post WWII order, the crisis of loneliness in a hyper-connected age without lasting empathetic meaning, shakes the beams and columns of our global 24/7 matrix. Is it any surprise that Middle-earth calms and appeals to so many, with its illusions of a simpler time and place? And yet what is surprising to the adult in us, is that the voices we hear inside it are both timeless and endlessly complex: cathedrals of imagination and recovery, and mystery, and yes, even faith, that captivate the well-meaning, and the astray. So that we get the sensation that we’ve been here before.

When we think about the cataclysms of the 20th century, from the Spanish Flu to the World Wars, it’s hard not to ask whether we are living through a Jungian cycle or archetypal whirlwind. Prof. Honegger has pointed to the Jungian implications of Middle-earth with his essay, More Light Than Shadow? Jungian Approaches to Tolkien and the Archetypal Image of the Shadow, teasing out the thematic possibilities of a Jungian reading of Tolkien’s fiction.

Honegger has also found evidence that Tolkien must have been familiar with Jung or read his works. In an academic visit to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 2006, he found in Tolkien’s notes for his famous lecture On Fairy-stories that Tolkien had written down a list of authors and scholars to mention. Among them was “Jung,” and elsewhere “Jung Psych of the unconscious.” Quoting Jung, Honegger believes Tolkien perhaps omitted him to avoid biographical over-analysis:

We can therefore be grateful that Tolkien refrained from using his tales and stories as “therapeutic tools” and treated them as works of art… [They] fulfill one of the functions of art, which Jung, in an essay written in 1922, defined as “educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present.”

In many ways, it’s a miracle that Johnstone’s dream visions of Arwen and Gandalf and Aragorn, and his intricate symbolization of Isildur and Gollum, so naturally fit and fire a new dimension of Tolkien’s mythology. More so than probably any other Tolkien artist, he has managed to move his absorption and appreciation of Tolkien’s story and characters into truly different territory, a territory that is at once alien and convincingly within the meta-world of Middle-earth. Johnstone’s yearning and yielding of new forms, his conjuring of a holy house for beloved Tolkienian characters, reconnects us with a primordial light, and its shadows.

While meaning gets its power both from its specificity and its interpretability, even its mutability, dreams are on their surface powerful because they are at first experienced as an interface with the present, so often a bombardment of images, sounds and motions that are meaningless save for the sensation of consciousness. Only so much can break through moment to moment when we are awake, and so it is the same with dreams. Yet in dreams, there are cracks of contradiction that we fall through, things that defy physics, time and even logic — the psychologic.

Tolkien explored the personal and collective unconscious through language and most importantly through mythology, and then fantasy, the story form most like dream, yielding clear meanings. Like dream, art is at its best when it transports us. The so-called flight from reality. And yet, that our minds can drift through space and time and out of our bodies, makes no sense. Until it does.

“I still find it difficult to claim any credit for their creation,” Johnstone writes, drawing a line from his unconscious to a series of iconic images that illuminate Middle-earth. “To me, they are but copies from dream paintings.”

Our consideration and conversation with Jay Johnstone continues in Part Two, where we deep dive into his illuminated manuscripts…

So follows the dialogue of Lolo Moth, the last known Ovyrrakrúsk of Aphantasia, who survived the fall of the Orlantian Empire. Friend of the Magi of Korin and a disciple of Lord Aratarasu, he is often called the Rift-Moth, the Monk Moth, and the Last Grand Moth. This text was recorded by his cellmate, Azkazin, in the cruel jail of Aroondalesh during the snowy Great Sleep, about one million years before the so-called End of the World, which is the edge of a place as much as a bridge in time…

I am no moth. And I am no fairy. Little do I know, but that I do. From cocoons to aeries, we can walk on air. Gravity Angel, is what they once called me. Yet scary is what children once found me. How strange it is to be small or tall, from the ant to the Moon, vulnerable deep down we are all. A crystal dew drop inside a sea of blue, the inkblot mystery, the recognition that long ago everything flew, from meteorites to dragonflies to star-flights — this is you — a very simple truth.

So let me ask: where do you stop, and where do I not? My mustache is perhaps one place to start. Except I do not have a mustache. That is just my masking visage. It’s my fabulous flair that every winged warrior must declare, an independence and an irreverence for what moths should wear. Atlas Moth or Luna Moth, the moths do not articulate such swishing hair, nor do they have human-like hands or feet. My exoskeleton is armor I can don or disassemble, or dissemble. Even my bug-eyes are not my own, but the bejeweled oculi of my obsidian visor, with my two antennae jutting inside horned antlers, and my topknot, a green mohawk.

My spindly fingers grasp many things, but my mind is much more nimble. My hands most often hold my lightning-staff with stripes of black and yellow, like a bumblebee ribbon, silver-purple sparks igniting at both ends as both a weapon and a lantern. I play a flute that is also a blow-pipe for poison darts that bring dream fevers and visions of the future. And at my side is always my sword, a vorpal blade that cuts through the folds of time, finding waves to alight, and surges of flight, an edge that keeps waking the dead and lifting the living.

Which brings us to wings, what strange and funny things. The butterfly reminds the winter weary of the colorful sparks of spring. Red and orange and yellow and blue — from the Monarch to the Morpho — they get all the glory, simply because we espy them in daylight, flitting among the flowers with their gentle pointed antennae; whereas the moths mostly love the night, and the Moon especially, following it on their many migrations, their feathery antennae catching the subtlest reverberations, the spiraling winds, and the tiniest spiky pollens.

Yet my people chose the Lolo Moth for their raiment, happy in the Sun and Moon alike, with green and red and yellow and indigo splotches on our wings, a tiger-striped archipelago of wonder and delight: See!? Azkazin, as you stare into their sparkling glare: the rims and reefs of islands, like water rippling across oceans. Does it not remind you of some distant youth in a paradise lost and lasting in buried recollections? We are the Ovyrrakrúsk — Dream Keepers! — and it is flames of hope and healing that we protect most of all. But even so, in cruel Aroondalesh, hot by the deserts, the cold sea winds of the Scrying Gulf do frustrate the grey pelage of my collar and cloak. As I cry freedom, be calm.

Look now at the kites hovering off the lighthouse, my friend! The Pharos of Raíyavek still call here many voyagers and mercenaries from around the world. I thank you for nursing me back to health, even if I awoke to a hell of iron bars and biting sandstorms. I did not expect to meet a humming bird here, yet that is the magic of Azkazin, and the nectar you coaxed from honeysuckle, blown from the dunes there, with their misty morning patches of green; the briny breeze pricks everything back into vibrance — the succulent grass and trees, the laughing of seabirds, and the dancing of dolphins in foaming waves thick with seaweeds.

See! — how that kite gleams blue in the sunlight, and dips with the wind, like a fainting damsel in the moonlight. And funny there, how it falls low over the surf, disappearing behind the tips of waves and the spume of whales; and then up, up, its shadow flashes over the white foam with a prescient wing. Oh and you — the Hummingbird King, for that is how I will forever think of you — hovering and zipping all about, your beak ready to pick the door lock apart, your eyes a dark piercing of the heart, your wings so fast that my eyes see right through them.

And so that blue kite reminds me of a devilishly clever machine — Kymeraz — part animal, part nothing, both alive and dead in this world and in parallel worlds back and forth through time. To drift, is to wander, to let thoughts billowing on the horizon to carry onward, to weave what is, with what is not. Let the dragons disappear and drift, from the tales of yore to the bones of the world, to the phantasms high in the ether, teasing us with questions of impermanence.

And now the blue kite vanishes behind the cloud that is wrapping around the lighthouse. Never has there ever been a kite that does not get lost in the wind. And listen at how the wind howls, cold and powerful, blowing sand into this iron-barred cell, sweeping it off the sandstone cill, pushing you a little here and a little there. And feel the pounding of the winter waves crashing against the shores.

The Drift Dragons — were they ever here!? — are hard to find. They seem like a dream to me now, fading in and out, like ships bobbing out at sea, sailing up and down with the swells. Hummingbirds are close to what they are. Yet they were as big as an orca and as graceful as a condor, humming between worlds. That’s how they leapt through the clouds, how they became leopards of the sky: they would disappear into the future and then come back, as the Earth turned, so fast that they hummed; or they would bank into the past, and zigzag over the compass, weaving time as fast as a shooting star — crackling in waves of brilliance.

There it is again. Back in the high wind, our blue kite scouring the low tide. Obscured are the hands that guide it. I cannot see who is trying to master it, only a glimpse of rope that tugs and loosens uncannily, ever does the wind move freely.

Now, I’ve heard rumor of a girl named Kanvaly, who some say may find one of the mighty Kymeraz, off the coast between here and Unverant, perhaps washed along the ice-melt river that has fed the canals of Tiverask. It is said that she thought at first that it was a seal, but when it emerged from the ice in the bay, it had a mouth of gaping zeal: intake for all that has been or ever will! The Snow Dog, I believe, she calls it — “Ramakool” in the local Valmerian tongue and merchant dialect.

That is why I am here. In a fortnight on a new moon when it is darkest, save for the stars and the fire in the lighthouse, I will continue my journey to find Kanvaly and her Ramakool. Then I hope to find the secret that will reopen the Gates of Aphantasia, to find the Magi of Korin and renew the wisdom of the ancients.

Harken to the Haiku of the Drift, which I compose for you now, my friend. Inside it is a koan that will keep this dream of hope akin. If I fail and never return, speak not, I pray, of these things, these winged things, to the slavers of Aroondalesh. Through any keyhole, keep watch for a dust mote in light of Sun and Moon:

Mists from tips of waves,
Wisps from snow peaks of fire —
Dragons out of time

For dragons know the mountains and the motes. They escape far into oblivion. Take this then with you, for I will leave a way out when I go. I am no moth. And I am no fairy. And I am in a terrible hurry. Call me what you will. But never forget. We are a very simple truth — the Journey of Light — and may it shine on your path through darkest night.

Thus concludes the Prologue to The Mothling: Little Did He Know, an adventure tale that is part of the Aphantasia myth cycle and precursor to the Aphantasia Trilogy: Where No Thoughts Go, original epic fantasy works by T.Q. Kelley. You can read about its mission and its musings here. We will be self-publishing future chapters (most will be free), and short stories (which will be for paying subscribers). The first chapter to Where No Thoughts Go is here, the second chapter is here, and the third chapter is here. The Mothology of the Moon short story is in three parts, starting here.

Copyright owned by T.Q. Kelley.

He coughed as he breathed in a cloud of dust. It spewed into the air as he turned the pages to the immense Book of Knives. Its letters were faded, but there, clearly enough for his eyes, in an ancient script devised by the Kirrai insect people, were words that struck him from far far across time. It dawned on him right then: that dreams are waves of memory crashing against the rocks of time. He knew this because a comet blazed outside and the world was on fire.

If the world kept all that had been in its bones and its breath, then surely it might remember its wounds and fevers in the form of nightmares. For fear, in the play of shadows and the breaking of spirits, seemed to come, and then go, and then crest, in moments of violence, even in silence. It had been thousands of years since last they saw the comet. The wise thought it had disappeared forever. And then somehow it returned, when the Sky Ship burst asunder, shaking the Earth.

A deep shock was moving through the vast tunnels and chambers of the hive known as the Fátacombs, that his people and the Kirrai had built many eons ago. In the city and lands of Amralas, what was below the earth was far more telling than what was above their underground palace. Yet here above the earth in the dusty script of the sages of Or’Loz — whispered in the cities of Neem, Bazus, Melaras and Anakaras and Ord of Orlan Kan — he sensed there was indeed a secret that might hold the key to an escape for the entire planet.

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In the last month, the Lord of the Rings on Amazon Prime hype engine has hummed and then roared into full throttle. Three weeks ago on January 19th, the title for perhaps the most expensive TV series in history was revealed in dramatic and clever fashion: “The Rings of Power” was literally poured in molten metal form straight into a redwood slab, where a mold of its flowing letters crackled and burst with sparks and flame. To many, the name was pitch-perfect. It is a simple yet expansive articulation of the show’s ambitious intent to capture and tell the Second Age story of how the One Ring and its sibling bands of magic and temptations of power came to be, and how they shaped Middle-earth.

That last mission by the showrunners, Patrick McKay and JD Payne, is visualized by showing the lava-like title close up, its rivers of fire flowing through canyons and valleys, the redwood flaring and smoking as if on the sides of cliffs and mountains. And then by a flood of water that splashes across…

The great island civilization of Númenor will be a critical linchpin of the grand narrative to come. A hub of metal-age technological marvels and seafaring daring, it is the ancient Atlantean home of Aragorn’s ancestors. As if in a sleight-of-hand Hollywood wave to both cinematic and Tolkienian magic, the special and visual effects for the sequence were advised by Douglas Trumbull, the legendary designer and tech wizard of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner, who passed away days ago.

You can read about the making of the title reveal trailer here (via TheOneRing.net / TORN) and watch a short video showing some of the behind-the-scenes shoot here (via IGN), which took place at a foundry in Los Angeles. As a special effects innovator who has also pushed the frontier of frame rates in HD digital camera capture, Trumbull tells TORN, “We all had in mind this idea of molten metal brilliantly glowing — so that there’s no question that what you’re looking at is a hot metal. What we settled on was to mix some of these metals to get a certain color and a certain brightness. It was a combination of bronze and aluminum.”

That unique combination and mixing of materials seems to be at the heart of Amazon’s risky yet gutsy foray into Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Last week, intricate and mysterious archetypes began rushing into the popular consciousness. Only snapshots of the torsos of 23 characters, the exquisite images released revealed that the designers and artists working on Rings of Power are working at a high level of Hollywood alchemy. Fans, agog at the wealth of imagery, picked over every detail, hypothesizing on identities and hidden meanings.

Costumed fabrics and belts, weaponry and finery, the skin color of hands, the grain of dirt on knuckles and fingernails, the embroidered runes on robes or engraved in hammers, and yes, rings, were poured over in detail across the internet of fandom. On Twitter, and on Discord, this was the first real sign Amazon was not toying around, fans realized.

What did it all mean? “Gold dusted hands?” “A broken sword that’s clearly not Narsil?” “A hand holding what looks like ropes from a naval boat with its melted ends?” “A wooden breast plate with the carving of an Ent-like Green Man?” “A sickle in a hand?” “A horse-shaped hilt of a sword reminiscent of Rohan, or is that a seahorse evoking a Númenórean?” And on and on it went…

The images are all stunning, revealing not only a high-fidelity mega budget, the artisanal care Amazon’s backing can buy, but also the idiosyncratic passion of artists, and how such commitment can bolster a more personal wonder. And that was and is still the main question at the heart of this Rings of Power proposition: who are the creatives behind this new chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world-changing mythology — unwritten by him but still we hope deeply inspired and faithfully living inside his beguiling dream?

The answer to that question was answered, or at least has begun to be answered, by the stunning Vanity Fair “First Look” article by Joanna Robinson and Anthony Breznican, which came out one week after the 23 posters. Titled “Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power,” the reporters worked on it for a year or more, talking to the showrunners, producers, scholars and fans. They poured through Tolkien’s letters and steeped themselves in the mysteries and byways of Middle-earth.

The depth and fervor around the article even sparked a Twitter panel with the journalists and some of their sources via Vanity Fair. It’s a fascinating listen in itself, and can be heard here for the next month or so, apparently. It’s a well-written article packed with information that hits several beats, from the first interview with Patrick McKay and JD Payne about their aspirations and apprehensions to the production’s search for authenticity, and its gutsy multiracial casting — a visionary direction that is as essential to truly understanding the power of Tolkien’s mythic appeal as anything.

But I do not want to spoil the article. Anyone interested not only in Tolkien, but in the full potential of storytelling, should read it. It not only elides a critical moment in the Tolkien-verse, but a key opportunity in elevating our conversation about our deepest sense of belonging, whether that is heartsickness, or a giddy excitement over a possible new kind of homecoming. Which brings us to a few more thoughts before the oncoming wave of Rings of Power mania enters the mainstream.

On the same day as Vanity Fair’s article, Variety reported that Saul Zaentz Co., the longtime film and TV rights holder of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, has put its claim up for sale. As we also speculated last year, this appears to be of a piece, and could mean not only could Amazon decide to get the fuller rights to two of Tolkien’s masterpieces, but that they could also seek and win the keys to The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales, and all of Tolkien’s other Middle-earth works, such as The Children of Húrin.

This brings the feeling that we’re on the brink of a perhaps precarious moment in Tolkien’s fiction. Not only may The Rings of Power rocket-boost the stakes of post-humous fantasy storytelling, but it may do so with two other moves. One is that we’re about to re-open the door to one of the deepest mythologies ever imagined. The first image revealed from the series back in August of last year was immense in its intellectual scale. It was a beautiful image of the Two Trees of Valinor, reaching right back to the flashpoint and genesis of Tolkien’s original vision.

Lastly, while it’s sad that it’s controversial, Amazon, and yes, the Tolkien Estate — the family and descendants that Tolkien himself entrusted with his legacy — have blessed not only a multiracial dramatization of his story-world in the Rings of Power. But in the mixed race characters and cast they have hired and blessed, his most sacred and beloved message about love and reconciliation, is about to take fans and newcomers on a whole new perilous, thrilling and brave adventure.

For Tolkien scholars and fans, this signals something very big in the making. If Tolkien’s stories translate into this wider new era, it will help validate what many have long averred: that Middle-earth is indeed for everyone, and that Tolkien was timeless in his thinking, engaging the deepest wells of the human experience.

For many months, here and there, time had passed like the wind over glacier meres. Now she whipped along with it as it grew stronger. Running north up along the lake’s shore, she came to an open shale covered with many flat stones and pebbles and black moraine sand. On the other side of the clearing was where she hid her canoe, made of birchbark and sewn together with ox leather.

In it were also some fishing rods, including a small one for catching cyprinids, minnows, perches, zanders, darters and bitterlings. She pulled out the canoe and turned it to empty out rainwater, swiping away spider webs that had collected in its hull along its thwarts and yoke. Grabbing the paddle, which she hid inside a hollow log nearby, she pushed the canoe into the lake and jumped in.

Halkjavyk landed on the gunwale as Greil plunged her paddle deep into the lake’s glassy waters, hitting only soft waves as the storm continued to recede north and west. The sky grew brighter, though it was still covered with clouds, the distant reflection of yonder mountains and drumlins hovering above the lake, reminding them of a sleeping giant facing up, while at the same time its reflection was faced downward. Over the chest of the giant flew a phalanx of geese, flapping their wings in unison, carving the air in a triangle hovering over the lake, their reflection a double arrowhead grazing the giant’s peaceful face.

“What do you call this lake?” Halk asked Greil as she dug in, building the canoe’s momentum into a smooth glide, moving them further and further from the flint shore toward the sun high above out over the deep divide.

“We call it Sky Hall, for it is mostly calm,” she said. “At night, you can see the stars and the moon in the water just as clearly as looking up. There are many lakes here, as I’m sure you know, and this is the first one of the Goorvalig, from the south and west of the Magistrad, which is my real home, not the lodge.”

“I see,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about that, and more about Tammerak. So the lodge is just for hunting? I guess you completely missed it when I said it, that I’ve been inside a time chamber before, my lady, many times, in the heyday of Or’Loz. We called them back then Kyndrayks: the Time Dragons. For they unraveled and bent the perception of time, melting the ice mind.”

“Magic!” she said. “So you’ve been to mighty Or’Loz!? I did not miss it, but I did not realize you had been in the time chambers of Or’Loz. What of Kyndrayks do you recall? Ours we call Ral Tanzul, the golden slumber in the sky, and is one of only a handful in this part of the world, as far as I know, modeled on the ancient designs. We use it as a retreat for contemplation. Big problems are cracked in its quarters, and even cracking that sometimes goes too far. Tanzul is also for hunting. My uncle Kúlluvía has long used it to restore and prepare before embarking on his long journeys. Like the tails of a dragon he winds.”

“Koo-luh-vhy-ah?” he said. “I would like to meet him. You said you were sent to the Uplands to hunt and to pray? Yes, time chambers are funny things. They are like beacons of the spirit world, like torches that attract animals and bugs with wings. You know, like moths that fly into flames? Silly things! But we mothlings are not so eager for enlightenment. We seek contentment. It’s less about what one knows, and more about how one uses the knowledge one has. For it seems the world is doomed to amnesia, again and again. That is one of the great teachings of Lord Aratarasu. I have seen many an ice age across millennia. The more important question to ponder up here is simply this: what is time?”

She plunged her paddle in with greater force to keep the canoe moving. Her rhythm had slackened as she listened. “Well then, that would bring us back to Tammerak,” she said, picking up her pace, paddling left and then right, and then left, and right. “It seemed to me he was running out of time. And as the glaciers melt, the world seems to be quickening with its flooding into rivers. Like Aratarasu’s dram or manor, I see the chamber as a redoubt.”

“It is true that we need time for thought,” said Halk, his mind now loosening as he listened to the lake water slosh against the hull. “Lord Beetle bid you to make a dram. I believe that is a good omen, but it is also perilous. If you know anything about Or’Loz, then you know that knowledge was also its downfall. It’s hard to imagine the fires of creation, so skillfully and artfully cast with so much wealth and power in their hands, could lead to so much ruin. So is that the purpose of your solitude, to change the meaning of the past — for redemption?”

“Yes? For isolation, and meditations on the future,” she said. “And I had never thought of this, but for dreaming, I suppose. My family built it before I was born. While my people came to Irèlia generations ago, a few hundred years or so, only in the last hundred did we take up the local need for hunting. My father’s people that is. My mother and my uncle’s people are an Irèlkan tribe, the DaKúrain, from the highlands up north, where the Haarynns have made their home. The Vul Kalla in my mother’s tongue. There was a war long ago between us, and we lost.”

“I remember it,” said Halk. She turned and looked at him. He was looking southwest, where the lake continued far beyond sight. Eager to get to the other side directly west, where she hoped to find the rosewood, she decided not to pry right away. It would be nightfall when they returned, and it would be bad to be caught in another storm while on the water. After some time, he spoke again. “I like it here,” he said. “I’ve never been on a boat, my lady. The sounds of the lake are peaceful, and the view so very wide and tranquil.” 

She listened to the water, as well as the drops that fell off her paddle when she pulled it back out, and the slashing sound it made when she dug it back into the lake’s undisturbed surface, the canoe cutting cleanly through it, waves going out as they went, growing smaller and smaller as they spread into two giant wings. 

“You see many things when you fly,” he continued. “I never fly as high as the eagles, but I see flower tops and tree tops. I see rivers from above canyons. I can see the cliff’s ledge and not fall. I can float down alongside a waterfall, and spy fish in its pools and jumping out of rapids. I can see people like you, through windows, or from tree branches.”

“I recently dreamed I could fly,” she said. “But I didn’t get very far. It was an entirely strange but wondrous sensation, as if I was levitating on a cloud.”

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“Over the mountains. Or at least I tried.”

“Those?” he said, pointing to the distant glaciered western range in front of them, the cold vapors and clouds slipping over their snowy heads.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It could be. I’ve always wanted to go west, toward Elfsayker, where the Elves live, and Elorthiel, at the heart of the great Gamma Wood. Or further still. But I think Mr. Feleran, something tells me they were the ones behind, the tall jagged ones, toward the great river Kúmareg, which we call Serpio the Great, and I suppose, onto Killadran. But I truly don’t recall.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter overmuch,” he said, as he walked on the gunwale close to the canoe’s bow, looking over and straight down at the lake’s surface. “Does it? All that matters right now is that we kept it. East or West will come to you.”  

He saw his reflection in the lake, and the sky above him in all its brightening power. A sensation of slight hovering came over him, as he felt he could fall into the sky, its clouds suspended underneath them over a deep cobalt void, where he glimpsed a sudden hidden world in its depths. The shadow of the canoe brought him back to center, watching its hull press against the water, where below he perceived in its shadow a darkness that was unknowable. How deep did it go?

“Can you swim?” he asked. “The lake seems deep as the sky, both up and black as night below, just a bubble here or there I can see.” As the canoe moved, as the water rippled away, he perceived a shaft or two of light reaching into his dark abyssal gaze into nowhere. “I wonder what is down there?”

“Yes, I can swim,” said Greil. “All children of Goorvalig and the Magistrad are taught at a young age. But not all learn to swim strong. Some of us drown. The lakes are cold, fed by glaciers and mountain streams and rivers, and not by hot springs, which are to the south of the Goorvalig. While this canoe floats, we do not so easily on our own, which I am told is different from the sea, which carries everything higher up. My father says it is the salt in the sea. But here, there is no saltwater. If you are not strong, you will tire and sink into oblivion.”

“I guess that’s where wings would help? Or fins?”

“I think so,” she said with a chuckle. “Wings would help with a lot. How deep the lake goes I do not know. Some fishermen or boatmen maybe know by measuring the length of rope tied to dropped nets and anchors. I have no anchor. I’ve never had a need. Sky Hall though is very deep, I am told. If you drop something in it, you can’t recover it.”    

“Well, it is a nice canoe ride nevertheless,” he said. “Nothing like it.”

“Yes,” she said. “I guess you could say, for me, it is almost like flying.”

Halk folded his arms and put his right hand to his chin, contemplating what Greil had said. Was it like flying? he wondered. She did not know flight, so perhaps this was the closest she could imagine to what he had always enjoyed. And yet he did not know what it was like to paddle and move the canoe forward. At times it did seem to glide just so, effortlessly, as if the lake was not even there, like air. He noticed the canoe’s wake rippled from its two sides like two wings.

It reminded him of the geese they saw fly off, which made him think about how the glaciers had carved out these intricate highlands. For he remembered a time when they covered everything in their giant slumber. And now, hundreds of years later, they had given way to Sky Hall. That was the power of time. So he watched the ripples travel away for sometime, what seemed like an hour. Then he spotted what looked like an owl along the northern shore out past the canoe’s dwindling wake. It had white feathers and it seemed to sway and buckle in the cold air. But how could it be an owl, he wondered, for snow owls never came here this time of year. Just as he had that thought, he realized the western shore of the island was fast approaching. Greil was indeed moving them much faster than it seemed. 

The isle loomed before them. It was small but not, with many large rock formations and boulders that looked like giants had simply sloughed them off, with one great spire of rock in its center stabbing at an angle high into the sky. They had a greenish hue with some speckles of blue. Pines and rosewood trees circled the great slabs, crowning them along the island’s shore. She was once told by DaSheen that it was called Sawyer’s Stone, and that the priests of the many Irelkan tribes once gathered there. Beyond the island not far was the western shore of Sky Hall, vast and riddled with moraines and drumlin swarms.

“Landfall is what canoe people call that,” she said, as she scanned the trees. “Do you see any rosewood or malachite on those yonder rock mounds? That is what I hope we will find here to quarry.”

As the shore came closer, the wind picked up suddenly, and blew Halk off the canoe and into the air. Greil’s hair whipped about. Halk nearly fell into the water but grabbed one of her strands of hair and glided down under the gunwale and back up near the huntress, grabbing onto her left shoulder as she thrust the paddle down, and then steered them straight onto the black beach.

“Hold on!” she yelled. She then got up and climbed forward, jumping off just as the canoe hit the sandy rocky shore. It gave a scraping sound as they landed, the water splashing up around her knees as she carried it forward and set it to rest.

“I’ll look for the rosewood and green ore,” she said. “Why don’t you fish?”

He had looked at her uncertain, then flitted to the stern of the canoe which was right at the lapping shore. She reached into the canoe and rummaged through her fishing kit and pulled out a small rod the size of a thin, long reed. He looked at it more closely. On it she attached a line and a small hook. To him, the rod and the hook were not small, but like a great oar with a big anchor. He was dubious.

“My vision at the pond was right,” she said, looking down into the water and stepping around, where she saw little tiny minnows and bitterlings scurrying about the lapping waves. “There are all kinds of fish here. If we can catch even a handful or two, they will make a few nice meals. Just dip the rod in and gently rock it, and wait. They attract to slight movements. When they bite, pull!”

“My lady,” protested Halk, as she reached back into the canoe and pulled out a little leather bag that she opened and set down on the canoe to hold any fish he caught. “I am no fisherman. I am a Dream Keeper!” 

She looked at him for a moment. “Anyone can fish!” she said, and turned to the forest, pulled out her axe, and waded into its green mystery. Stepping through the woods, she looked at this glade and that glade, and onto this ridge and that ridge. Then, she stopped, closed her eyes, and breathed in deep through her nose. She smelled the sweet scent of rosewood not far away, just a little south. “I’ll be back soon!” she yelled to her little companion. “Don’t fret, just catch what you can!” 

She walked deeper into the isle, scaling its steep trails into the rocks. She would search for the malachite first, she decided, on the way to the wood, where she also smelled a trace of hickory, perfect for making tools. As she came on some bigger boulders, she scaled them easily as they were rough on that side of the island, a massive sheet of rock having broken off when the glaciers melted and drifted through the Goorvalig. Gripping lips and faces with her hands and boots, she jumped from this outcrop to that rockfall.

As she got higher, she could see the canoe, but not Halk, for he was too small. Though she thought she caught a tiny glimmer of obsidian, or perhaps it was the sheen of a silver bitterling. Turning again, before her was a wide plate of grey greenish limestone, and above it a large thrust of green rock, as big as a hill. Irelkan legend had it that it was once a whale that swam the ice, eons ago, searching for its long lost brother who had followed the moon to Irèlia.

His name was Thölkynwu, the Whale Finder, and so the rock still retained that name. For the legend said that the ice melted beneath him and a sea of icebergs drained into the Goorvalig and out to the Moon Sea. He never found his brother on the Great Ice, many said, for he escaped down the Magistrad to the ocean. For there was a great lasso in the sky, a constellation that ran from north and east to south and west, from summer to spring, a vast sheave of stars that breached the sun gate and travelled along the Whale Road over the horizon.

The vision told her that was where she would find her malachite lode. So she scrambled up the limestone table and walked under the shadow of the imposing Thölkynwu toward his belly, where its base pushed up, out and over. Picking up a large rock of dolostone, she approached the greenish Whale Finder and swiped at its face where others in years long past had chipped at its wall. Her hit sparked against the flint in the sediment. She hit it again and some small pieces broke loose. She hit it a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a nice slab fell off.

She knew enough about metallurgy to realize that from the malachite, she could smelt copper to make the mazed plates of the dram’s six sides. She kneeled down and smote the slab in the middle, breaking it in half, so she could put the smaller pieces in her pack. She might need more, so she whacked at the malachite whale some more, splintering off several more hand-sized pieces. She also knew about stannic rocks she could find in stream banks on the way back to the lodge. If she mixed it with the copper ore, she could make it stronger.

She looked up again at the Whale Finder and then bowed down in gratitude. Then she stood up and started back down the limestone slab and slipped back onto the old paths left by her ancient Irelkan kin, arriving at a fork that she had come up, but going the opposite way to the west along the rocky face of Sawyer’s Stone. Winding down into a small ravine, she headed south to the smell of hickory.

It was utterly strange that rosewood could be found in the cold climes of Irèlia, for it grew in warmer regions of the world. She was doubtful that she would find any surviving trees of rosewood, and yet she smelled its floral scent wafting with the hickory. And she knew that the Deserts of Tazaram created bursts of vortical rain and heat that might give them root in the Riverland. Something else was possible: that the Exiles may have planted them, for the Orlantian strain of rosewood, the long enduring kyrm holoz, was sacred to the Magi of Korin.

As she had that thought, she came into a hidden glade tucked under the cliff face of the malachite mine. There in front of her was a ring of rosewood trees around a rim of dark garnet rocks that were polished smooth, each about the size of a bear. Inside the ring was another ring, and inside it, another, each with small trees of kyrm holoz and tall standing stones. She was astonished to see the trees, and the enclosure. Had it been kept secret, by the Magi, or hidden by Lord Beetle?

With that thought, she realized that the three rings mirrored the rings that Aratarasu and Ranharrow drew at the pond, of memory’s existence in dreams. Was this another dream? No, it was not. That, she was certain. Or was it a crossroads between? The rosewood leaves rustled in the wind, and the morning’s storm near the pond still grumbled in the distance. Pulling out her axe, it was time to cleave.

Whock! Whock! She hacked at the thicker branches. Down they came after a fierce series of blows. The sun was now westering and they only had so much daylight before the canoe journey back across Sky Hall. Something told her to stick with threes like Aratarasu’s rings, so she chopped three logs. Then she went to the center where she found an iron altar in the shape of a box?

How very strange. It had been smushed, possibly by a glacier or by a fierce fire. On it was engraved what she thought was a large beetle, with three horns. Kyvaliya. She wondered, was this the heart of the drum?

Looking more closely, she saw some runes around the beetle. She wiped her hands over its dirt-crusted letters and blew away the loosened dust. It was in a script she hardly recognized, for it seemed to have elements from the Orlantian Taíshalk, the ancient hieroglyphs that she had seen in some of the oldest tomes and scrolls kept in her father’s library. She took out an engraving knife that she carried with her to mark her trail on rocks and tree trunks during harsh winters. Carefully, she copied the runes onto one of the rosewood logs.

The letters were very strange, even for the sleight of Taíshalk. They had sharp angles and cunning geometries, but also intricate tangles that seemed to suggest deeper passages and chambers of thought. There were three words, each faint in their echoes, that she seemed to recognize: “moon,” for it had three strokes that lashed up under a circle; “seer,” for it had a sharp arc that cut through a stack of delicate needles; and “vine,” for it made a serpentine thread with what looked like water drops dropping from it.

She thought about it for a moment: moon, seer, vine. Yes, they already made sense, painting a picture in her mind, of an old man with a band tied around his eyes, a full moon gleaming in a starless dark night, and a winding road running through a wet rice country out to sea. It was a question as much as an answer — words and things that had stumped the wise since the beginning of time. Dun-dun, dun-dun, went her memory of the drum at the heart of the ice cave. She reopened her eyes, looking at the sky, not realizing she had closed them. Then it came to her.

Kameino would know. For nothing could explain this strange place. She had communed with insects. She had happened upon Halkjavyk. But this? She had never heard rumor of it in the Magistrad. It did not add up in her mind. Did Lord Aratarasu and his followers make this place? If it was Orlantian, then who made it? Kameino would know. Her grandmother would know. For she remembered many forgotten things in the movement of her hands.

But now it was time to go. Walking out of the encircled grove, Greil hacked away at a large hickory tree, collecting small logs that she could burn into hot coals, to help fire the smithing of Lord Beetle’s tabernacle. Tying them into a bundle with leather twine, she lifted the holoz and the hickory onto her back and then stepped up the path under the brave Whale and over the sharp malachite hill and down to the island shore. The truth was, she had never seen a whale, or the sea. Only in her deepest imaginings.

“Kyrraskala!” he had said as she left, this time annoyed. “Incredible, it’s only the second day, and she’s making a moth contend with fish.”

With that, he dipped the rod in with both his arms, seesawing the rod on the gunwale so he could use his whole weight to counter any catch. He peered over into the water. There he saw silver cyprinids, breams, and breaks, and chubs, with their flares here and there of red and green and blue. He saw gobies and shiners and daces, hundreds of them, the more he looked, as plentiful as a swarm of hornets and flies, only he thought the fish much more pretty, much more delightful and silly.

Rocking the rod up and down, he felt a tickle deep down slowly coming up his throat, and out came a giggle. 

“Alright, my darlings,” he said. “Time to come up for some air!”

Crack! Crack! — he heard the sound of Greil banging a rock against Thölkynwu the Whale, the echoes falling down onto the lake. Looking up, Halk saw a bunch of geese and ducks fly off and head south from the island.

Not long after he got a bite and a tug. He pushed down on the rod until it was straight up and the line was taut. “Now what!?” he shouted, in a panic. Before he could think more on what to do, the rod slipped off the canoe seat and fell into the hull, dragging him with it, and over came on the hook a silver chub with green fins, flying overhead, and falling right down on top of him.

It was heavy, and indeed half his size. He had caught a big one. It thrashed suddenly, spraying water all over his indigo wings. Aghast, he looked into its big round pearly eye. “Dear me!” he shouted, as he grabbed the hook and yanked at it, his legs against the fish’s head, pulling it back out of its mouth. There was blood on the barb, some of it smearing onto his hands. This was different than eating pollen or honey, he thought. He looked at the fish as its gils opened, its fins flipped, and its mouth gasped. 

“Sorry my slippery friend!” he said.

He then grabbed its tail, and pulled it up to the leather pouch, and dragged him up and over and in. Halk panted in exhaustion. “Two handfuls!?” he complained to himself, looking again at the dying chub, bleeding and drowning in the air. The afternoon had taken a turn, he thought, but he had to press on. He picked up the line and heaved the rod up to the seat again, and then threw the hook back into the lake’s little lapping waves. 

Chip! Chop! — he heard the sound of Greil’s axe cutting into the forest. She must have found some rosewood, he wagered. Strange that, he thought, for he hadn’t seen such trees in these parts in hundreds of thousands of years. She hacked on.

He tried to block out the sound in his mind. Fishing was hard work. And dangerous too. One of the hardest parts was dislodging the hook. Halk felt the pain of the fish acutely. Each time it seemed he caught a different kind, each different in shape and size, colors and scales and fins, even personalities he gathered. Some were feisty. Others frightened.

Still a few were stoic. Even prideful. There were the spiny ones. And there were the flashy ones. There were the elegant ones. But the best were the plump ones, mainly the goby, which reminded him of newts and mudskippers, with their round cheeks and pouty mouths. 

Most came up surprisingly easy all things considered. But there was one that didn’t. Though the fishing rod angling on the gunwale was almost like a catapult, Halk lost advantage with fish that were caught further out. So it was with a big grumpy gudgeon, with his wide face, his mean mouth and eyes wide apart. He was a bottom dweller used to hiding under swift waters, now adrift on the lake, wily and desperate. So it pulled Halk forward, jolting him above the canoe. He clamped down again on the rod, closing his wings so he would back-yaw.

But as he came down, he bounced back up, the rod bent and catapulted him over into the lake. Splashing down, Halk was shocked by the freezing cold water. He was paralyzed for a moment, confused by where he was and what happened. It was so fast he had no time to think.

The gudgeon, hook in his gill, mad as hell, leapt onto the Butterfly Lord, pushing him down into the waves. While Halk had drank often at streams and creeks and ponds, he had never been underwater. Now, he found himself in a foreign land, a big green and grey fish trying to drown him.

It thrashed and pushed him down into the lakebed. Bubbles floated around him, big orbs of air that reminded him of his beloved moon. He grabbed one orb and pulled it to his face, sucking life back into his lungs. Then he reached his arms down toward the lake bottom, so shallow for humans, but deadly deep for the Ovyrrakrúsk, fumbling for a pebble. He reached frantically for a bludgeon.

He finally got his left hand on one and swung it at the gudgeon’s fat lip. It spasmed when it hit, thrusting Halk out and up to the surface, where he gasped for air, water up his nose, spluttering and choking.

Then another fish came at him, and another, and another, bumping him off onto a rock, ramming him in the stomach, slapping him in the face with their tails.

“Oh my!” he thought. “This is the end!”

Over a hundred thousand, thousand years, undone by a fish. Out of breath, he desperately grabbed onto the smooth face of a big skipping stone, his spindly fingers slipping. Beating his drenched wings, they propelled him upward so he could hug it, and wrap his body over it. Now he could breathe, even with the fish mutiny all about him. He looked at the gudgeon as it swam up next to him. He looked into one of its ringed eyes with a blackhole for its giant pupil.

He was fierce, and in that moment, the Ovyrrakrúsk felt great respect for his aquarian adversary. How strange how water had shaped this Mr. Grump. On another day: friends. But Halk was going to die, so he punched him in the eye.

The gudgeon pulled back, giving Halk the briefest window he needed to fly. Up Halk soared onto the edge of the canoe. “Kyrraskala!” he yelled, and then kicked the rod off the gunwale. It fell into the hull, zipping the gudgeon right up and over to his final destiny.

“Forgive me!” the Ovyrrakrúsk cried, pulling out his curved vorpal sword and jumping down to his last catch, to jab him in the gullet, twisting out the light. The gudgeon thrashed, but then slowly wiggled, went limp, and was dead. He was thrice Halk’s size and could have eaten the moth in two bites.   

“Well, my friend,” Halk said, patting the gudgeon’s head. “I’ve never felt more alive! But I must apologize. I don’t like killing. Lord Beetle commanded me to keep this girl fed. And well, I did not expect it, but fishing is not so bad.”       

What was it like, he wondered, to roam the lake just as he had roamed the sky? He believed he had some idea now. Hoisting the gudgeon into the leather bag, he slipped him inside along with all the other fish. He looked over the pile. He was amazed at the bounty of the haul. A multitude of beasts, with different shines to their scales, fins like blades or fans, and glassy eyes that stared back at him.

Their legions reminded him of the butterflies: monarchs and admirals, hawk moths and mourning cloaks, coppers and skippers, metalmarks and silverspots, whites, blues and painted ladies, cloudy-wings and dusky-wings and angel-wings, wood nymphs and willow sisters, papillons and elfins and crescents, seraphs and archangels, sprites and goblins, satyrs and queens. He could keep going, but then Greil emerged from the forest with sweat on her brow. 

“Let’s go!” she said and laid the rosewood and hickory logs and bag of malachite in the canoe under the thwarts. She picked up her paddle, pushed on the canoe, and then jumped back in. Off into the lake, they glided once again: “Look east now as we go and take in the other mountains!”

“Aren’t you going to ask me about the fish!?” Halk asked, adjusting his balance. 

“Very good,” she said, looking over at the bag. “I wasn’t sure you would even catch one. It was just a hunch you might hook these little fish. I am grateful. I am. But the sun is setting, and another storm is coming, once again from the East.”

He had completely lost track of time. It was very unlike him. While he was not a time keeper, dream keeping required a strong sense of history. Wisdom in rhythm, is what he called it. Including her underestimation of him, maybe he was actually in one of its troughs. “Was it hard chopping the rosewood?” he asked. “You must have hit it a hundred times! Bless the fish, I don’t think they could hear it.” 

“Are you sure?” she said, the wind picking up, blowing west, the surface of the lake more choppy with waves and the current. A loon flapped out of the way in front of them, making a laughing yet haunting call in three notes, its last note teasing them as it glided off, its black head and red eyes gleaming with a silver trout in its scissoring beak.

The sun now touched the back of the mountain range behind them, the sky growing more orange and red and magenta, the waters vibrating with the shifting of the light. “Hang on!” shouted Greil. “This is going to be choppy.” In front of them rose the crescent moon amid the growing storm clouds, waxing wider this time. She plowed her paddle in and out, right, right, right, fighting against the northern wind, then left, left, moving forward.

The mountains loomed much greater in the east, jagged and young and ice-crowned. They were fire-tipped as the sun sank. Halk flitted forward, hugging the thwarts and the gunwale, the stern now the bow, his blue-green indigo wings also aflame with the sun’s farewell light, his obsidian skin scintillating in an echo of Aratarasu, for a moment reminding Greil of her encounter with the Dream Lord.

That was why they were there. That was why they were on their strange errand, that for all she knew, as she once would have argued, was headed nowhere. Halk turned his head, the wind fluttering the fur on his collar and his wings. She could see his green eyes shimmering in the fading light, his antennae bending.

“You were right!” he said excitedly. “The mountains are wondrous! I’ve seen them every day for hundreds of years, but today they are as glorious as,” he stopped to think, “the first mountains I ever saw! With flowers covering their many hidden meadows and treasures.”

“That’s nonsense!” Greil shouted over the wind. “But what kind of flowers!?”

“Lilies. Lilacs. Yarrow. Poppies. Honeysuckle, with its summer night smell.”

She could barely hear him, as writhing lightning streaked in front of the mountains from north to south, flashing in a purplish light over the ridges and forests, and then seconds later thundering and echoing all across the Uplands and the lakes, rolling from mountain range to mountain range, trailing slowly off into silence. The wind snapped three more times, blowing her cloak up behind her, splashing water up in Halk’s face, nearly pushing him off into watery oblivion.

Then the sun went out, and the wind died down, and the water calmed. The storm seemed to shrink before them as darkness swept over the Riverland and the wild lake lands of Goorvalig.

“Look!” said Halk, pointing. “There is the moon, free from clouds. We are moon wise! Like my name, Halkjavyk. You can see it in the sky and in the water.”

There it was, untouchable, glimmering in the sky and in the lake. Two moons. She could see them now on either side of the water line, like two eyes partially closed, the mountains in front of them the contour of a woman’s tender nose. 

“We are lucky,” she said. “It may be calmer now until we return to shore.”

All of a sudden two meteors shot below the moon. Then three more.

“Kyrraskala!” he yelled, taking a deep breath and exhaling. Then he put his spindly little hands to his jaw, and lifted. For a moment she thought he was removing his head from his body in some kind of macabre magic trick. Yet as it came off, there in its place was a handsome face with green skin, and yellow eyes with amber irises, and a shock of wild green hair in a topknot.  

“This, Ovyrrakrúsk, I did not expect!” she said, bewitched.

“Well, we’re bug-like, but not bugs!” he said, pausing as the lake lapped against the speeding canoe. “You know, I almost died back there. A fish tried to kill me. Tried to drown me when I fell in. It is perfectly understandable that he wanted to murder me. I was fishing him out of the water, so he tried to fish me out of the sky. He probably thought I was a bug too. Fish love bugs.”

“Kyrraskala!” she said, stopping her paddling and bowing her head before the obsidian winged knight, the canoe gliding momentarily as she held her head down. “I shouldn’t have asked you to fish, Sir Moth. I am terribly sorry.”

“Now, now!” he said, waving it off with his hands. “No need for ‘terribly.’ Do not worry! Keep paddling. We have a warm lodge to get to, my lady. As you can see, I am fine, though I am drenched and rather cold. It’s why it was time to take my mask off. I may be small, but I am old far beyond your years. Besides, today I breathed in a lake, and I am, I found to my relief, still alive.”  

“Kyrraskala!” she said, the wind blowing in her hair. “Huzzah, Aqua Moth.”

“Not Kyrraskala,” he chuckled. “Praskarryn: tears for the sea. For I wonder now, where will we go? Not in hundreds of thousands of years has Kyvaliya been heard. The future is not yet written then. Much is in our hands.”

As if the heavens answered, another meteor skipped down from the night sky, its reflection converging on the horizon before it disappeared into the dark vastness of the land. Then she saw beyond the mountains what looked like a honeycomb of ghostly purple, lightning that lit distant clouds, an upside down sea rippling it seemed to the ends of the Earth.

“Well, Pras-skar-ryn!” she said, saluting him with an Irelkan sweep of her hand from her brow to her chin, then out. “And are they happy or sad tears?”

“Both!” Halk said, nodding and climbing onto the canoe’s prow. “Both sting the stronger, bitterest and sweetest, when they go together, I have found.” Lightning in the east illuminated his golden sunrise eyes, his green horseradish plume, his sweet grin, water running down and off his face.

She wondered in that moment: she had found a rift-moth and a dream beetle, accompanied by a singsong bullfrog and a phasmid engraver, but was a whale’s brother really once lost in the ice back there? And then, as her eyes wandered, she recognized the same purple horizon. She had seen it before.

Skimming her paddle back into the black lake, the little gusts of wind watering her eyes, she believed she was heading through invisible waves emanating from far away, even from as far away as from where Tammerak came.

It was East, she recalled right then, watching the mothling’s antennae and topknot bend in the wind, East that she flew in her dream.

Thus concludes the third chapter of the Aphantasia Trilogy: Where No Thoughts Go, an original epic fantasy work by T.Q. Kelley. You can read about its mission and its musings here. We will be self-publishing future chapters (most will be free), and short stories (which will be for paying subscribers) here at Wraith Land. The first chapter is here and the second chapter is here.

She woke. She was back where it began. Her hands were empty. She had tracked animal trails and a hawk’s tail that led to nothing, that then led to something else altogether: a mothling in the drumlin hills. Its wings seemed to disappear into dusk. Its antler antennae seemed to carve open a trap door in the sky. Its eyes within eyes sparked a cryptic fire, the lava of a group mind. Dwelling deep in timedrifts, she thought, the Ovyrrakrúsk was a lodestar and a crux.

Sitting up, she pictured the Moth and the Beetle’s name as she listened to the shadow clock turn: her ancestors created time chambers to remind them of the world before the Great Ice, with their thin intricate shafts of stone and glass that arrayed and caught light in interminable reminiscences of a warmer age. Blinded by blizzards of snow and sleet, moving over the north in relentless waves of the bitterest cold, they had survived off the frozen shores of the Lost Sea, and soon forgot. But her time chamber was not made of just stone but wood and sand. It was remote, far west in the highlands, across the sea, where the Exiles had escaped finally, hiding away in the glacier-cut Riverland of the Tam Tam. 

Her family’s time chamber was called Ral Tanzul, the Gold Coma in the Sky. High in the Uplands above the deep gorges of the Magistrad, the river Tam Tam and its many streams and waterfalls gushed from the jagged mountains and the thawing glaciers, riving steeply down into a landscape of granite cliffs and grim drumlins, rich in metals and gemstones, moraines swooping down its northern outflow; Ral Tanzul was a redoubt above the Tam Tam’s tumult and removed from the ministrations and machinations of the Exiles below.

Once again, she observed its play of shadows on the walls. Shimmering in a soft blue at the center, she could see a small dot with a crescent shadow, moving ever so slightly across a great expanse. It was the waxing moon reflected from the sky through glass floating tiny before her eyes in a sea of rainbows. “Moonlight,” she said, observing the tiny moon, just now opening its first pale smile to the world, emerging again out of darkness. It made her wonder about phases and the invisible: was the rift-moth just a dream, or like the moon?

For out of shadow, Halkjavyk burned so bright in memory. The room was silent save for the gentle drips of melting icicles outside. The warm afternoon the day before loomed in her mind: the secret river and its narrow canyon in the Eskers. The long scar along the rift wall and its rough-hewn steps. The tapping of twice, then thrice. The red cloud of orange poppies on the drumlin. The lamb’s ears and cat lilies. And the mothling inside the flower cup. Over the moraines and the throb of the rivers rushing through the land, she felt the pull of his hand.

She reached by her head on her bed and there she found the cool petals of the cat lily that Halk sat in. Its center was a dark violet that engulfed its thicket of yellow and red stamens, stigmas and styles, splashes of indigo bleeding near the ends of its large white tips — peninsulas in a sea of pearl. He had told her to pluck it to remind her it was no dream. And so there it was, in her hands, springing his vorpal ghost back into her mind’s eye.   

Carefully putting the lily into a pouch, she got up. She opened the door and walked outside. There were still patches of snow in the highland meadow. They were shrinking and vanishing. She walked to a trough by the side of the lodge and dipped her hands in, cupping ice cold water that she splashed on her face, wiping it clean of sleep. She grabbed her bow, her knife, her spear, her axe, her arrows, and strapped them tight. Hunting was an instinct, but now she thought twice.

Spring was here and yet the land seemed as quiet as the afterlife. No signs of deer, boars, rabbits, mountain lions or bears. Only birds and squirrels, frogs and toads, and bees, dragonflies, ants and beetles, and the Ovyrrakrúsk. She looked out and saw the cold winds blasting snow and ice off the tops of glaciers stabbing from mountains both near and far, as a cloud moved in front of the morning sun, casting its shadow. She listened quietly to the murmur of ice-melt streams.

“Aratarasu,” she repeated quietly. The sounds of his name flowed from her lips, she imagined, like bubbles rising from a fish in a pond. “Lord Beetle, he who is there and not there,” as Halk had said. She wondered, would his court come? 

Right then, she heard the cry of a hawk high up, and then the answer of another. There, they flew under the grey belly of the passing veil. One from the East and one from the West. She wondered if one of them was the lucky hawk who had called her to Halk’s domain and that she followed through the serpent kame.

Even with her sharp eyes she could not make out any markings she recognized, and she could not quite tell their size compared to the tree tops or the sun, their distance too hard to fathom. But one of the cries had a familiar sound to her ear. It was a screech within a screech, and as the first echoed through the air, the second echo pierced higher and longer. It made her think about the tail of a comet across the sky, or the meteor that skipped across her mind. It circled around the other hawk, then it dove, and then opened its wings again like a wind-jolted kite, and circled lower in opposite flight. Round and round they came.  

She noticed above their circling and above the grey cloud, the crescent moon cresting with the faintest silver, its true size much bigger than the tiny one she saw crawling on her chamber wall. That slightest of shifts in light and cloud and moon reflected earlier by the shadow clock struck her as strangely reassuring. It was a stark reminder of the slowness of time as well as the distance of kind. What was the moon after all? It too was a clock, a marker of rebirths, the hunter’s light, the lover’s guide. Seeing it was always a good omen to Greil.

It was a deeper rhythm: the moon. It was there to ponder. It made the night more than darkness. It made the day more than visible. Perhaps it woke the butterflies from their cocoons. Or maybe it gave the Grand Moth his truth. Her mind turned to questions about his origins: Did the Ovyrrakrúsk go through a metamorphosis millions of years ago? Did Halk come from an enclosed world, a caterpillar enveloped in darkness, starting as one form, then waking up into another? 

The hawk cried again, an echo inside an echo inside an echo. The moon floated in a sea of blue amid the gathering storm clouds, tendrils of vapor creeping round it. She saw it now, from low to high, the humming and bumbling bees trailing amid the leaves nearby, the tops of tall trees towering toward the sky, the crying hawks swirling in courtship, the brooding clouds shadowing and hovering from afar, a flash of lightning, and the moon fading as the thunder jarred. Heaven and earth, one and the same, from the falling star to sun over the moraine, erasing time.

She walked to the stump as she pondered the moon and its play on yesterday. What else was so perfectly round? Bubbles came first to mind. Like the ones she imagined when she repeated the name, “Aratarasu.” Ripples from raindrops and pebbles. There were yolks, and the setting sun too. The pupils and irises of eyes. But then no other? Mushroom caps? Blueberries? Dandelions? Craters?

“A-ra-ta-ra-su,” the sounds rolled again off her lips like fish bubbles. The thunder grew louder, as if in response to Lord Beetle’s name, echoing off the glaciers and mountains and trees. Listening closer, she could hear the water rushing off the Uplands into the steep gorge of the Magistrad. At that moment she saw a large green praying mantis, an Ózil as her people called it, a “green monk.” It was crouched on a pile of firewood, waiting for the future.

Or was it? That was its natural state of being, cleaning its claws after a meal, she thought. His large green eyes scanned the horizon, his head turning at the sound of another lightning strike. The clouds drifted closer, the grass bent further, her lodge and its eaves grew shadowier. 

Kroom! The sky cracked with a deafening boom. She started. A shard of light struck down off the ridge, lighting everything up in a ghostly white, then gone, everything even darker than before, the hair on the back of her neck standing up, and the Ózil as still as if he were dead.

Then the first rain drop fell, and the mantis still prayed, but cocked its head, listening to the drop bursting into smaller drops. Then the next rain drop came, falling in the dirt between her and the insect crane. Then another, and another, and another, far apart. Time passed and the Ózil did not move. Nor did Greil. It drizzled and then poured, the drops falling closer and closer together, for what felt like an hour, the thunder growing louder and louder. 

Waiting, a little wave of mischief brushed her brow. She put her right hand on the stump’s bark and peeled off a long thin strip that slightly bended with an arc. She pulled her bow out with her left hand, raising the strip to its string, then pulled it taut. Her eyes on the green sentry, she breathed in, prayed for merry havoc and a true mark, then let go.

The bark flew through the air right at Mr. Ózil on an arc that brought it down right at his feet, landing with a thump. Startled, he jumped off. Behold! He had wings! She had never seen a praying mantis go from prayer to flight. That made sense. If it only walked, how would it get far, even in its green disguise? It looked like a giant grasshopper, she realized, but it did not have its speed as it glided into the meadow and the shade. How well could it fly? Maybe not so well, she thought, as it landed defenseless in the open field. 

Right then, a sparrow swooped overhead. The mantid froze for a moment. Greil was standing now, watching it, tense. The sparrow turned course, circling above, scanning the earth. Then another flash of lightning, followed by a rolling thunder, shaking the damp air and the soil. Perhaps startled and distracted, the bird didn’t see Mr. Ózil. Instead, it banked and disappeared into a curtain of rain.

Relieved, Greil looked back down where the rain drops thumped and then seeped into the ground. It was a silly joke that almost turned her mantid monk into bird-lunch. She scanned the black dirt. The green prayer too, was gone. 

Only here in Irèlia, she was told, did so much come so close. It seemed even more so high up in its wet cold Uplands above the Magistrad. Here, by Ral Tanzul or on her excursions into the ice-delved land, she watched how the turn of weather and the dueling of animals changed fates in the blink of an eye. The praying mantis had taken flight at her impetuous prompting, and a sparrow circled for the kill. The green prayer was doomed, if only for the strike of lightning.

She often thought, was it by luck or by design, or were the two one and the same, like heaven and earth? Twice, then thrice. As soon as she had that thought, a little shadow appeared on the sand where she stared, then grew on her hand. Halk was arriving with his lance held out like a fishing rod, as more lightning flickered near and far, illuminating his green, red and indigo wings. As he landed, his armor gently clinked, kneeling on her open palm.

“Hail, Greil!” he said, bowing down his black scalp with its green fin of hair and strake of antler-antennae. On his knees, his obsidian armor gleamed in the grey light. He outstretched his arms with his bee-striped lance before him in a gesture of peace and friendship. He then stood up and smiled. Happy that he hadn’t been just a dream, she raised her right arm. He quickly climbed up so they could confer face to face.

“The Sky Lord is grumpy,” he observed, looking round. “But no matter, my dear! For you have made the call, and Aratarasu will come. Not here, but there, past the forest to a lake, then a pond, where lily pads and water weeds adorn the calm.”

Looking where his spindly finger was pointing, she knew exactly where. It was a decent trek through the woods and over the western hill ridge and moraines that ran in between the valley and the high lakes and rivers beyond — Ralm Goorvalig, the Riverland of Irèlia. It was raining hard and the storm blocked out the morning sun so much it seemed more like night. She took a deep breath, and blew it back out in a puff of steam. It would be a wet cold walk.

“Well, Mr. Feleran,” she said finally, “To the pond we go. But is there a reason why we are meeting him there, and not here? Does he not like wooden houses, chopped and made of timber? It would be warmer, Butterfly Lord, and dryer!”

He looked at the time chamber and smiled. He saw the wood, but he was most taken with its massive grass roof with its long sloping flat top. It almost reminded him of a tomb, or a cake frosted with green tea dust. It had a long wall with four sides around the house with one door and two small round windows. But his sharp eyes could also see little glass circles and squares of different colors all along its façade. He remembered such chambers from long ago when the Ovyrrakrúsk lived and worked among the Masters of Or’Loz.

“That’s an interesting question,” he finally replied, thinking about the time chambers in a colder nearly forgotten time, bringing his right hand to his chin. “I never thought of him that way, as a house guest or wayward lodger. But it may be. I’ve always just happened upon him by ponds, and rocky glades, and the like. He is very fond of ponds, you should know. And, well, I can’t say I have spent much time in a wooden abode myself, and what an odd house this is, I must say! Nor I doubt has he. Yet here I am, so perhaps that could change. Do you want to wait and see if he comes this way?”

“No, no,” she said. “That would be rude, I think, now that you mention his wont. If it’s customary, we will brave the cold and rain. I don’t mind a little weather, or even a lot. It’s more the lightning, though. It’s all around us now, and when it’s wet, well, it could knock us underground.” 

“The underworld or under the earth? No matter, I know them well. I presume you mean dead? But not all under the soil is dead. Quite the contrary, my lady. There are worms and ants and termites and beetles. There are roots and seeds and spores and eggs, and the tiny fungal cities that push up into toadstools and mushrooms.”

“Why yes, my mother and father have taught me much about the dirt and the rocks, and the rivers and the lodes that run underground, the wells and the steam from springs, that push up water and sometimes elixirs and poisons. I know about the grinding of vast sheets of stone and the fiery heat at the center of the Earth. I’ve seen trails of smoke as the land wakes up from the Ice and the Great Sleep.”

His eyes glimmered. He looked back at the time chamber behind her and then intently at her face: “I see it now! This house is indeed a time chamber, like the great mounds of old, that my people learned from Lord Beetle and his Kirrai, the Bug Masons of Vashvaroun, and that we taught the Magi of Korin long ago.” He squinted now as he studied her eyes: they were brown and hazel with flecks of yellow, green and amber. “You are not from around here, are you?”

“Why no, I am indeed from around here,” she said, with a flicker of anger stirring inside her, forgetting what Halk said about time chambers and bug masons. “I’m from around here, but I’m from around elsewhere also. My father’s people came here three hundred years ago in search of shelter. They are the Magi of Korin.”

“But they are not hunters!” he said, surprised. “And you do not look like them. I knew one other from around here that I helped many many moons ago. His name was Rukúschtra and he was an Irelkan of Irèlia. He too was given the calling of Aratarasu, but he knew nothing about the wise ways of Or’Loz. Do you?”

“Yes but only a little,” she said, her voice quieting to a whisper now. “My mother is Irelkan and our tribe has been in these highlands and valleys for thousands of years stretching beyond memory. We know the barks of every tree family, the color of every leaf, the path of its many rivers and streams, the tracks of its animals and the shape of its hills, as the ice reshapes and tills. Her name is DaSheen, a witch and shawoman of the rain-swept fells.”

His admiration for her grew as he listened to her speak about her ancestors and her knowledge about the land. He knew there was something different about her. That she was tied to the Exiles of Orlan Kan that made their way to the Magistrad centuries ago was not surprising. But that she was part Irelkan and Orlantian was far more intriguing. He had kept his distance from the Magi of Korin over the iced eon since the Great Tempest, but here, like the phases of the moon, was a glimpse into a lost world he had long abandoned.

“Who was this Rukúschtra?” she asked, noticing he had drifted away in thought. “I’ve never heard of him. I thought you had never met anyone like me before. Was he a hunter from the Magistrad below, or a lone woodsman?”

“I did not know him well, I’m afraid, for I only guided him a short while,” he said, with the slightest hint of melancholy. “I tried to lead him to Lord Beetle through the rain and the lightning, but he was too in love with the wild, and disappeared over the moraines. That was more than a thousand years ago, long before your father’s kin came to the lake lands.”

For the first time she sensed a deep lacuna in Halk’s soul. There was a vein of loneliness there in his long memory. Was he the last of his kind? She suddenly wondered. While she had heard about Grand Moths from her father, she had long thought mothlings were just illusions from tall tales of old. Crack! Right then, the lightning tore through, and his eyes within eyes flashed blue.

Time had entered a pool. The deep past was sloshing into the present, and the future now seemed to creak open as the sky poured down and the thunder rolled. Raindrops, big on his small frame, amoebic and drooping off, absorbed into each other on his obsidian plates of armor, a swirl of black and blue light that made her think of the night sky. Water dripped from his antennae and his wings. The storm clouds parted briefly just enough so she could see his curling smile.

“Well, Greil,” he said with a little chuckle, looking up at the darkened sky. “Aratarasu loves the rain, and he loves lightning especially, you should know. That follows him, it seems to me, wherever he goes.” 

With that, she put her boots in the growing mud. It bubbled around their threaded rims. Heavy raindrops pelted her head, shoulders and gear. She unfurled a dark grey cloak from her pack, and pulled its hood over her head. Halk flitted up her shoulder and settled on her collar bone. 

“I’ll tell you,” he laughed, “Kyrraskala, the drops are much bigger for this Butterfly Lord. At my size, they are like goose eggs splatting all around. They make quite a pounding sound and can jar the crown. Usually, I am under a log or a rock.”

Listening, Greil bent down, and picked up a big oak leaf with wide lobes and indented folds and handed it to Halk, who then held it over his head and arms like a slanted roof hanging before his purple blue wings. Seeing he was sheltered now, she stepped, breathing out more steam as she went. She left her spear behind so not to attract the lightning. Both hands on her bow, which she wrapped around her torso, and with her long axe in her belt, she made her way off the main path through the tall grass, into the trees as lightning shook the wide meadow. 

They quickly came to the stream that ran along the northwestern corner of its woodland edge, the one she listened to most astutely whenever she daydreamed in the time chamber or prayed outside. In front of her were small stepping rocks, the water rushing round them, with sand and dark mud under its infinite gleaming. Raindrops made little ripples in its undulating effluence, wetting boulders and tree stumps as she hopped over this bend with that wend. Tumbled beams sat across its braided strands, forming a passage through many islets. Again the lightening flashed, and all about her countless blades of grass, and bushes entangling the river air, gently waved as the sun’s muted glow played off fluctuations of shadow, leaves whispering in dreamlike murmurings.

“So, how did you find me?” she asked, as the thunder trailed and she finished crossing the braided stream. “I wasn’t sure if you would come. I thought maybe you really were just a dream, and I had lost my mind in a winding stream.”

“I’m sorry, my dear!” he replied, shouting. “You’re going to need to speak up! I didn’t hear a word you said! The thunder got in the way!”

“Was it hard to find me!?” she asked, changing the question slightly and raising her voice. “I would have thought you had to follow me!” 

“Well, in a way I did!” he said. “I followed your dreams. Do you remember what you dreamed? To me, it was fascinating! But to be entirely truthful, I followed you yesterday after you set out to return. I followed you down the riven rock and into the Riverland and across the cold meadows to the edge of the forest. But that’s where I stopped. I wanted to make sure you found your way back. Because I’m curious about you too. I didn’t want you vanishing on me like a dream.”

“Well, I don’t remember my dream,” she said. “I slept very well though, Mr. Feleran. And you don’t ever have to worry about me finding my way back. I’m a hunter, so I know how to track, and mark my way, and read the signs, even when they look different coming the other way. Although I have to say, I have gotten lost from time to time.”

“Hmmm, it’s good to get lost, is it not?” he asked, a wry spark in his voice. “It’s funny. Because I can fly, it is very hard to get lost. I don’t recall getting lost in a hundred years or more. Maybe never, now that I give it more thought. Isn’t that sad? I miss when the world was bright, and new! Like a great sunrise that lasted a hundred thousand years. That’s the story of the Ovyrrakrúsk. We’ve seen so much. What more is there to see? But that’s why you intrigue me, and why dreams are so important to me. Thank the gods for Lord Aratarasu.”

Right then they came upon a dip in the forest, that led down into a dell. It was dark and dank in front of them, as the rain dripped from far up and trickled down on them, running in rivulets from branches and leaves. Greil pulled out her axe in case she needed to clear away some bramble. They entered, stepping on this root and that log, over that bush and that moss, by mushroom patches and lichen bunches, onto this slab and under that boulder.

For a long time they made their way in silence through the dip. They came to a grove of redwoods where a fairy ring of pine mushrooms grew round its shadowy edges. She kneeled down and picked several, putting them in a netted pouch so their spores could keep sifting out. As they walked on, they happened upon lion’s mane mushrooms too, reminding her of the icicles on her lodge that Feleran had watched disintegrate in the rain.

Her people called mushrooms the “children of the forest.” They kept them fed in a pinch. But some could also poison and even kill. While others could open doors in the mind, or even shut them close with shadows that plagued dreams the rest of their lives. DaSheen had taught her which ones were good and which ones were bad, and which ones were decoys. But there was one that remained a mystery called the Black Atom. It made not just one mad who ate it, but a civilization through unseen cracks. And yet, some said, it could resurrect.

“So what did I dream?” she asked. “If you are the Dream Keepers, can you also interlope and see what I see? That’s not the most comfortable thought, my lord. But I guess with you, it’s not wrong, because I asked you to take me on. There are of course many tricksters about. Perhaps that’s why you were made so fine and encouraging, and as small as a mouse?”

“I’m not allowed to say,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons why we’re called the Dream Keepers. If I told you, I would not be keeping dreams. I’m keeping it safe for you while it steeps and transforms your being. Ha! Perhaps like a mouse, this Moth stores them away for life’s winter. While you cannot remember every dream, it does not mean you did not have them. What we do is deepen them for you. And if you learn to sleep as you walk, and walk as you dream, over time, you will be able to recall the brightest ones in complete clarity. Unspool them, and thread them, and even find the far reaches to where they lead.”

“Do you always speak in riddles?” she asked with a chuckle, as she picked some phantom mushrooms and blue elf caps. “I suppose I cannot pry all of your secrets. Yet it seems strange that you can see my dreams. How is it that your people came upon such an unusual talent? Did someone give you a spell? Or a key?”

“Your dreams!?” he said with a smile. “Perhaps they are our dreams, all like water taken from a deep deep well. No, my lady, it is not a spell. No one gave it to us. It’s more a curse, than a spell. We didn’t ask to guard the spirits or every thought and their trails. Since we fell from the sky to Meteorhome, we have always seen things very differently. We have double vision, and double hearing, you might say, even double lives! It’s not just that we can see dreams, it’s that we know what makes them, who visits them, when they come, and where they go. But none of that matters as much as why, which eludes even me. For words fail.”

As they talked, they had made their way back out of the dell and soon came upon a ravine with a little trickling stream. The Goorvalig was a good hike through the forest still, where many ponds speckled the shores of glacial lakes in its interior reaches. This was the halfway point. Words failed, he had said. So she wondered, grasping for some way to picture what he described. His riddles, they had a rhythm and a beguiling form to them.

She stopped to let the elusive drift off. Closing her eyes, she listened to the rain drops pelting the leaves, branches and earth. She felt the cold air enter her chest as her lungs breathed in, like mist falling into a deep cave. She meditated on his words about the well and the emptiness of her forgotten dream. Slowly, an image emerged in her mind. All she could imagine was a box with a keyhole, but no key. Inside it, she perceived Lord Beetle, waiting for her, patiently.

She turned her head and looked much closer at Halk. For the first time she perceived intricate striations and lines under the reflective obsidian glass of his mask that ran along his nose and around his green and blue eyes — the gleaming windows of eyes within eyes — that ran down its plated visor beyond his chin. He looked in the rainy light like a knight. He was crouching deathly still, holding up the big leaf above his head with his lance, the rain dripping off onto her shoulder. Behind were his green indigo wings, dark toward the center, and growing brighter at the edges like moonlight on sand, with flecks of yellow and red on dark islands that evoked campfires and drum circles in a deep blue sea. 

“I see,” she said quietly. “Secrets that can’t be shared. Riddles that lead to nowhere. It’s like a recurring dream. Or mysteries that lose their magic in the light? I was sent up here by the wizard and the witch to spend the winter in the Uplands to hunt and pray until the first spring moon. I have woken each morning to a clock made of prisms and shadows and invisible wheels. I have caught almost nothing and have met no one. Until yesterday, when I met you after seeing a star blaze across the sky skipping like a stone on a lake. Today I saw the first sliver of a moon and called Lord Beetle’s name. And now I see a box that is locked.”

“Kyrraskala!” he said. “I know that box. The Dram, it’s called, where the Deep dwell. It’s a box and a drum, my Greil. We call it Kyvaliya in our tongue, which means the ‘lost door to wonder.’ It is a vision of the sacred that only comes to the very few who Aratarasu summons. And ‘who is summoning who?’ you might ask. I have wondered that too.”

He carved the air into a diamond with his flat hands, then moved them down, creating the shape of a cube, but looking on from an angle at one of its corners as he turned it, so that she realized the Dram had many sides, both inside and out. In the same motion, he then cut a circle, making space between edges and curves. As he drew his hands away, the idea of the diamond drum that became a box when it was turned this way or that way, remained etched in her mind, a vessel that could hold anything or anyone.

“It protects and unfurls your deepest held dreams,” he said. “Such dreams came to this world from long before we were ever born. So say the Wise. We call those the Drames. There are keys to each dream, and each dream is a key to even deeper mysteries. The keys are sacred words, which can be sung. They are fiercely guarded, with a maze to each one.”

“You spoke of a ‘Meteorhome.’ Is that where Ka-vahl-ee-ya?” — he nodded at her slow utterance of the box-drum — “where Kyvaliya, the keys and the box-drum, come from?” she asked, waiting for another wrinkle in his words; for every time he spoke, a new riddle emerged, riddles within riddles within riddles, ripples upon ripples upon ripples, of the mind.

“Amralas?” he said. “That’s our name for Meteorhome. No. Lord Beetle grants the keys. We only guard them.” The sky crackled as lightning came down just on the other side of the ravine, its thunder shaking the earth. “No coincidences,” Halk shouted. “Not one!”

The rain came down harder. In front of them up just a little way was a giant alder tree that had fallen across the ravine. It had been there long before Greil came on her many scouts. It was old with moss and lichen draping off, all of its branches and roots shorn or worn away so that it was now an aging beam. 

“Shall we cross the bridge?” she asked, as the rain hit them and dripped off. She knew that somewhere on the other side was the dram, drame, dream.

“Why yes,” he said. “Lead on!”

The storm clouds heavily cloaked the forest. The sun was still only a rumor in the wet woodland darkness, occasionally breaking through here and there. She had many questions as they walked. About Aratarasu. About Amralas. About Halk.

But she did not ask. Each time she asked her new friend, she only ended up with more questions, more forks in the road, more winding paths. Getting lost is good, he had said. So it seemed to a mothling, she thought, but maybe not to a huntress. And yet, she believed there was truth locked up over there. Each step she made in the wet soil, on wet leaves, over rocks and moss, she was finding new things, new views, and that was hunting too. There was no way to know without first not knowing. And so, the mothling had his own questions too.

“I saw you trick that green mantid,” he said. “Insects are not playthings, my dear! Though I know you did not mean any harm. There are the spiders that trap, sting and make one ill, or even kill. Scorpions that scurry in the desert and strike. There are the worms and ticks that bore into the flesh. There are the locusts that eat the wheat. The wasps that torment the air. And the ants that build and build.”

“It is true, but I did not mean to hurt him,” she said, blushing a little in embarrassment. “I was just testing my marksmanship. It has been a few days since I practiced my archery. But it is also true, that I was growing impatient, and for a moment the idea came to me to mess with the Ózil.”

“Mess we all do, in this messy world,” he said. “While I may speak in riddles, I do not see you as my Ózil, if only that I can see the strength of your meditations. My riddles are not necessarily riddles meant to keep you out. They are meant to lead you in. For they are the only way I can describe that which defies the mind.”

“And what of that can be known?” she asked. “If one can even know it. I don’t want to freeze like a green monk in prayer, forever searching for something that was not there. You Aikyrrie, as the Haarynns call you, must also know that what they have long prized is what has long troubled even the wise. The cat people pursue those who waver on the road to enlightenment, who give into lies, who lose sight. They guard the narrows and the clears from the twisted and the accursed.”

“The Haarynns have no business here,” said the rift-moth. “For Lord Aratarasu has already chosen you. He has been guiding you since we left the lodge. Dreams are not just confined to sleep, Greil. Every waking moment, they shape us. Even now, this is dawning inside of you. I can hear it in your questions. I can see it in the shape of your breath. You are not cursed. At any moment, you can turn back.”

“It’s coming back to me! His name was Tammerak,” she said, Halk’s words sharpening her thoughts into a new insight, as if a key had been turned and the lid opened to the hidden box. “He’s in my thoughts now. I saw him last spring, with a steel javelin and a shield the shape of an hourglass, and on it the emblem of a blue sickle moon,” her voice rising with excitement. “His helm was unlike any I have ever seen. It had a great black brim that came out like a flat mushroom cap, and a top that went up like a chimney, with two tall feathers straight up on both sides like antelope ears, or your antennae. He reminds me of you, Sir Moth!”

She waved her hands up in the air in curly-cues, as if she was tracing smoke, creating the shape of his antlers and Tammerak’s feathers. “A strap made of thick red and yellow beads came down the sides of his face, lying lazily on his neck, and his chest, his thin black mustache and beard sharpened like knitting needles,” she said. “His tunic was magenta and his robe a deep night blue. He wore a silver breastplate, and his gloves were dark leather with studded pearls. He was a fascination on a horse, and I saw him just that once, and then no more.”

“Where did he come from?” asked Halk. “What you describe to me sounds like he was a man from the East, from over the straits of Simbesh, even from as far as wide Sarkadon: lazily knitting deep night blue pearls on a horse…”

“Killadran, I was told,” she said, looking at him curiously, as he smiled and uttered her own words back to her in another riddle of words. “Yes, I guess he was a kind of poetry, from far in the East. But there was nothing lazy about him or his horse, Mr. Feleran. He came bearing tidings of war around the shores of Lake Kelverrik, one of the Gavran Wars that have sparked in the erasures of glaciers, his errand tense as a bowstring and arrow.”

“I know of Killadran,” said Halk. “I know it well. Not all good things or good tides. But a noble people, is what I have always known. My tidings have often only ever come from others’ dreams. This is no different. You asked of Amralas? Well, Killadran is just south and west of my ancient home.”

“Perhaps we met in another life!?” she said, realizing that her ancestors might have known and even parlayed with Halk and his brethren, for she knew Orlan Kan was north of Killadran. “I would love to go to Killadran one day, and on to your home — the moth land of meteorites.”

“One day, I hope indeed,” he said, nodding his head. “But if we met, for me, it was this life, and not another, for I have watched hundreds of thousands of lives pass by me like waves and currents on a river. No, if I had met you, I would have known. Like Amralas or Killadran to you, you are the unknown. Now, this Tammerak and his feathers…”

He wanted to ask more about Tammerak, and she wanted to ask about his homeland of falling stars, but right then they came upon the pond. First they heard lake crickets nearby and the throaty croaking of frogs; the sound of distant thunder retreating far off, out to upland lakes echoing with clear tones floating to them over the face of cold waters. The rain was also letting up, dripping gently now, making a pleasing thumping music on leaves and petals.

“Ah, here is one of his courts,” said Halk. “Here, my lady, is the Lord of Dreams, lost and found, recurring and fading, from the beginning to the end, borne on the sound of thunder. Aratarasu, we have come to pray with you.” 

She stepped up to the pond’s edge and bowed. Now closer to the water on her knees, she could see beyond the low hanging branches of the willow trees to the lake, which was now bright white and steel grey under the stormy sky as far off lightning flickered behind distant mountains behind. And the world outside the pond grew quieter and quieter as the rain drizzled on, bigger drops making ripples that emanated in languid discs of delight. 

But by the pond it still seemed like night, with an alien moonlight outlining its mysterious flowing shapes, hinting at long forgotten secrets. The pond was dark and clear. It looked like its deeps went down forever. She saw bubbles coming up from fish, and could see their curving movements vaguely among the underwater stems and plumes of algae. She saw an eel squiggle through too, and a turtle sink back into its underwater lair. There were lily pads and water weeds. She noticed tadpoles in one corner and blue tree frogs on a half-submerged log in another.

Sploosh! — above water there was a red salamander diving in at the far end, stroking as he caught a worm with his curling tongue. A squad of fireflies flew by, from one towering plant to another, flashing green with liquid glowing in their stomachs. Red-eyed dragonflies hovered over stately blue lotuses, flowing with their long sharp petals and bluish white seed pods. Shwoosh! — there was a big swish in the water that rippled near the center of the pond, where a carp or a catfish had caught a fly next to a shadowy reed bed. 

Rrroork! — then she heard the low croak of a bullfrog. She looked over up along the right edge of the pond, where she saw him croak again, his throat expanding like a bubble, quavering out, his round flat ears like skins of a drum — Rrroorm! Rrroorm! Rrroorm! His call was loud and guttural. He had big eyes, filled with yellows and browns and maroons in his irises, his eyelids shuttering and reopening quickly. Rrrrimm! Rrrrimm! Rrrrimm!

Greil looked at him across the darkness, amazed by the droning girth of his low ribbit song. His face was blue with black dots running on his forehead and down his bumpy back, where his hind legs and torso turned a soft green. His throat and underbelly were pale, and as he watched her, he took deep panting breaths, his hands splayed proudly on the ground.

“Carefully now!” said Halk, whispering to her as he dropped his rain shield, kneeling closer to her right ear. “Patience, my lady, don’t scare him. That frog is no ordinary frog. He is the herald of the court. His name is Boswan. He is welcoming you.”

“Hello, Master Boswan,” she said softly, remembering her manners, as she went closer to the bullfrog, moving into a small clearing among the tall grass, next to gnarled willow roots and drift wood, smoothed pebbles and rocks. There was a patch of dark soil and moss, and thereupon she saw a procession of insects and animals. There were ants carrying dandelion seeds. At their front was a large stick bug with long craning legs flanked by a guard of grasshoppers. Behind them were two lines of ladybugs, some blue, some red. Each was flanked by shield bugs.

As they marched in, she half-expected to see a palanquin carrying Lord Beetle. But he was a gentle thing. He did not lord over his court. There, behind the lines and phalanx of courtiers emerged a big scarab with three long horns, six legs and a head and carapace that gleamed in a multitude of hues. Behind marched two tortoises, not big, but titans among the court, with snails on their backs, and a panoply of bugs doing what looked like a ceremonial dance. 

It must be him, she thought: Aratarasu walked up toward Greil, then stopped, and lifted his head and his two front legs. His body gave the glint of an ageless eye. It threw up new colors and shapes from wherever she moved her gaze, each angle transforming into a new surprise. From here, at first it looked like oil on water. From there, it looked like a chorus of angels. Rainbows spilled off him onto the ground. He was indeed a living gemstone. This was the Walking Gem that Halk spoke of, an oracle ancient and inscrutable. And amid all that restless reflection, his two eyes rippled deep down with black wells of memory.

“I am Aratarasu,” she thought she heard him say, but it sounded as if it was coming from far over the mountains in the form of a whisper, a voice that flowed low like the breeze. “I am the Lord of Dreams.”

A light wind rustled the grass and the trees and the pond, its little dark waves with rims of light pushing up against the wet shore. She looked at her shoulder and she saw Halk bowing down, his antler-antennae pointing at Lord Beetle. Then she heard Sir Moth’s voice, but it too seemed like it was coming from nowhere. “Now, we must go,” he said. “Off to the Land of Dreams, and the Setting Sun.”

For a moment she thought perhaps she had lost her mind. She had never heard of Lord Beetle. Yet in her training, the shaman and the shawoman had also told her about the Great Hollows, the Starkness, and the Haarynns. They had warned her that the world was cracking like ice as the glaciers retreated. They had taught her about moths and metamorphosis, and told her before her sojourn in the Uplands, that she might encounter great masters. She had thought they meant perhaps a bear or bitter cold. They too had their secrets. Did they know of Aratarasu? No. Something told her ‘no’ and know — that she had to find out for herself.

He bowed his head down now too. Then his front legs carved a circle in the dirt as his hind legs pushed to help him dig deeper. She looked into his eyes, which were speckled with tiny points of light. In them, she thought she saw many phases of the moon and what looked to her like cities of stars, with the comet Razakusa cutting a circling line, worlds within worlds within worlds, eternally drifting.

He finished the circle, then started another circle inside the circle. Then the walking stick came up, striding and carrying a reed stalk. The phasmid started helping Aratarasu, digging another bigger circle outside the first circle.  “Ranharrow!” she heard his name called. “That is Ranharrow,” said Halk.

To Greil, the circles looked perfect, one inside the other, before they started to bend like the ripples in the pond. As she looked at them, the little round ditches started to glow brighter and brighter, little dunes of dirt casting shadows, wind blowing dust off their tops, light adorning Aratarasu and Ranharrow, making their faces a beguiling mix of eyes, mouths and noses, like ghosts of smoke in marble, yet shifting in the fluttering light. 

Then the pond began to stir, its waters lapping on the roots and against its pebbled muddy shore, swirling over logs and rocks with growing force. Its lily pads bobbed and fen reeds yawed with the circling gusts of wind, grasshoppers clinging to the reed’s tall leaves and rush tails. Frogs leaped high into the waves, shooting out their long tongues as flies zipped about in unrest. Catfish and carps glug-glugged water spiders that tripped in the whooshes of the surf. Dragonflies darted here and there, in triangles of air.

And then Greil saw the three circles of light pulse outward across the earth and the pond until everything slipped under a tide of shadows. She felt little Halk on her shoulder but weightless herself, as if she was floating in water. Aratarasu was at everything’s center, the eye of the storm.

“Bless you, Sir Ranharrow,” she thought she heard Halk say to the twig-man who stood by Lord Beetle’s side, his voice a swish-rush of countless reeds and ripples. “Even after countless years, drawing circles is never easy. But you do it happily.”

So here they could walk in each others’ dreams. Here, they could talk and they could see what was deepest inside her dream. Here, they came right up to what could not be said or thought.

“Here you see three rings,” Halk said to Greil. “Inside the smallest one is memory, all you see, hear and feel. The next ring is all that exists, what is known, and unknown. The third ring is dream. Without it, there is nothing, not even thought. The great spirits gave the Ovyrrakrúsk dreams to keep, and with dreams, we could grant wisdom. We nurtured scryers and prophets. In the starkness, we became Dream Keepers, and others became Shadow Keepers — the Fáta we are called. And the Fáta pick among the living those ready for the banshee’s call, to wander and seek the very bones of time.”

As he spoke, she found that they were walking inside a glacier, an ice cave of glassy shimmering blues, with meltwater dripping from its ceiling in little peaks and spikes, like a hive of ice. She heard water flowing down one of its tunnels, and following its sound she came upon a stream that flowed down from a tall moulin, a chute of sunlight coming down, sending glimmers here and there, her own shadow melting and squeezing along its wet crystalline walls and alcoves.

When she came upon the winding current, she saw a red leaf float down it and across her tunnel path, the water cutting right across it. “Every age is a leaf floating on water down a winding stream, the ripples of time moving it up and down,” she heard Halk’s voice say. “For memory transforms into history, as each new leaf sinks or drowns. Yet some leaves are ferried back to shore. And some lives are reborn.”

She nodded in silence, as another leaf passed on. But when she looked up, she saw standing still on the other side of the stream, Aratarasu, who was gleaming black with steam rising from his belly as he breathed. Behind him the tunnel continued. He turned and walked up its snowy floor and up a little incline in the path and down through an arch that looked like the ribs of a giant mammoth. Following Lord Beetle, she and Halk went over the little hillock, and down into a big wide cavern where she saw what looked like a massive ice-covered lake.

Dun-dun! Dun-dun! — she heard a deep resonant drum coming from underneath the reservoir. Light seemed to dance up and glance off the vaulted glacier hall. A play of shadows and shining beams dazzled her eyes, as she tried to peer down into its depths. It was pulsing, whatever it was. And then she saw it: a big dark shape ploughing through the lake, a shadow that was not a shadow. It was swimming her way and swooshed under her legs.

Then she saw its fluke, and it dawned on her that it was a whale. Stunned, she turned and watched it bank and spiral down. “At the center is the beating heart of time,” said Halk, his words washing away at the shores of her mind. Then she saw the three circles spinning inside and around her. She saw the sun and moon going round the ice hall. She put down her bow and perceived a drum. She gently tapped it — dun-dun! Then she saw a manor by a bubbling volcanic lake. She went inside and it had countless doors. She opened one and saw the Beetle’s shadow on the wall. No rain. No lightning. This is where he was.

“Kyvaliya,” she whispered, before straightening from her bow. The manor and the volcanic lake disappeared, the three circles faded, and the ice cave receded away. His procession started to depart, one by one, as the turtles stood guard, waiting for each courtier to pass back into the forest. The rain had stopped. She heard now the soft marching of their many feet, and the music of drips of water from the trees above, the little plunks into the pond, and the plops on the fronds. Ranharrow the stick-mantis bowed and turned to withdraw.

An image came to her then: a grove of rosewood and a great jut of malachite at the other side of the lake on an island that she had long known. She would go out to it, she thought. Thick swarms of fish she would find across the water that she could catch for the days ahead. She would take some wood to carve and some green ore to etch. She would search for the heart of it.

The breeze again rustled the grass and the leaves and the shore. Halk too came back out of prayer. “We are here and not here, but now you have the Vision,” the Moth said, as the shadows wavered and the wind died down.

She wondered what exactly she had gotten herself into, as Lord Beetle stirred. Rryrrinn! Rryrrinn! Rryrrinn! — went Boswan as Ranharrow strode on.

“Yes, Lord Aratarasu,” said Greil. “I will go there. I will follow the sun.”

“Bless bright night and day,” said Halk. “Go then, and run-run.”

Then the Beetle bowed, turned and was gone.  

Thus concludes the second chapter of the Aphantasia Trilogy: Where No Thoughts Go, an original epic fantasy work by T.Q. Kelley. You can read about its intent, mission and musings here. We will be self-publishing future chapters to book one, The Low Owl (most will be free), and short stories (which will be for paying subscribers) here at Wraith Land. The first chapter is here.

Copyright owned by T.Q. Kelley.

From the top of a valley in a wood chamber, she dreamed of a watchtower at the edge of the world from where she could perceive an endless sea, its restless waves striding like giants from across the horizon. She heard the howls of a hound echo through the stars, answered by the howls of another, and another. Then peering into darkness, she saw a firebird ignite a light-storm beneath the sea. For an instant, the giants turned into black glass with crests aflame. Then nothing.

It all went dark. In her hand was a lantern. Raising it to guide her, she walked down a spiral of stairs. And wandering out of sleep, she opened her eyes. 

Up on the chamber wall, awake, she watched dappled light move in gentle tides around her, blots of thought crossing into the void. A shadow clock turned with many hands, each representing a planet, a moon, a sun, making an infinitesimal hum. Not a circle within circles, but many circles askance, with faces and gears invisible to sight, its hands hidden in a trick of darkness and splintered light.

Made in the mold of ancient time chambers, its shadows turned in countless interlocking rhythms. Her thoughts turned too, folding in on themselves like clouds backlit by suns and moons, drawing her gaze from day to night, and night to day. Time was refracted in glass prisms, the morning sunlight from the window striking dead centers, and escaping in rainbows, the room’s secret faces and gears angling rays as they spun with the Earth, sending different colors this way and that in glimmering gleams, kindling her mind back to the world’s first sunrise.

But what fit in the chamber, was just reflections. The night before, she had seen the brightest meteor skitter and scatter and blaze across the sky. Its sharp bursts and streaks of fire reminded her of a stone skipping on water. Each skip was a ring — an eddy in an infinite stream. Its path was so bright, she thought she heard it thunder and roar. But it was just her mind reeling from the shock of waves crashing over buried wells of childhood dreams and distant memories.

She had never seen anything like it, save as a baby in the first starkness of daylight. Yet that, she could not remember. She could only imagine it.

Heaven and earth were one and the same, she was told. The Great Ice was receding and the glaciers were in retreat, with rivers and lakes left in their wake. She wondered about the origins of the voyagers from afar on winding roads that followed the rivers among the stars, the planets that sneaked by, the moon that played the fool, and the sun that turned darkness to its rule. Deep was time.

Where did it come from and where would it all lead? Was there some long lost door? Was there a window up in the sky from which gods and demons stared out? Were they messengers that she sent back to herself from a future so far that it was the beginning once more? That last thought was a strange one, but something told her time warped high up in the firmament and deep down into every spirit.

Cutting across those horizons in her mind was a whispering stream that ran through the northwest corner of the meadow that her woodland lodge was built upon. Its crystal clear and cold meltwaters babbled over rocks and tumbled trees. Its dulcet notes were a great relief to her, constantly replenishing and slaking her soul with its gentle yet tireless music. Listening to its endless sound, she tried to imagine where all its burbling was coming from that made up its mystery but all that she could picture were little pebbles and eddies and splashes that reminded her of the stars. She had wondered, did all the waves and currents of the world’s waters, since the beginning of time, outnumber the flickering fires in the sky?

It made her realize that time flowed like a stream in one direction, but that it also went in circles, and as she had done so many times when she stood in the stream, it slowed or even stopped, at least in her mind. She had hunted many times along its course, surprising elk and wolverines, hiding her careful steps in its murmurs. At night or under moonlight, she could even hunt herons and mallards. In the starlit darkness, the mirror-rills of the riverland flowed into the vast un-light.

Musing on, she knew that every hunter followed twilight tributaries to the cities of gods, shining on high, destinations that decided fates of all-world tribes. From her lookout lodge, she had watched for tidings from estranged nations, the march of seasons, studied their signals from night skies, and wondered about the fires of empire and war. That was the riddle hidden in black holes and the stars — fateful sparks in the great spans of time stretching beyond the mind — and why she was learning how to read and chart the heavens. She was seeking not just an ancient clairvoyance but the very memory of it and the long gone world that created it.

At that moment as her thoughts lingered amid the stars, trying to find any lost memories before the Great Gyre, she heard a tap-tap-tap, outside her chamber’s misted window. It had a gentle yet firm rhythm to it, some taps with deep woody tones, as if she was hearing the notes of a careful drummer and not the drips from a melting snowy awning. The tapping would stop and then continue in triplets. It kept her from yawning. So she knew it was not a bird or a beaver because they tapped or pecked in their own little grammar. Top-top-top — now whatever or whoever was making the taps, was moving further and further — what was it?

She listened closely now to the wind over land outside. It whistled high against the sun’s path and trembled the dew sitting on the window glass. It was time. She got up from her bed and walked to the chamber door, opening it. There was snow at the doorstep, and off in the meadow, melting and quenching the thirst of the grass, soaking into its dark soil. The morning sun warmed her face as the wind wiped her brow. The flying squirrels had taken up in the giant pine trees at the edge of the path from her waiting place, plunging down from the Uplands. 

She had been waiting for the first full moon of spring, when the wizard and the witch would begin her shamanic training, drawing the fates with the threads of the ancient oracles, casting inquiries into the unknown. That’s why the skipping star had struck her. Maybe it was what they called the Deep Sign that the world was tipping over and under but on a straight line. Or was it just a star on its way to the underworld? “No one knows,” the shawoman often told her. “No one.”

By which the witch meant: find out. But there was also a triple meaning or four. There was the question of knowing oneself, yes, but of knowing the spirit at the heart of all things too. For perhaps the arrow she did not know, she was taught, was simply destined to go somewhere no one can know. Still, she would go.

A hawk flew overhead, catching the wind. There, she thought, was an arrow. Grabbing her bow and her quiver, she checked her arrows’ fletchings and pulled her bowstring taught, tightening it just so, right up to her eye and the top of her cheekbone. She pulled out her hunting knife and wiped it on her tall leather boot, sharpening it in the light. She kicked her spear from a pile of firewood up into the air, its wood pole bending and vibrating, until she caught it with one hand in one quick stroke. She checked its long steel flared tip for any chips. It sparkled in the morning light. She stuck it in the earth, hiding its gleam in the mud, masking its sting from wary eyes. Once again she heard the tapping, yet distant.

She took a few slow steps forward, her boots seeping into wet dirt. Where would the signs lead? The hawk right then cried overhead. She stopped and looked up, watching as it circled and drifted in the air. What did it see? She listened to the quiet drum of waterfalls far away, the infinitesimal clicks and ticks of the clock melding with the sounds of creaking branches, chattering crickets and snow melting in drips, all flowing into the efflux of the meadow stream.

She turned and looked back into her chamber, and saw the prisms’ glimmers fading, and closed the door behind her. Then she turned again to face the day. Great pines, cedars, firs and oaks towered before her, reaching up into a blue sky scattered with cold bright clouds. Stepping toward the forest, she grabbed a long-hafted wood axe resting in a tree stump. A cool breeze ran through her long dark hair. Her bow’s name, Valmryn, the “dream killer,” heralded the hunt. Yet no dreams but nightmares, she prayed, would she banish from there. 

For up here, she dreamed of dreams, within dreams, within dreams, within dreams, of stargazing from the world’s watchtowers, smiling at the memory of a meteor skipping like a stone on water, lighting up the hills in bright waves. She was an arrow of fire shooting high. Then gone, forever, in the sky. 

Over the ridge along the Magistrad, hanging over the steep and deep basin below, was a labyrinth of canyons and ravines and outcrops amid hills of green grass and ice cold streams. The hawk she saw high up scouted and weaved into the riddled rocks, where she believed must lie the hidden tapper. So she followed him. The morning had passed and now the sun shone clear and bright close to its zenith, warming a land beset by ice winds pounding from across the great river gorge where the mountains held back the eastern and northern gyre-torrents.

For the world no longer waited. And she knew its hunger had no limits. She was hunting for others who could not hunt. That’s how they survived. By early spring, she was out setting traps, tracking deer, boars and rabbits, and foraging what she could in the cold Uplands. It was her uncle who trained her, a great bowman who explored and watched the shadowlands east of the great forest city of Gamak, the dunes of Drathirz to the north and over the Straits of Simbesh onto Araíyek and then south to enduring Avaray and vibrant Dassint, and sometimes onward.

His name was Kúlluvía. He was on a long journey over land and sea tracking the comet Razakusa as it moved east toward the planet Kyristala, the Wandering One. Following its tail, he was looking for signs of how the ice shifts had buried empire after empire in the drifts of time. The lantern in the hermitage had grown brighter and brighter, for Razakusa had been caught in its chamber. Sitting and reflecting to the calm rippling clock, she wondered for how long? For five winters he had been gone. He may have even roamed, she thought, as far east as Sarkadon.

For his delay this time was unlike him. He was exact as a woodsman. It was Kúlluvía who taught her how to make her own bow, how to carve arrows, how to keep her breath in time with the breeze, loosing shots only when it whispered in her ear, as if it were dreaming of death, carrying the hiss of violence, into silence. “Pull the string until it tugs back at you,” he would say. “Feel the arrow’s feathers stiff in your fingers. Breathe in and hold your breath, as if you are keeping all the winds of the world in your chest. Ask forgiveness. Pray. Then let go, and listen.”

Pray. Let go. Listen. Those were commands that she returned to more than just with her bow. When she prayed, where did she go? Far off, deep inside, to the afterlife and the afterglow: moonlight, rivers, the cave, fires, smiles, laughter, grumbling, whispers, silence. All those things and more. But not how to die.

“If you dwell on that,” her uncle said, “You’ll freeze and the arrow will never find its way home.” For survival was hammered into the arrowhead, he said, imprinted and burnished into its steel and deadly point. Hers were in the shape of birds with beaks and two eyes, one half shining, the other inset with soot. It was a reflection of day and night bisected by a ridge that guided her aim: hawks, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, harriers, falcons, kestrels, eagles, loons, owls — all gliders, divers, climbers, strivers, crooners, rangers, avengers, savagers — ready to alter fate.

“Honor the dead,” he would say, “And savor the blessings of the land. Someday the hunting wil stop, but who can say, will starve on that day, until the ice relents and lets us raise the living from the earth in plenty again. Keep your eyes and ears open then, guided by the assassins in the clouds and gliding in the wind.”

Whirling from the ways of the ice age, even the seasons buckled and swayed. Any day now, she thought, Kúlluvía would come round the sentinels’ gate far up by the glaciers under the mountain tops and return home. For the thought crossed her mind many times, as she followed the hawk hours after the noon. There was no telling what she would find. The further she went, the more she felt Kulluvía’s absence. In the last year, the whole world seemed afoot. But few wandered to Irrèlia, their homeland, or could weather the Razakuzan Hunt. Top-top-top.

Finally, the hawk turned east as the sun westered, gliding above a rift of granite in the Eskers and the Uplands’ serpent kame that ran south from a massive moraine of gravel and glacial grinding at the northern tail of the Magistrad vale. The bird of prey might soon disappear behind its vast walls, she thought. She hurried but kept her footfalls light. Emerging back out of the forest and cutting through big grassy corries, she came upon a rushing stream that was gushing forth from the rift. She had been there many times, but not with the water so strong.

Hopping along its southern side, she continued along the watercourse until she came up to the ravine’s mouth, then stepping onto a series of boulders, made her way up across the stream to the rift’s northern face. She could no longer see the hawk. She listened as she scanned the water for any pools or signs of fish. There were none. The rift had recently widened through some cold force of the winter, she believed, opening another path from the main course that ran opposite from the cliffs that fell into the Magistrad. She listened to its deep drum as she heard the hawk’s cry echo off the winding walls of the little canyon. The sound of the echo had sharp and lower tones that broke asunder into smaller echoes that moved at differing speeds. It sounded like laughter over the moraine.

But the overtones of the echoes told her that the rift was deep and long with many recesses and side channels below the red-tinged drumlins she saw beyond. There was a clearing up ahead through the narrow cut in the hill, inside the canyon, where she had never gone. But how would she get there?

She looked more closely as her eyes adjusted to the shadows inside the riven rock, where she saw a fracture that ran from the lower depths of the passage and up to the heights. She decided she could not take her spear with her as she climbed, so she fixed it against a boulder and the wall to aid as a step in her descent when she returned. Putting her axe into her belt, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and leapt.

Her fingers touched the lip of the wall’s scar, and she gripped on tight, letting her body hit and hug the rock face. She moved her legs slowly up and down until she found a crack she could wedge her foot on to rest, then she pulled herself up until she could straddle up onto the ledge. Taking a breath, she kneeled and dusted off gravel from her hands and knees. Standing up, she edged her way along the vein, following it slowly toward the top. Below her, the water loudly rushed, cutting its way through jagged and sharp fissures. Don’t fall, she thought. Don’t rush. 

After making about a hundred steps, as she moved carefully with her back against the wall, she began to hear a sharp tapping. It had a funny pattern to it: twice, then thrice. It sounded like a rock being tapped against the rock wall. She stopped, and then it stopped. How strange, she thought, was she being watched? Pulling her long axe out of her belt, she slowed her breathing to silence. She took in the air through her nose to see if she could smell anything. But she smelled only the damp rich air of the wet riven granite. Then just as she was about to continue stepping, the tapping started again.

It was the same pattern, but slower this time, tentative, and with longer pauses between the twos and threes. It didn’t sound like a drip. It wasn’t a contraption. No. It was being made by an animal or by someone. She decided to wait again. The tapping kept going. Maybe it was just a squirrel cracking open a chestnut, she thought, a musical squirrel with a keen sense of time but a loose touch.

After a time, she resolved to keep moving. She had her axe handy, she reminded herself, and she knew how to cleave any animal with one swing. As she got closer, the tapping grew louder and more peculiar. It was definitely a rock, but it was being struck at slightly different angles. The tapper was imprecise, or very precise. She simply could not place it. Not a woodpecker. Not an otter.

Now she was right up to it, but it was above her, and around an outcropping in the rock face, perhaps a hundred feet above the meltwater. The top of the ravine was also very near now. She could feel the mountain air across the vale seeping over in big draughts of cold. Looking north, she could now see the tip of one of the glacial mountain peaks capped with snow rearing its rugged silhouette, jutting into the blue sky. Right around the corner, she could also now see the rock face gave way to a recess, that looked to her like the bottom ledge of a stair.

The tapping continued as she crept, and a few small pebbles crumbled and rolled over her head down into the crevasse. Was she afraid? The rushing water and jagged rocks below would kill her if she fell. Whatever it was, it was probably harmless. And yet, wolverines lurked in these hills, and mountain lions. She meditated one more time before she looked.

Even if it were a cub, they had the strength to push her over the edge if they toppled her from above. Taking a deep breath, she thought of the skipping star again. Follow its grace, she told herself. Follow its speeding destiny. With that, she swung round the outcropping and into the recess with her axe ready.

Everything exploded. Gravel flew in her eyes and face, as she saw a blur of black and blue and green dash away from her and up over the rocks. It looked like a buzzing of wings so fast she could feel currents of air whip against her cheeks. Her eyes barely caught its form. It wasn’t a flying squirrel or bird. It was the biggest butterfly she had ever seen, she thought. 

Or not seen, because she couldn’t be sure what it was that she saw. She let out a  quick chuckle of relief. Even if she was wrong, whatever it was, she could tell it wasn’t out to kill her. Perhaps it meant to deter her, but not through force. Once she regained her wits about her, she saw that in front of her were stairs hewn into the granite cliff. That was just as peculiar. She had never heard of any stories or rumors that people once lived here. Though the Haarynns, the cat people, were just on the other side of the forest and the valley, to the north and the west. 

No time to wonder, she was after that butterfly. Leaping up the stairs, she emerged onto the shelf above into tall grass waving in the wind. The sun was bright and the drumlin hills beyond were covered in splashes of red orange, a great band of poppy flowers, thousands upon thousands, blooming underneath the cold grey and white of the mountains and their glaciers. It was the clash of spring against winter. There was a little respite coming and life returning. 

So where could that butterfly be? She quickly scanned the ice-delved land. She didn’t see it at first, but then she caught it in a blur hovering far away over the grass toward the flowers, just the faintest flutter of blue, with flecks of red and green flames on its wings. Off she ran through the field.

As she came up on the tapper, they both came near to the flowers. The air was fragrant with the poppies’ sweet scent, mixed with a dreamy smell from patches of lavender, which were also in bloom, their small purple flowers peppering the vast expanse of orange and green that now grew in her mind as even bigger than it had first seemed. It was as if they were in an upside-down cloud. The butterfly was almost in her grasp, but now she noticed it too had changed from what it first appeared. Something was very strange about the little specter.

It was as big as her hand, and its body was peculiar. They waded into the cloud of petals and pollen and lavender plumes. She noticed there were other flowers here too. There were sunflowers, orchids, dahlias and lilies, and near the ground, soft velvety lamb’s ears. Bumble bees and dragonflies flitted about, working and droning. That’s when she noticed her friend had a fur collar and a wingspan flapping down, tucked into a tent-like cloak, cutting the shape of a rhombus. Diving into a cluster of butterflies, he briefly disappeared among them.

She might lose the butterfly here, she thought, so she slowed so not to scare him. It landed on a lavender stalk, then jumped to a big lily, where it went gently still, the flower bending back and forth with its weight. It scrunched up, leaning into its cup, its wings folded up, so to hide itself modestly among the lily’s core of stamens, stigmas and styles, which was an ornate thicket of reds and yellows. 

Was it playing dead? She took slow steady breaths, and kneeled in the thick lamb’s ears and grass, and then gently leaned forward and moved her right hand up the lily’s stem, and with her left hand moving her fingers over leaves, shooing the other butterflies away in whirls of orange reds and splashes of vibrant blues. Patiently, she cleared a path, calmly raising her hands to trap him, the many morphos and monarchs flitting or crawling off, his vorpal form emerging.

“Don’t you have a clue?” she suddenly heard. The voice was small yet deep, as if it came from the shadows and the creases of the grass and the flowers and their  flowing dance. She was astounded. Her hand suddenly trembled.

“So you came all this way only to wait and hesitate?” said the voice. The sound of his words echoed through her as if ripples in a pond were expanding out into her mind. The flower and their petals, the ears of lambs, the stalks and the leaves and the grass, seemed also to expand, growing longer and wider around her. She felt the breeze more strongly so that it felt as it grew and withdrew, a gale and a sigh and then up again, a great ocean of time pressing through.

What was big and what was small mattered not. Only the idea and the thought. She heard him chuckle, not derisively but quizzically: “If you’re going to swat me or capture me, then try your luck and let’s see how things go for thee.”

“Why, no-no-no!” she stammered. “I don’t want to hurt you! Not once or twice or thrice. I simply heard you tapping, and I didn’t want to be surprised. But now I surely am bewildered, by many, many times. My good sir, what are you!?”

The winged thing turned around now and unfolded his wings like a flowering cloak rimmed with the finest fur in a wide cowl. She could see now that he was mostly black and shiny like many insects, with a body like a man, yet still insect-like, with spindly hands, lithe legs and an ornate torso, covered in intricate pieces of obsidian armor and holding what looked like a long thin bee-striped lance wrapped in ribbons of intertwining jet and ivory tinted with massicot.

He had a head and a face with a sharp sloping nose, and what looked like a mask and visor, with a fantastic mustache that swept across his cheeks and over pointy shoulders, two big dark green and dark blue iridescent eyes like those of a bug — eyes within eyes — and high feathered antennae that lashed up like great antlers above tall blades of green hair that formed a fin atop his raven crown. And hanging from a belt was a long wind-pipe and a curved sword. His wings especially dazzled the eyes, a mix of streaks and blotches, and both cool diaphanous and warm delirious hues. She realized, staring at him amid tempestuous butterflies, that he was a mothling — a Grand Moth.

“Why ‘who’ is more exact, my friend, for I am Halk, Halk Feleran,” he said. “My sacred name is Halkjavyk: Kijaromôn in the ancient tongue of Kirrann. I suppose you might call me a dreamer, as I can see and think far ahead like you. I was first tapping to break open a nut for lunch, then to see what musical echoes that might come out of the Riverland, because I heard someone jump to the wall path, and it turns out it was you. But I did not expect the axe, or the dagger, or the bow or the attack. Together it was more deadly things than I’ve seen in these parts since days of old, when the Haarynns once ruled here after the bitter cold.”

“Halk-ya-vik,” she said, sounding out his name. What a strange sounding name, she thought. “So Mr. Halk, the Haarynns made those steps? And, pardon me, but I must ask again, what are you?” There was silence. She was in awe of what she was hearing and seeing, so maybe time itself had simply come to a freeze. “Have I gone mad?” she asked suddenly in a panic. “I don’t recall getting sick. I have no fever. Perhaps I breathed in poison pollen from these flowers?”

“No, no, I am not from your imagination, I am sorry to disappoint you,” he said with a chuckle. “I stand apart, my lady. I would fly this sky whether you were here or not. I am a Jasper Moth, my dear. The Haarynns called us the Aikyrrie. We call ourselves the Ovyrrakrúsk. That means Dream Keepers. Halkjavyk means ‘Moon Wise’; but on a shadowed new moon, I become Myrkjavyn — that means ‘Wraith Moon.’ I have always loved the Moon and know its beguiling phases like the bug shapes of my own wings and hands. And no, the Haarynns did not make those steps. No one knows who made them.”

“So that’s a mystery even to you?” she asked. “That is strange. And dreams? Good dreams? Bad dreams? Do you have a jar or bag full of them, and how do you catch them if you’re the Keepers? Why do you keep dreams, O-veer-ra-kroos-k?”

“Very good. You have a good handle on uttering. Well, I suppose, beekeepers, we’re not unlike. We tend to the dreams of all living things in this cool carved land, helping them grow when they sleep, so they know where to go when they don’t. Sun-bright dreams. Inky black ones too. But that takes lots of explaining. Do you have a thousand years? There is no jar because dreams can’t be trapped, my lady. How, is a secret. And yes, we do not know who made the stairs.”

“I see. So the stairs were there when you came? I was hoping you would know, for my people have always wondered about such things. But keeping the dreams and what it means sounds marvelous,” she said, realizing that Halk spoke with a tone that seemed to come from the Earth itself, ancient and forgotten. “Are you old?”

“Well no, not really I don’t think,” he said. “At least not in Ovyrrakrúsk years. I have seen over one hundred thousand, thousand springs, if that’s what you mean. Most creatures your size are just children to me. Except the Elves and the Kirrai. Oh, and the dragons. Oh, and trees, tall trees. But all of that seems to be coming to an end. The sky is odder by the day, haven’t you seen? And I say that, having seen its worst days. Lightning strikes from nowhere. Fires burn the woods to the south. Glaciers drain their cold. Avalanches keep crushing everything below.”

She furrowed her brow and looked up at the ice world and spotted the ablations. The ice wall north of Othuar was calving. She had heard that the ice-dammed lake above Baugaon was flooding the tarns of Haar. And many snow-bridges in the upper passes had caved and dropped several caravans to their deaths. He was right, things were rapidly changing. 

“Oh no, no! I see you’re worried,” he quickly said. “I said ‘seems,’ not ‘is.’ Like I said, children, too eager to bear the world’s cares. Don’t be so alarmed. We’re not coming to an end. Not yet. Not yet! There is still too much to do, my friend, and too much to see. It’s my job to record all of this history. I watch everything like a hawk, like a moon.” 

She thought deeply about his words. Some of it sounded like nonsense. But there seemed to be a rhythm to the mysteries of this curious mothling. History was ever-changing, from day to night. But the ice was encroaching and sliding down from the mountains. Her traps were empty and it rained incessantly. She looked up at the wind blowing snow high into the sky. Halk watched her closely, seeing her drift into thought, trying to understand everything he was saying, catching and pulling it all together like leaves in the wind, and doing it fairly well, he judged. He could see it in her eyes: not just worry, but prophecy.

“Well, Kyrraskala!” he said, using one of his favorite phrases to break the silence, and pointing his lance to the sky. “That means ‘lightning in my head’: a thunder-stick is a staff we craft, and at the end pack various fire powders, like a long torch. Because this is no ordinary day, I thought I might say. Did you see that amazing meteor last night?”

She looked at him. Her eyes widened, then focused on his eyes, which showed no emotion, no irises, no opening or closing of lids or pupils. He had no pupils. Her mouth slacked. “Yes, I did,” she answered quietly. “Keer-ra-ska-la?”

“Yes, that’s right. Brilliant bright luck, that! Lit up the trees and the mountainside bright as day. It reminded and re-minded me of the Great Tempest before the ice age. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. My lady, what is your name?”

“Greil,” she said. “My name is Greil. In my native tongue, it means Sable.”

“Greil,” he said, leaning his head forward with his hand moving to his chin, serious in thought. “I like that. It’s strong, and supple. Sable is good too. That fits your hair. Sables are also quick witted creatures, my dear. You could use a controversial epithet, though. I’m sure we’ll find you one.” 

“Thank you, my lord,” she said, and bowed her head before the lily and the mothling. “That is most kind of you. Controversial sounds fun and intriguing. I must say, I am greatly enjoying your company and our chance meeting.”

“I wonder,” he continued, as if what she said was an indisputable fact, not a charity or a flattery, nodding his head to her polite bow. “Have you met Lord Beetle? He’s dark too, and fabulous. I suppose you would enjoy his company just as much as me. His court can come to you.” 

“I have not. Who is Lord Beetle? And how do you know I would like him?”

“It’s not because you like me, which I can see. It’s something else, that I really shouldn’t say. But you can’t miss him, or rather you certainly can, but you shouldn’t, and that makes him all the more fascinating, if you follow?”

“No, I am sorry Mr. Butterfly Lord, sir. I do not follow.” 

“Well, I am a lord of butterflies, you could say, and a Moth, older than the cocoons that first graced these hills. The night is my domain, my dear, and I came from another world. For it is good not just to follow, indeed.” 

The sun was now entering dusk and the shadows were growing deeper and longer. He shook his thunder-stick in the air and she heard a rumble rolling over the hills and the Eskers, as lightning flashed in the clouds over the mountains far off. Two purple and violet flames burst at both ends of his lance with silver sparks that lit the edges of the leaves and grass, illuminating the lily in which he sat. The fierce flickering of his fire-staff shimmered in his eyes within eyes, and danced against his exoskeleton of obsidian, playing in the shadows of his moth wings, a cloak of narrows, blots and dots, suggesting a map to the otherworld. 

“Kyrraskala!” said Halk once again. “Things are changing, Greil, not just the Sun and Moon that always circle round. That is the lesson of Lord Beetle. Aratarasu, we call him, the Master of Dreams, the Cloud Beetle, the Walking Gem. Though he gleams like the most beautiful star, he lives underground in shadow. He comes out in storms. All kinds of storms. He is there, and then he is not there.” 

“A-ra-ta-ra-su,” she repeated slowly. 

Thus concludes the first chapter of the Aphantasia Trilogy: Where No Thoughts Go, an original fantasy work by T.Q. Kelley. You can read about its mission and musings here. We will be self-publishing future chapters to book one, The Low Owl (most will be free), and short stories (which will be for paying subscribers) here at Wraith Land.

Copyright owned by T.Q. Kelley.

It’s a stunning image. The sky is aflame with what looks like two atomic bursts. A city on a hill connected by an arched walkway to another citadel basks in the light. We’re looking through an opening between two mountainsides, waterfalls pouring down from cliffs. Birds fly along waterways and off domes. Ships float on surfaces that shimmer under the heavens. Standing on a lush green meadow, someone stares off into the distant horizon. And then your eyes perceive. It’s not two explosions, but giant trees, shining out from some long lost memory at the beginning of time — the spark at the heart of everything.

So arrives Amazon Studios’ first full bona fide image of their new Middle-earth. Inside its panorama is already the promise of an epic and even spiritual journey to the very core of J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythic multiverse. We’ve been busy journaling our first reading of the 12-volume History of Middle-Earth (THOME) as we go, making our way through part one of The Book of Lost Tales, the proto-narrative of Tolkien’s fabled Silmarillion; in its third chapter, we read Tolkien’s first imaginings of his Two Trees that burn with the power of Creation. So to my mind, Amazon’s creative team has chosen wisely to frame our perception in the deepest way possible, by opening our eyes to that “lost” but timeless vision.

The point of view is key. We are looking over the shoulder of a mysterious figure out into what unconsciously registers as a setting sun. But then our eyes also pick up the branches and trunk of a darker and a lighter tree. For those who know what the Two Trees are, a sudden joy explodes in the mind. For those who do not, there must be a kind of confusion and wonder. On the one hand, perhaps they might think they are looking at the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb? But then do nuclear bombs go off in Middle-earth? And the tops are blazing. There’s something strange and magical here, one cannot help feel.

Because the picture overall is beautiful and peaceful, it sustains our curiosity. Amazon’s original image file is letter-boxed (the current speculation is that it is in fact an image still from the first episode), giving it a cinematic context. This is an image that is meant to take over our vision. We can’t take it all in at once. We are meant to look closer and to scan it and be overwhelmed by it, and then sit back and ponder its meaning (I highly recommend downloading or expanding the image to contemplate its full grandeur and mysteries…)

My own first thought was, “My god, they are really going for it!” They are going to go cosmogonic with it. The great spans of space and time in Tolkien’s mythological universe, most readers and certainly filmgoers, don’t even quite comprehend, and here they are going to get a series that looks deep into the past, and as a result, far far into the future? That is fitting for the times we live in. Because we’re coming up on some epic changes in our world, and we need stories that ask us to think bigger and deeper thoughts with humility, and yes, with humanity.

It was only just two weeks ago that TheOneRing.net shared several important spy reports on the Amazon production — 20 fascinating details to be exact. Of that post, there were three that stood out to me as the most important:

1. The Tolkien Estate is “very happy” with the direction of the series so far, including its overall plan. This is *CONFIRMED*. This was put right at the top of the report, and rightfully so.

2. Apparently, because of this confidence, Amazon’s creative team has been granted the rights to parts of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, which means they have enough material to give their series the needed backstory, heft and authenticity to tell an expansive epic, or multiple franchise stories.

3. Hobbits will be in the mix, and importantly, some will be “browner of skin,” as Tolkien describes the “Harfoot” hobbits himself in his Prologue to The Lord of the Rings. TheOneRing’s Clifford “Quickbeam” Broadway highlights this connection. The report that the Tolkien Estate is very happy with the production means they are behind this expansive humanist interpretation of Tolkien’s mythology. Also, we were told that Sir Lenny Henry, a British actor of more recent African descent — for we are all of African descent in one fashion or another — will play one of the “Harfoot” halflings. This is not “confirmed,” but Quickbeam comments on it with confidence.

We interviewed Quickbeam at great length in May, and touched on topics of diversity, and the potential rights of The Silmarillion. On the former, the decision to make this new series a multiracial and multicultural work is very exciting. It is our opinion that Tolkien’s South African heritage also makes this push for diversity especially poignant.

This inclusion of the world’s heritage also works hand-in-hand with the point about The Silmarillion. How so? Well, Tolkien’s mythology, while European in flavor and origin, is now essentially a world mythology. His books have been published in about 40 languages and have been sold across the globe. And yet most people don’t know The Silmarillion — his “Bible” of sorts — which tells the stories of the creation of the world and the long suffering saga of the Elves and humanity before our own recorded history. So this is new ground.

Of course, Amazon did release a series of images before this one: they were versions of Christopher Tolkien’s famous map of Middle-earth, refracted through the lens of the Second Age. This is fairly ironic, because Christopher Tolkien, who was J.R.R. Tolkien’s youngest son, was the fierce protector and executor of his father’s stories and legacy for many decades. With his passing early last year, speculation has increased around the idea that the Tolkien Estate is ready to relinquish some of that control, and hence, Amazon’s ambitious foray into Middle-earth, having received even the blessing to invent new tales.

But with these latest volleys from Amazon and TORN, it seems to me that some of the rumors about this new era has moved on from speculation. As Quickbeam and I discussed at length, it seems both the “Production” and the “Estate” must be on the same page concerning both the scope, scale and diversity of the series. This image confirms this with style and energy.

Take the images above and below, which focuses on the left side of the picture. What we are seeing is a grassy hill and a tree illuminated from afar, and a city beyond a water passage on another yonder hill. Fans and scholars are still debating what city this is but so far the consensus is that it is either Tirion or Valmar in Valinor, the land of the gods (the Valar). The city has many domes and walls, towers and spires, and bridges and walkways, reminiscent of Minas Tirith, yet different. Less warlike, and more at peace with itself, it is unmolested and majestic. The level of detail is awe-inspiring, and certainly of the caliber of Moria and Minas Tirith in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

There is a lot of Jackson’s Minas Tirith and Rivendell in here, which were both mostly designed by the renowned Tolkien artists Alan Lee and John Howe. But I also can see the influence of the other great Tolkien artist Ted Nasmith here. It has his hyper detail and his delight in light: the birds or seagulls flying over the waterway and the trees, the way the light catches the leaves and the grass blades and the flowers on the hill, the fine grain on the rocks here and there; the rolling hidden surprises tucked in this corner and that bend. But Amazon is also bringing their own unique vibe to this image, both in the bold choice to capture the Two Trees in a way that I predict will become iconic, and in the way they added a couple subtle lens flares off the left shoulder of the character, as well as a diaphanous glow in her cloak, the cut of her arm giving her a noble air.

Tirion was built by the Vanyar and the Noldor, two of the three great tribes of Elves who migrated to the holy land of the Valar over the great sea of Belegaer, far to the west of Middle-earth where the events of The Lord of the Rings take place. In The Silmarillion, we learn about the creation and founding of Valinor by the Valar, who invite the Vanyar, the Noldor, and later, the Teleri, to come live in the Blessed Realm, where also shine two great trees, one golden, and one silver, named Laurelin and Telperion. These trees are filled with the sap and light of the universe (we explored their genesis at great length here).

Tirion sits on a great hill in the Calacirya, a narrow opening in the mighty mountain range known as the Pelóri, the Mountains of Valinor. The Vanyar are the most pious of the Elves and later decide to live closer at the base to the great peak of Taniquetil, where the lord and queen of the Valar live high above near its summit. But behind us and the vantage of this image is the sea. It could be the figure is standing a bit up the coastline or even on the island of Tol Eressëa with Tirion on the hill of Túna rising before us.

This could be a clue as to who the person is who is standing in the foreground. We will get to that more later. Suffice to say for now, that a different tribe of Elves, the Teleri, reside in Tol Eressëa, and are known for their ships and connection with the sea. Their main home is the harbor city of Alqualondë. It could be the domes we see on the near side of the image just below the onlooker to the left and the right, are part of Alqualondë, though it is more likely they are just outposts of either Tirion or Alqualondë, with pathways leading between the two.

Also known as the Falmari, the Elves of Alqualondë, are a key connection back to the Elves who remained in Middle-earth and resisted the call of the Valar to join them in Valinor. One figure in particular connects several threads and ages of Tolkien’s great myth cycle — Galadriel, the Lady of the Golden Wood, ally of Gandalf and one of Frodo’s great mentors. She is the daughter of Finarfin and Eärwen, a prince of the Noldor and a princess of the Falmari respectively.

Later when Galadriel leaves Valinor for Middle-earth and is hence exiled, she reunites with her great-uncle, Elu Thingol, the greatest elven king among the Teleri Elves who stayed behind in Middle-earth. His people are called the Grey Elves, or Sindar. Like their kin in Valinor who have a great affinity with nature through the sea, the Grey Elves are also close to nature, but have a great affinity not just for the sea, but also the woods. And so Galadriel becomes a great mistress of the forests of Middle-earth, and it is with the Grey Elves that she later mostly attaches her fate and witnesses “Three Ages of the Sun.”

Which brings us back to the Noldor. Who are they? The Noldor are known as the Deep Elves. They crave and cultivate great knowledge and skills of the hand and mind. Fëanor is the most gifted of the Noldor and creates the Silmarils, three jewels that capture the light of the Two Trees. He is also a cousin of Galadriel.

Fëanor and his Silmarils set a number of key events in motion that lead to the exodus of the Noldor from Valinor back to Middle-earth, where war is waged against the god Morgoth, the Great Enemy, liar, and corrupter of the ancient world. Balrogs are Morgoth’s lieutenants. Dragons are his brood. Orcs are his slaves. Sauron is his pupil and apprentice. He kills the Two Trees.

So Galadriel, we believe, stands here looking out on the world when it was at its height of beauty and divine grace — an age when Two Trees lit the world, and before they died, and their two last fruits became the sun and moon. Some fans disagree with this assessment, but I am fairly confident, since early press availability has focused on Morfydd Clark, who will play young Galadriel.

While the figure in the foreground doesn’t appear to have the famous golden hair of Galadriel, I would argue that is because the back of her head is in shadow with the glow of the Two Trees illuminating the rim of her head with light. She is also wearing a white gown of sorts, which is often associated with Galadriel. Nerd of the Rings is of similar mind. You can catch his analysis of the image here. Some fans have hypothesized that it could be the great mariner Eärendil. But as is pointed out by Nerd of the Rings, he was born after the Two Trees died.

I think we can confidently predict this is the White Lady; the other plausible theory out there is that it is Finrod Felagund, Galadriel’s brother. It is very likely a flashback or extended prologue, giving us background on the history of Middle-earth and her own place in a long struggle against Morgoth and Sauron, going all the way back to her youth in Valinor. It also will set the stage for the Second Age, when the people of Númenor frequently keep a maritime connection to the Elves of Eldamar, the coastal region of Valinor where the Teleri, Noldor and Vanyar mostly live and preserve their ancient culture.

This is important for a number of reasons. It will give the series depth and a larger cosmic context. But perhaps most importantly, it indicates that the creative team at Amazon is steeped in The Silmarillion, which can only be a good thing. Finally, by taking us back to the era of the Two Trees, they have opened the door to an adaptation of The Silmarillion, if all goes well. The implications are immense. Looking at this image, we can almost see such a future right now.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elves are obsessed with light. Which is another way of saying Tolkien was obsessed with light. All kinds of light. Starlight, at dusk and sparkling through dark clouds. Moonlight, on a sea of grass as the Rohirrim on their horses ride through the land. Firelight, when the Ring of Power shows its hidden fiery runes. Sunlight, shining on Bilbo’s face as he looks out from a treetop across Mirkwood to the east. Dragon light, beaming through the eyes of Smaug the Golden. Holy light, in a phial when all other lights go out.

It makes one wonder, why was Tolkien so sensitive to light? Was it because he was born at a time when tungsten light bulbs were just starting to pop up across urban landscapes? Was it because he spent many of his earliest years in the countryside, whether it was in Africa or England? Was it the flash of lightning or the flash of artillery fire and airborne shells exploding, and shell-shocking the mind? Or maybe it’s just an elemental part of the universe that he wisely mined?

That core of nature he delved deeply to unlock. So did his dwarves. And his hobbits, especially Gollum, who kept on digging and crawling until he holed himself up in the guts of the mountains, hiding next to his lacuna — as in a little lake, a gap of space in knowledge. Of course, Tolkien was not Gollum, and his sensitivity to light was not such that he avoided it. Quite the contrary.

It is the contrast of darkness and light that he was attracted to, I believe. And if there is a biological thread, perhaps it was the shock of moving from bright Africa to cool England, the absence of a father who died when he was three, and then his mother when he was 12. One can say in a way that many lights in his life had gone out. As his biographer Humphrey Carpenter emphasized, his mother’s death, not surprisingly, utterly altered his relationship with the world. And as Susana Polo rightly notes in one of her essays for Polygon’s excellent Year of the Ring project, her death made him prone to big emotional swings.

Humphrey writes, and she cites: “Her death made him a pessimist; or rather, it made him capable of violent shifts of emotion. Once he had lost her, there was no security, and his natural optimism was balanced by deep uncertainty.”

For anyone who has ever suffered a great personal loss or tragedy, especially early in their formation, it is easy to relate to Tolkien, though perhaps more difficult to fully appreciate. That’s because it’s hard to cope with things like death, and in its place is a hole, a gap, a lacuna, a shadow. Since this happens to a lot of people, if not maybe to all in some capacity, Tolkien’s sensitivity to tragic death and loss is certainly a big part of the appeal of his richly detailed mythology. Through his poetic language and concepts, he elevated life’s deep uncertainties into images that were universal in their mythic potency.

We wrote last time about his dark seas image and how it gave his Elves a deeper purpose — setting them in a dreamtime without sun or moon. Here we’re turning to the other end of that spectrum in Elven consciousness: the light they first saw and how they harnessed it in their own creativity and history. As we noted last time, the first Elves woke by a lake called Cuiviénen that was starlit. Looking skyward, they saw stars and were filled with wonder. It’s a powerful image, because one, most every person is enchanted by the stars, and two, Tolkien proposes the idea here of experiencing starlight as a primary light source.

Astro-physically, when it comes to planets, this is on its face a fallacy. How can you have an earthly asteroid without a sun at the center of its solar system? But intuitively, we also instinctively accept it as true, because it speaks to a deeper archetypal experience — not only our own time in our mothers’ wombs, but nightly cycles of sleep, when our minds “go dark” yet still wander inside the mysterious dream-space of our so-called unconscious. There, we sometimes experience flashes of lightning in the electrical storms of our brains. These conjurations can be delightful, nonsensical, and even frightening.

If we step into myth-space, where dimensions can bend and even switch, Tolkien’s poetic image of celestial persistence (there is no antonym for circadian I can find) rings true because if we were to step outside the Earth, or more accurately, “off world,” and head into outer space, generally speaking, if one were to drift far enough from the sun, the stars would be our brightest and main light source. Cosmic design, lest we forget, is core to Tolkien, starting with his Genesis.

I know we’re getting pretty “far out” there, but to my mind, this is in part why Tolkien’s mythology resonates so deeply in our modern times. Astronomy was expanding in its understanding of the cosmos, in leaps and bounds, during his lifetime, and the Space Age would dawn in his golden years. I am not saying that he intentionally or consciously was making a direct connection of his Elven starlit consciousness with our own awakening to the heavens in terms of landing on the Moon and so forth, but that he was mining our spiritual condition so deeply, that he uncovered mythic images that could cross space and time to different ends of the universe — and he wisely did this by leaning into the stark interplay of light and shadow, and eventually night and day, and yes, to his credit despite the howling of his critics (most of them never war combatants) — good and evil.

Which brings us to Fëanor, and gems, and not just any gems, but Elven gems. So that here in The Book of Lost Tales, in The History of Middle-Earth (THOME), and The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, Tolkien reveals one of his greatest mythic images. Like the dark seas, his mythic gems represent a kind of infinite wonder and reflect something much more than what we assume at first glance. There are many facets to his gems, just as there are many waves to his seas.

We first hear about Elven gems in the context of Aulë, the smith-god of the Valar, the angelic lords of Tolkien’s world. We are told in The Music of the Ainur: “From his teaching, whereto the Eldar brought ever their own great beauty of mind and heart and imagining, did they attain to the invention and making of gems...” But it’s here in The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, that Tolkien first reveals that his Elves are cunning and skillful and bright. They are not just physically strong, but also mentally strong, and spiritually acute as well.

It comes in the second half of the chapter in the “Making of Kôr” section, after the Elves have migrated to the land of the Gods — Valinor — and are filling its coasts with their own formidable culture, building towers, swan-ships and ports. There is something beautifully synergistic about the imagery of the sea and land, and how the Elves live at its juncture in Eldamar, on the coast of Aman, the continent that contains Valinor. There, near those dynamic waves of physical and cultural change, Tolkien envisions the invention of gems that capture an energy…

“Behold there is a low place in that ring of mountains that guards Valinor, and there the shining of the Trees steals through from the plain beyond and gilds the dark waters of the bay of Arvalin, but a great beach of finest sand, golden in the blaze of Laurelin, white in the light of Silpion, runs inland there, where in the trouble of the ancient seas a shadowy arm of water had groped in toward Valinor, but now there is only a slender water fringed with white. At the head of this long creek there stands a lonely hill which gazes at the loftier mountains. Now all the walls of that inlet of the seas are luxuriant with a marvelous vigor of fair trees, but the hill is covered only with a deep turf, and harebells grow atop of it ringing softly in the gentle breath of Súlimo….and the Gods named that hill Kôr by reason of its roundness and its smoothness.”

These Trees are the Two Trees of Laurelin and Silpion that captured the holy viscous light of Creation (you can read more on the Trees and their special role in Tolkien’s mythology here). The mixture of their golden and silver rays, a mingling that happens twice for an hour each time every six hours in twelve hour cycles — which constitutes a “day” in the Count of Time that begins with the Years of the Trees — we are told is exceedingly wondrous. It is essentially a perfect balance of two alternating states on the wave of existence, Tolkien’s spiritualistic version of electromagnetic radiation and energy, one could say.

The bay of Arvalin is the Bay of Eldamar, also called the Bay of Faëry, where the Elves who have come to Valinor — Tolkien would later name these three tribes of Elves collectively the Calaquendi, the “Elves of the Light” — have anchored their civilization at the confluence of these great landmarks near a gorge later called the Calacirya, the “light-cleft,” where a “long creek” runs from the city of the gods to the cities of the Calaquendi, which include Kôr (later called Tirion), Alqualondë, the “Swanhaven” of sea-faring elves, and Avallónë, which in later versions of the legendarium replaces “Kortirion” on the island of Tol Eressëa.

Súlimo is another name for Manwë, the king of the gods, hence alternately Manwë Súlimo. That’s a lot of names, but like facets of gems scintillating with different colors and rays of light as one turns them, etymologically they hold extra clues: “Súlimo” means “breather,” for Manwë is the god of air and wind; “Eldamar” means “Elvenhome”; “Avallónë” means “outer island,” is a bit reminiscent of “abalone,” and is inspired by the Avalon of Arthurian legend.

This convergence of geological and fantastical images gives the impression of great energy. The divine and natural splendor Tolkien captures in his description of what he would later call “Faerie,” is both a concept and a mythic place, drawing a line from our popular perception of the words and practice of “fairy tales” to the misty mystic notion of his own elvish devising, one that as we push on through his Book of Lost Tales and as we roll to the end of this chapter in particular, becomes as clear as a bright gem. For “Faerie” is an early English term for “realm of the fays,” based on Old French concepts of spirits and magic, evolving from the romantic “faie” and evolving through cultural transference to English “fay.”* Importantly, the French etymology goes back to the folk Latin “fata.”

It’s a linguistic trick you might say, or a cunning flip, that Tolkien went with “elf” in the end over “fairy,” for “elf” comes from German folk and Norse mythological traditions, though some of these fantastical concepts did admix with Old French tales and historical migrations across northern Europe, from Norman conquests to the medieval works of Chrétien de Troyes. My main point in diving into all of this linguistic ping-pong is to highlight Tolkien’s creative process and the ambitious synthesis he was undertaking by harmonizing these elements.

In much the same way, this fusion of ideas, words and images is reflected in the migratory evolution of the Elves. And the Bay of Faëry is where Tolkien locates this “melting pot” of fantasy, if I daresay, what he would call in his famous essay On Fairy-Stories, the “Cauldron of Story.” Yet it’s not soup-making that Tolkien prioritizes for his Elves. It is the cutting of crystal light into bright gems.

The other reason I wanted to try connecting some dots in terms of Middle-earth’s geographical features with the word base of Tolkien’s medieval source texts, and then back to some of the possible philosophical and artistic concepts at play, is to give his character Fëanor some needed context. When we come to him at the end of The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, he is not introduced with any backstory. He is simply defined by his main contribution to Middle-earth.

But I believe Tolkien was intentional in the name “Fëanor.” As we noted in one of our earlier journal entries on THOME, “Fëa” is a root word to the name for the Valar associated with spirits, the Fëanturi — the “spirit masters” Mandos and Lórien. “Fëa” is also Quenya (“Elvish Latin”) for “spirit,” combined with the Sindarin (“Common Elvish”) “naur” or “nor,” meaning “fire.” Hence, Fëanor translates to “Spirit of Fire.”

There are a couple linguistic riddles in his name that are worth bearing out here. For one, “Anor” also appears in The Lord of the Rings with Minas Anor, the original name of Minas Tirith. It also appears when Gandalf faces the Balrog, warning that he is a “servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor” — in this context, the common reading is that “Flame of Anor” means the sun. But the “Secret Fire” is the Flame Imperishable, literally the Power of Creation.

That spiritual fire is a key aspect of The Music of the Ainur, in which Eru Illúvatar, the godhead of Tolkien’s universe, sends it into the heart of the World — to power its reality and being. Which brings us back to Faërie, faie and fay. It is my opinion that “fay” is the creative source of “fëa” and hence when combined with “Anor” and the Secret Fire, we get “Fëanor,” meaning the “Spirit of Creation,” and the character Fëanor, who is the chief alchemist of The Silmarillion, embodies the synthesis of Tolkien’s neo-fantastical vision, of the low with the high.

So the myth itself is a gem, both in terms of artifact and meta-image. The Elven bright gem is the story. For we learn that Aulë teaches the Noldoli (later called the Noldor) — one of the three tribes of the Calaquendi — the art of gem-cutting. The greatest Noldorin elf and lapidary, Tolkien tells us, is Fëanor. He is also the brightest of the Elves in terms of intellect. He is our Prometheus in this Promethean story of spiritual light.**

Coming in the last few pages of The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, Tolkien builds this moment into a crescendo. He weaves and dives, casting gems of imagery as he goes, describing the grottos and luminescent creeks all along the coasts of Eldamar and on the sandy shores of Tol Eressëa; the “slender silver tower shooting skyward like a needle, and a white lamp of piercing ray was set therein that shone upon the shadows of the bay”; of sweet musics and “threads of sound whispered by waters in caverns or by wave-tops brushed by gentle winds”; white and pink shells strewn above and below the “magic waters,” with pearls shimmering among the sea-beds, of a “pure and starry luster.”

“These pearls were their model, and the lore of Aulë and the magic of the Valar were their tools, and all the most lovely things of the substance of the Earth the matters of their craft — and therefrom did the Noldoli with great labor invent and fashion the first gems. Crystals did they make of the waters of the springs shot with the lights of Silpion; amber and chrysoprase and topaz glowed beneath their hands, and garnets and rubies they wrought…”

And yet still, these countless gems that they amass in great piles and “blazed in the light like beds of brilliant flowers” do not satisfy their hunger for beauty. Into each “they gave a heart of fire.” Pushing their craft further, they create opals from pearls and the other jewels, with “gleams like echoes of all the other stones.” And of diamonds, the Noldoli, Finwë’s people, combine “starlight and the purest water-drops,” and the “thinnest air.”

Feverish now, the fire was burning bright, flashing from Tolkien’s own pen, one can imagine. That may sound hyperbolic, but from here it all cascades into an ever greater vision. Enter Fëanor, who in this moment of sub-creation echoes the Creator in a daring re-creation, if not amplification, of the fire and spirit of Creation, however Promethean and vain his act may be:

“Then arose Fëanor of the Noldoli…and begged a great pearl, and he got moreover an urn full of the most luminous phosphor-light gathered of foam in dark places, and with these he came home, and he took all the other gems and did gather their glint by the light of white lamps and silver candles…and the radiant dew of Silpion, and but a single tiny drop of the light of Laurelin did he let fall therein, and giving all those magic lights a body to dwell in of such perfect glass as he alone could make…and it shone…in the uttermost dark…”

And those jewels he called the Silmarils. As those who have read The Silmarillion may know or recall, it does not go into this kind of detail on the actual “technical” creation of the Great Jewels. It is easy of course to get caught up in the idea of the Silmarils as the apotheosis of beauty, of “light in a thousand scintillations of splintered colors.” But the idea is more important than the thing.***

From here, as I’m sure we’ll learn as we read on in THOME, a great confluence of events will lead to a fight over the Silmarils that will ultimately diminsh paradise and lead to a great schism among the Elves. I think the most important thing we can take forward from here though is that Tolkien was absolutely serious when he said that his Elves and their ornate mythology were created in order to express and live out his linguistic designs. I believe this chapter shows that in great abundance and shows how any other would-be mythologists must go about creating their transformative story worlds to reach the same heights.

Because once you establish an aesthetic that is otherworldly but is then poured back into a “body” with traces of the world we know — then you have something like a gem. Names, as we’ve written before, both in terms of their importance and in terms of Tolkien’s exquisite sensibilities, were absolutely essential in making his fairy tales timeless works of art. Whether we’re talking his dark seas or his bright gems, his Elvish languages or his geological poetry, it all resolves into a magical Interface — to borrow today’s techno parlance — that opens us to something ancient and deep inside us — the divine power of imagination.

It’s a lot of data and fata to download. But once you do, Tolkien rewards those who are willing to see the world from a deeper place. It hits you in waves. I recall years ago, when I was maybe a teenager, reading his Unfinished Tales, and coming to a passage in Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin.

A Noldorin Elf named Gelmir is guiding Tuor through an underground river: “And then Gelmir brought forth one of those lamps for which the Noldor were renowned; for they were made of old in Valinor, and neither wind nor water could quench them, and when they were unhooded they sent forth a clear blue light from a flame imprisoned in white crystal.”

I was stunned by the image. It ignited my imagination so much so that I felt like I was there in that tunnel with them. And then there was an endnote I had to read:

“The blue-shining lamps of the Noldorin Elves are referred to elsewhere, though they do not appear in the published text of The Silmarillion…In a note on the story of Gwindor they are called ‘Fëanorian lamps’, of which the Noldor themselves did not know the secret; and they are there described as ‘crystals hung in a fine chain net, the crystals being ever shining with an inner blue radiance’.”

Amazing. Here is a world behind a world. The rhythm and consistency is stunning, spanning thousands of years back across time and the Great Sea to Kôr and Valinor. Tolkien’s son Christopher is diligently uncovering layer after layer of his father’s imaginative gem-cutting. Every facet reflects something new. Turning it just so, reveals a new truth. This passage through the Annon-in-Gelydh — the Gate of the Noldor — echoes back through the years, both in our world in terms of decades, and countless centuries in terms of Middle-earth, back to Fëanor by his silver candles, shaping the Silmaril and his blue Fëanorian lamps.

The shadow of Fëanor is long: in the history of Tolkien’s Elves, his Silmarils kick off ages of struggle and sorrow; but they are also bright, and they fire so much of the imaginative brilliance that was yet to come, and the heroism Tolkien captured in his books. But it’s one thing to light the way with bright ideas or gems; it’s quite another if we don’t have at least some sense of where we’re going or the courage to break free. Which brings us to a turning — I have one more linguistic koan that I think we should keep in the back of our minds as we continue this journey into THOME to uncover the magic of Myth with a capital M.

Like Fëa — and I believe it’s a conscious or unconscious tie to Fay and Faërie — Tolkien used another Quenya name root in these early drafts of his legendarium. In the third chapter of The Book of Lost Tales, we learned various details about the Fëanturi: Mandos and Lórien we mentioned above, but there is also their sister Nienna. Tolkien originally called her Fui, and she is the goddess of grief and courage. Originally however, the three were called the Fántur. Lórien was alternatively Olofántur, and Mandos was alternatively Vefántur.

You may see it too, but “fánt” in these names evokes “fantasy,” “phantasms” and “phantoms.” We’ve contemplated this similarity before. Faint as it may be, Tolkien was playing with the very words that signified his own journey into darkness and light, dream and fantasy. The symmetry feels too strong to be a coincidence, like “fay” and “Fëanor.”

What I think this shows us, and I think one would have to have dimmed the lights considerably to miss it, is a deliberate and determined mission to imbue Fairy Tale with a capital F and T with spirituality. And the same for Fantasy. To make Mythology soulful, in a word.

This of course is obvious on one level. But it’s easy to forget its audacity in our secular modern world filled with scientific jargon, Silicon Valley algorithms and self-conscious marketing speak. Literary generalists have dubbed Tolkien’s work “High Fantasy,” a label that first came into fashion in the 1970s. It denotes epic fantasy and speculative stories with a detailed alternative setting. Multi-verses have of course only raised the stakes, perhaps to Mega Fantasy?

I jest, but the more I think about it, and after reading this latest chapter of THOME, I don’t think “High” is quite right. I don’t think Tolkien’s work belongs to any genre. If anything, it should be called Spiritual Fantasy.**** By which I mean it can’t really be defined or put in a box. He took myth, and expanded it by making his fairy tales prismatic. That is, he left the world brighter than he found it by letting it in. And so, looking into his gems, we refract as much as we reflect.

Tolkien had reeled from loss and reached through space and time to re-anchor to life’s deepest certainties in the violent interplay of poetic imagery. From Fëanor’s lamps to Gelmir’s hands, the shock of the past shines through us out to the future. For blessed are those who get to perceive the gleam behind the gleam.

*Perhaps most famously, King Arthur’s older sister Morgan Le Fay bares this heritage of “faie” and “fee” from the Old French romances, of which Sir Thomas Malory was greatly influenced by, when he was crafting his Middle English versions of the Arthurian legends in Le Morte D’Arthur.

**It’s a fairly common concept, but it bears repeating: Prometheus is a Titan from ancient Greek mythology who steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, which becomes a source of civilization, art and science. It is “secret knowledge,” so to speak, and Zeus punishes him by having an eagle peck at his liver over and over, each day the liver growing back only to be eaten again.

Also, it is worth noting here that Tolkien also used “Gnome” to denote his Noldoli. This of course conjures the image of garden gnomes. But like “fairy” and “elf,” it has a very interesting etymology: gnome is usually believed to be derived from the Renaissance era Latin “gnomus,” meaning it is assumed to be a mistake and really rooted in the Latin gēnomus, which is a reference to the Greek word for “earth-dweller”; but I think it’s worth considering that the mistake may have also been an intentional play on gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. And “Know” actually derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root of “gno-.”

***Tolkien’s use of “phosphor-light” is striking. The word is associated with the morning star and phosphorus, a chemical substance that was used heavily in England for matches and in World War I as a component of grenades and in flares. Tolkien was a Signals Officer in WWI, so it’s intriguing to think that phosphor and phosphorus were on his mind at this time.

****I realize this potentially takes us into an area of extreme pretensions. My rumination on the often inscrutable power of Tolkien’s mythology is a bit like raving at the moon. We’re digging through the land of archetypes here for the fossils and bones of modern myth. Inevitably, it was going to take us to an ever more spiritual place. Not religious. But a poetic consciousness that pushes against conventions and peers beyond words. With your blessing, let’s lean into the spirit of fantasy as we journey onward.

Our History of Middle Earth Journal Index - The Book of Lost Tales, Part One:

1. The Cottage of Lost Play / Opening the Heart of Modern Myth

2. The Music of the Ainur / Tolkien’s Creation and the Creator

3. The Coming of the Valar / The Valar, Gods of Wisdom and Wonder, Part One

4. The Building of Valinor / The Valar, Gods of Wisdom and Wonder, Part Two

5. The Chaining of Melko / Who the Hell is Tinfang Warble?

6. The Chaining of Melko / The Convolution of Evil in Middle-earth

7. The Coming of the Elves / Tolkien’s Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems, Part One

8. The Making of Kôr / Tolkien’s Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems, Part Two

Following The Chaining of Melko, the fourth chapter of The Book of Lost Tales: Part One, of the monumental History of Middle-Earth (THOME), we move into the fifth chapter, The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr. Like the last chapter, it is an odd one, a mixture of unsure storytelling and moments of mythological brilliance. In the same way that the fay character Tinfang Warble conflicted with the darker descriptions of Melkor’s hellish redoubt, this chapter retains some of the more twee tones of stereotypical “fairy tales” while belying the weirder and stranger imaginings of J.R.R. Tolkien.* Like a steady but unmistakable tide, his deeply eccentric aesthetic — for that is what it is, though we take it for granted — emerges in moody imagery and inspired passages of description.

But to get there, we first have to surmount sea barriers that resist his powers. Like the previous waves, it begins with the human mariner Eriol and an elfin storyteller who recounts a “lost” history to him about the origins of the world. Queen Meril-i-Turinqui tells of how Melko was imprisoned and how the Valar — Varda especially — prepared for the coming of the Eldar.**

The text for some time carries an antiquated vernacular, with “methinks” and “thither” and “stonied” and “blindeth.” It’s not so much that these archaic words are bad in and of themselves. Clearly Tolkien was taking a cue from the writers of his youth, including 18th century interpretations of Norse and Celtic mythology. This was the “lingo” so-to-speak of legends and tales and it seems to me that it took Tolkien a while to find the right tinge of this quality.

It also seems this is true of his own names, many here being of weaker quality than the names he polished and settled on later. So that you have “Solosimpi” and “Tinwë Linto,” “Nornorë” and “Silubrilthin.” These are not terrible constructions. But they lack the sharp balance he later achieved, so that “Solosimpi” later became the “Falmari” and “Tinwë Lintö” became “Thingol.”

I know it’s “subjective,” but my strong opinion is that Tolkien greatly improved the narrative of the coming of the Elves and his names over time. The first half of The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr is pretty rough going. It is confusing and uneven in tone. I’ve noted the archaic language as one distraction. The other however is the Valar and the Maiar, who are rendered here as “all too human.” That is, very much in the mold of ancient Greek drama and plays, as well as Homeric legends (though Homer balances this out some in the Iliad and the Odyssey), we get gods who bicker and exuberate.

The first example of this is when the Valar realize that the Elves, the first Children of Ilúvatar, have awakened in the world — in this rather abrupt scene, Oromë, god of hunting, emerges in Valmar to declare their arrival: “Tulielto! Tulielto! They have come — they have come!” It is also stated just before, that the goddess Varda had also made many stars to commemorate the coming of the Eldar, but that in fact it was the blacksmith god Aulë who sparked them from his forge. Did Varda create them or did Aulë? It’s unclear. Tolkien seems pulled in two different directions over a matter that seems superfluous to the dramatic origin story of one his greatest creations — the Elves.***

That’s in part why the “Tulielto!” bit from Oromë feels melodramatic. Manwë senses that the Elves have awakened. Varda rushes to make stars to celebrate, then rushes back and drops a bright star named “Morwinyon,” but we’re told Aulë actually created the Seven Stars, and then Oromë shows up. It’s a lot of information and gives the impression that the Valar are clumsy.

That’s not to say that gods or nature or the universe is orderly. The previous chapters have spent many breaths establishing that chaos — and in particular Melkor and the impulse to control Creation by subjugating or destroying — is inherent to the cosmos.

However, while many have long criticized The Silmarillion — the evolved and “final” articulation of the tales first devised in The Book of Lost Tales — for being heavy on linguistic inventions but light on actual storytelling, it seems to me that its sparseness is part of its power. “Tulielto!” is not as effective as Tolkien’s much simpler descriptions in The Silmarillion of the coming of the Elves. For example, his detailed description of the lake that the Elves first awake next to, far east in Middle-earth, called Koivië-néni here and Cuiviénen in The Silmarillion, evokes something more poetic and starker in the later version. Where here the speedy Nornorë — a kind of Hermes or Mercury — runs in a flash from Valinor to Cuiviénen, and there talks to them in high speech, whereas later in The Silmarillion, no speech is relayed. Instead, we get a mythic quiet.

In fact, much is different in The Silmarillion. For one, Tolkien describes Oromë’s discovery of the Elves, which is written with great beauty and economy. We learn that the Elves awaken as Varda completes her work kindling many great stars and constellations in the dark sky. There is no mention of Aulë co-creating the Seven Stars. All praise is given to Varda, and it is the stars that the Elves first see, and from thereon hold her in the highest regard among the Valar.

We also learn that they hear running water and become enchanted by its music in The Silmarillion. They also make speech, and hence call themselves the Quendi — “speakers” — and are harried, we learn, by Melkor. It is this preying on the young Eldar that prompts the Valar to besiege Melkor and chain him. Only then do we return to the question of whether, and how, to bring the Eldar to the land of the gods. There is a great debate in The Silmarillion, and the decision to remove the Eldar from the threat of Melkor is given great consequence, memorialized by Mandos, the Doomsman of the Valar: “So it is doomed.”

Gulp! There is in fact very little of this fateful twisting and turning in the original work. That Tolkien and his son Christopher stripped down this particular tale to its essence, while also embedding the Chaining of Melkor within the heart of the Elves’ great odyssey to Uttermost West, strikes the mind with just how stunning The Silmarillion is as a work of art. It is eloquent and mysterious, serious and fay, beautiful and, dare I say, trippy as hell. The twists are spiritual, not textual.

That is to say, Tolkien was obviously just getting his ideas down on paper at this stage, experimenting with the depictions and machinations of the Valar and Maiar so that he could sift out the most critical and brightest elements of his mythology. So while The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr is convoluted and at times sort of silly, in my opinion it marks a critical shift to the darker and more melancholy tones of Tolkien’s vision. The magic seam is here.

I think he achieves this with one incredibly important image, an image that he will return to time and again but in different ways — a world without sunlight or moonlight. From this primordial era of the Valar to dungeons in Melkor’s fortress, from the Mines of Moria to the gathering darkness of Mordor, Tolkien is a master of light because he is willing to not only sustain darkness for chapters on end, but because he also contemplated a state of consciousness before the circadian rhythms that still dominate so much of our earthly human biology.

And so what is this one image? The dark sea — “strange was the roaring of the unlit sea in those most ancient days upon the rocky coast that bore still the scars of the tumultuous wrath of Melko.”

Wow! That’s some heady and bleak stuff. We’re talking about a vast open sea that one can hardly even see. Without a sun or moon, it lacks a horizon, so that one can imagine the sea and the sky constituting one interminable dark expanse, calling to the Elves to cross into the deep unknown. You can almost hear the waves crashing, feel the cold wind blowing, see the stars so very bright, yet far.

And yet why did the Elves decide to come to that dark shore? In this early version of the coming of the Elves to Valinor, it is as simple as Nornorë zipping three leaders of the Elves to the land of the gods, where they are then convinced to corral their tribes to make the long arduous journey west. These three Elven chieftains are Isil Inwë, Finwë Nólemë and Tinwë Lintö.

Tolkien also works in a couple striations of linguistic play here as well. We are told that these three Elves have “Noldoli” names too: Inwithiel, Golfinweg and Tinwelint respectively. The Noldoli are the people of Finwë, or Golfinweg. The Solosimpi are the people of Tinwë, or Tinwelint. And the Teleri, and the “Inwir” in particular, are the people of Inwë. For those who know their Silmarillion, some of this changes and switches fairly drastically later, either in terms of names or attributes. For example, Inwë becomes Ingwë, a slight change, but his people become the Vanyar and the name “Teleri” moves to represent Tinwë’s tribe, becoming the seafaring and sea-loving Elves.

The Teleri, who are here called the Solosimpi, become separated from each other in the great migration of the Elves to the holy lands of the Valar, across the great sea of Belegaer. For Tinwë, their chief and father of Tinúviel we are told, is lost in the wilds. It is said he lives with his spouse, Wendelin, “a sprite come long long ago from the quiet gardens of Lórien,” who is the Vala of dreams and brother of Mandos, the Vala of the dead. Tinwë Lintö is Elwë, known also later as Elu Thingol, and Wendelin is Melian the Maia, of The Silmarillion.

Again, much of this description of these tribes, their leaders, and their branching distinctions, is fairly convoluted to my mind. It could be that’s because I am also comparing this original account with the final more tidy account that Tolkien gives in The Silmarillion. It’s hard to know for sure. But after thinking about it some, my conclusion is that it was in fact tangled and messy in this first conception. Part of that is the process of creativity. It is dizzying.

However, I also believe it is because Tolkien was unsure what exactly he wanted to do with his Elves at this point. They weren’t yet his own particular vision. His Elves still had traces of “elfs,” and had a colloquial diminished quality to them. Names like “Tinwelint,” “Golfinweg,” “Inwithiel” and “Wendelin” are the hint. There are a lot of “w” name constructions here. Perhaps this is an artifact of Tolkien’s work on the “w” entries in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1920?

Perhaps Celtic mythology was high on his reading list as well — or as he would later correct others — “Welsh” mythology was, as in the stories and poems of King Arthur, Sir Gawain, and the Mabinogion. All are filled with names like Guinivere (Welsh “Gwenhwyfar”), Gawain (Welsh “Gwalchmei ap Gwyar”), Gwydion, and Manawydan. There is also Mathonwy, perhaps inspiration for Tolkien’s preoccupation with “-wë” in Finwë and Ingwë.

I think one of the breakthroughs that happened here was actually worked out through writing this chapter. Like I noted before, the final form is more concise and includes the Chaining of Melkor. But while this earliest form lacks the punch and power of his final design, Tolkien did something here that is missing in the later version, and that thing is distance, in terms of space, but also crucially in terms of time. So what we get from this version is a fuller sense of the long journey of the Elves to the home of the Valar.

While this contrasts with the speediness of Nornorë — a character I think Tolkien wisely discarded — the end result is what feels like a torturous and dangerous trek on land to a voyage at sea. Returning to the image of the “unlit sea,” personally it seems to me that Tolkien was working out two important universal phenomena — light and time. While the Valar could do all sorts of superhuman things in a primordial atmosphere and landscape, introducing organic sentient beings demands a different set of literary techniques.

For one, it seems the Elves would experience time very differently in a world without a sun or moon to mark day or night. The only temporal pulse in Eä, the World that Is — is the fluctuating silver and golden light between the Two Trees (see my entry on the Valar for a breakdown of this phenomenon). But the Trees are in Valinor and not observable by the Elves in Cuiviénen. So in a way how long the Elves’ journey took is immeasurable in some sense. Also, how Elves experienced time is a mystery too. In the earlier chapters when Eriol first meets the Elves in the city of Kortirion on Tol Eressëa, or when they tell him his mortal life is but brief in the long lives and history of the Elves, we get a little taste of this “immortal” perspective — it’s maybe a curse as much as a blessing.

So it seems to me that it is here in these “most ancient days,” that the nature of reality as it is experienced by living beings starts to truly enter the conversation in innovative and fascinating ways. One of the tricks Tolkien devises — and this may be coincidental, unconscious or conscious, or all at once — is that Tolkien ties the coming of the Elves both to geologic and astral time. Geologic in the sense that they awaken next to a lake that no one really can place on a map — something Tolkien smartly leans into in The Silmarillion, when he tells us that the lake is gone, lost to changes in the landscape. Astral in the sense that the very first description of the Elves is as “folk who gaze in wonder at the stars.”

Which brings us back to time versus light, and Tolkien’s unique linguistic aesthetic versus the names in Welsh legends that he admired. He had to find his own way, and he did it by tapping into the senses. As we’ve discussed before, his origin myth — his Genesis — starts with the metaphor of music. And as his Book of Lost Tales progresses, he brings in darkness and light, and starlight, and like waves roaring on a rocky coast, the great fate of the Elves rolls over the land. In the long lapping waves of his own life, we know quite clearly that this process also yielded a more original and more delightful aesthetic sensibility — this is still subjective, but for me his names bested any Welsh-isms and stand apart. I’m not going to go deep into the aesthetic power of Tolkien’s invented languages here. A good place to dive into that topic is my entry on his names. But I will say here that some of his better names at this foundational stage are his simplest ones.

Which brings us to Ulmo and Falman-Ossë, and Uin and Uinen. These four names to me are pure Tolkien. Ulmo is an iteration on the fairly common Elmo, but a sly brilliant appropriation, the shift from “E” to “U” in the first letter a masterstroke. It also has the benefit of alluding to St. Elmo’s fire: the atmospheric phenomenon brought on by electrical charges from shifting weather — including as harbingers of lightning strikes — has long been revered by sailors. But “Ulmo” has a deeper tone, conjuring “underwater” and “ultimate.” And Falman-Ossë takes an already strong construction in “Ossë” — perhaps a sonic play on “O’sea” — and adds “Falman,” which Tolkien adapts from the root “fala” for “Falathrim” and “Falmari” — meaning “coast people” and “wave-folk” respectively.

Uin does not survive into The Silmarillion, but is remarkable because he is a whale — there is no other whale in Tolkien’s mythology that comes to mind. Perhaps we will meet more whales in THOME, but here we are told that Uin is the “mightiest and most ancient of the whales,” whom Ulmo summons to help drag the Elves on an island across the sea to Valinor. Uinen, the wife of Ossë is not given a big role in this major event but in later legend we learn that she cared for all sea creatures and alone could help calm the wraths and rages of Ossë and his sea storms. Here she mostly just aids Ossë in a tug-of-war with Ulmo and Uin, helping tie the isle down to the sea-bottom with “giant ropes of leather-weeds.”

The tempestuousness of the sea is a critical aspect of the crossing of the Elves to Valinor. Falman-Ossë does not want the Elves to leave Middle-earth and hole up in the land of the gods. He wants them to stay in the wilds — and along the many great coasts of the Great Lands. But he also simply wants to spite Ulmo for using his island to carry the Elves without asking. There’s a lot of clashing here and the back and forth between Ulmo and Ossë feels at times forced and overly convenient, as if Tolkien was drumming up conflict to give this chapter excitement and some plot propulsion. It’s an ordeal to get to Valinor.

Ever a master of description — “world-building” that is — we can tell here that Tolkien was building up fantastical sediments and contours and motivations that could fit with his bigger philosophical ambitions as they evolved into ever grander gestures and feats of the imagination — laying the groundwork for all that would follow in the years ahead, from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings and finally The Silmarillion. We’ve discussed the dimension of time quite a bit, but as we consider how different dimensions and senses can work together I think now it is important we return to the motif of light and darkness.

Rhythm is critical in any narrative that ties its themes and imagery to light and darkness, not just time, especially when we’re talking about a time before there was a sun. In many different parts of The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, the image of darkness is repeated: “Shadowy Seas,” “unlit sea,” “Shadow Folk” and “deepest shades,” “floated darkly,” “dark waters” and “darkling glade.” More than any of the previous chapters, Tolkien is driving home the idea that much of this old world has no light or radiance like the sun or the moon, except for the Two Trees in Valinor, a spiritual light that echoes back to the music of Creation.

By doing this, Tolkien was playing with both the sensual and the spiritual, as well as the primal. When it comes to light and darkness, there is perhaps few things as powerful in the biology and psychology of humanity. Of course water is another elemental fact of life, its liquid undulations reflecting the waveforms of energy that spread throughout the universe, both oceanic, cosmic and temporal. With water, Tolkien ties them all together — time, light, music — on a dark sea.

And it is the play of light on the waves that Tolkien excels at, as he picks up his pace and dexterity the further we read into The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr. I won’t got into all of the imagery here, but it is in Ossë’s moodiness that it seems Tolkien delighted here. His motivations feel false and petty, but his pain and his alienation do not. One sweet passage describes how Ossë’s love for the Solosimpi beckons him close to their abodes along the shores and caves of Tol Eressëa, Eldamar, its coasts, and the opening to Valinor in the Bay of Faëry.

“Indeed war had been but held off by the Gods, who desired peace,” writes Tolkien, touched himself by war. “Therefore does Ossë sometimes ride the foams out into the bay of Arvalin and gaze upon the glory on the hills, and he longs for the light and happiness upon the plain, but most for the song of birds and the swift movement of their wings into the clear air, grown weary of his silver and dark fish silent and strange amid the deep waters.”

Now we’re getting closer to what Tolkien’s Elves mean to Ossë through the love and anger of Ossë and his battles with Ulmo over their migration from Middle-earth to the landlocked homes of Valmar. He wants his “children” to be nearer. He wants their company among the waves.

But tn The Silmarillion, this convolution and strife has a wholly different reason for its drives. What we are told is that Ossë is not fearful or resentful of his lord, Ulmo, but that Melkor for a time corrupted and confused him, and that it was Uinen and Aulë who persuaded him to return to Ulmo.

Christopher Tolkien makes a point of this in the chapter’s endnotes. As he emphasizes, in The Silmarillion, it is Ulmo who counsels against the Eldar migrating to Valinor and Ossë is simply helping him delay their crossing.

In the same rich vein, when Oromë first finds the Eldar in Cuiviénen, he learns that they are also filled with some fear. For a “dark Rider” it was rumored would come among them and hunt them, or was it perhaps that Melkor had propagated lies among the Eldar that a Great Rider would prey on them, so to turn them away from Oromë when he found them? Tolkien offers both as possible.

This is a subtle but incredibly important shift in the mythology. As I pointed out in our previous entry on THOME, the convolution of evil in The Chaining of Melko rings false, because in the later evolution of Melkor into Morgoth, Tolkien moved from a Classical conception of evil to one that incorporates a deep moral view of the universe, similar to the hybridization of Christianity with Platonic thought achieved by the Roman philosopher, Boethius.

This begins to give Tolkien’s Elves more purpose, and his imagery of shadow and light more poetic meaning. While there are only traces here, they are still striking when they flash in the darkness.

“Twice now had that isle of their dwelling caught the gleam of the glorious Trees of Valinor” — the holy trees: silver Silpion and golden Laurelin. And that once twilit isle becomes Tol Eressëa, carried back and forth, ferrying the Elves to Valinor, until it settles just off the coast, the brilliant light of the Two Trees beaming through a seam in the mountains of Valinor.

Earlier in the chapter, it is worth rereading to better understand that in the darkness of the world, one without sun or moon, it is this spiritual organic radiance that beckons the Elves “home” to the unknown.

When Isil Inwë, Tinwë Lintö and Finwë Nólemë first come as ambassadors to Valinor, Manwë, the leader of the Valar, asks them how they came into being, how they found the world, and what desire has entered their hearts? For Manwë also knows they are Consciousness itself, emerged from a deeper ocean of space and time, interlinked with him and all that is, and here he is asking a reflection to reflect on what lies beyond and before it awoke.

But Nólemë answering said: “Lo! Most mighty one, whence indeed come we! For meseems I awoke but now from a sleep eternally profound, whence vast dreams already are forgotten.” And Tinwë said thereto that his heart told him that he was new-come from illimitable regions, yet he might not recollect by what dark and strange paths he had been brought; and last spake Inwë, who had been gazing upon Laurelin while the others spake, and he said: “Knowing neither whence I came nor by what ways nor yet whither I go, the world that we are in is but one great wonderment to me, and methinks I love it wholly, yet it fills me altogether with a desire for light.”

Who is “me” who seems and thinks? It is we. And we dream and we love, and yes, we certainly need and desire light, even when the darkness is not evil, even when the sea is shadowy, even when we can’t perceive what lies beyond that invisible horizon, whether it be the edge of the world, the door to death, or the distant twinkle of the stars. Cast out or invited in, land or sea, it is still the music in everything, the play of light and shadow, that dazzles “me”. Just ask Ossë…

“Far behind lay Tol Eressëa in silence and its woods and shores were still, for nearly all that host of sea-birds had flown after the Eldar and wailed now about the shores of Eldamar,” Tolkien writes. But “Ossë dwelt in despondency and his silver halls in Valmar abode long empty, for he came no nearer to them for a great while than the shadow’s edge, whither came the wailing of his sea-birds far away.”

*Melkor is the chief villain and approximates Satan in Tolkien’s works.

**The Valar are the gods of Tolkien’s mythology. The Eldar are the Elves.

***The Children of Ilúvatar are higher order sentient beings created by the God of Tolkien’s mythology, who is named Ilúvatar. They include Elves and Humans, and by extension or adoption, Hobbits, Dwarves and Ents. Valmar is the name of the main city in the land of the gods, Valinor.

Our History of Middle Earth Journal Index - The Book of Lost Tales, Part One:

1. The Cottage of Lost Play / Opening the Heart of Modern Myth

2. The Music of the Ainur / Tolkien’s Creation and the Creator

3. The Coming of the Valar / The Valar, Gods of Wisdom and Wonder, Part One

4. The Building of Valinor / The Valar, Gods of Wisdom and Wonder, Part Two

5. The Chaining of Melko / Who the Hell is Tinfang Warble?

6. The Chaining of Melko / The Convolution of Evil in Middle-earth

7. The Coming of the Elves / Tolkien’s Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems

8. The Making of Kôr / Tolkien’s Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems, Part Two

Not thought. But spirit. Ghosts, not dreams. Where do they come from and where do they go? Is there a place that no one can imagine? What if we could talk to the dead and return from the future? What if humanity had made thinking machines hundreds of thousands of years ago? What if all thought was a restless reflection on the surface of a deeper truth, one deeper than skin or bone, where light and shadow are one, and madness turns the night into insight?

These are the questions I am asking myself these days, more than what time or exact place of the mythology that has been percolating inside me since I was a child — a hobby, a project, a vision — an obsession, that has waxed and waned over the years, but now halfway on my mortal road, gleams ever brighter in the darkness. Like a spectral gem, it refracts the kooky glow of a fool moon.

That world, and that story, I have titled Aphantasia — a place that cannot be easily imagined or perhaps even pictured at all. Something boggling and at the edge of consciousness: right there, at the moment of perception, is creation. Following in the footsteps of J.R.R. Tolkien, this world I am going to and where I hope to take you is not some alien planet, but our own Earth. Back in time perhaps, or maybe it is forward. It is covered in the mists of time. It starts at the end of a life-age of the Earth: the ebbing of an ice eon, glaciers in retreat, melting mountains of frost, lakes and rivers babbling, and long buried secrets unfolding.

I’ve seen a green tower standing in the vast land of ice where once the hills and rocks were dusted with powdered green tea. High up, it rises into the clouds, and airships hover about, and giant dragonflies buzz around. So a messenger flees his cage and flies across oceans to a razor-cut valley, where he is rescued by a girl, a watcher, a huntress. It just so happens, her ancestors knew this bird. It just so happens that she also knows a moth, the oldest living thing not of this Earth.

An ancient knowledge comes to the girl, who learns to engrave the sacred riddles of all time and all worlds onto a box that will hold a gem that holds all the dreams of all living things in its endless prismatic glim: where mazes and doors open onto different ends of the universe. That is where she finds the Half Owl, far from its home, alone in Irèlia, far from anything she can imagine, where no thoughts go...

In the weeks and months ahead, I will start to publish some of the short stories and early drafts of the Aphantasia cycle.* There you will meet Greil (Banshee), the wizard Low Owl, and the Gamma Wolf. Related to my work exploring the magic of Tolkien’s legendarium, Aphantasia is a conscious and unconscious mythology that will be a journey in itself, as I try to transmute memories, sensibilities, and I hope what wisdom is available to me, into a modern dream narrative. The long-term goal is to craft and sculpt a lasting epic for any who may find or need it.

Why? Because these days I believe that we’re in dire need of new mythologies that can speak to the moment by reconnecting us with something older and something deeper. Which means over time, our metaphors and our language must evolve in order to introduce new ways of seeing things. I am not trying to best Tolkien or surpass his legendarium. If I’ve learned anything the past several months going through The History of Middle-Earth, it’s simply that what Tolkien achieved, over decades, is practically superhuman. Certainly, he was often stumbling through darkness. But he was also a unique and complex person, a conundrum of loss, triumphs, passions, revelations, and idiosyncrasies. He burned so very bright.

I’m both scared and enlivened by the challenge to do anything even a little bit worthy. As the late fantasy author Terry Pratchett so beautifully said of Tolkien: “J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”

Reading that quote, I have often wondered if Pratchett was also alluding to the fact that Tolkien owned and admired Japanese prints, likely woodblock prints by the great master painters Hokusai and Hiroshige, who so often painted Mt. Fuji as their muse, whose works inspired Vincent Van Gogh and so many other artists. Being “hafu,” or “hapa,” or “half” Japanese, as if my DNA were some racial mathematical equation cut right down the middle, I find this to be apt and mysterious. I’m not going “against the mountain.”

No. If I’m lucky, and if I can get out of my own way, I’m going to try to go “through the mountain,” go “into” the volcano, trample over Fuji-san’s white snows and look out on the sea from its black-sand slopes, and then down into its heat and smoke and hopefully through some miracle or trick — and perseverance, come out the other side and rediscover some previously unknown dream palace. It’s a fool’s hope and a fool’s errand under a fool moon. But it’s a fun one that I can’t pass up, so pass into it I will.

Finally, please note that some of the material will be available for free while some will only be available to paying subscribers. This is not my natural instinct, but these stories will not be “blog posts” or “newsletters,” but mythic works.

That is, I am placing more personal value onto this labor of love. And I hope it in turn gives you something back. As ever, thank you for your support.

- T.Q. Kelley

*The name Aphantasia comes from the term for the inability to conjure mental images, i.e. the opposite of imagination. Currently, five chapters of the Aphantasia Trilogy are drafted but will continue to evolve, as short stories are also written to help fill in the history and edges of the world. The plan so far is to do a trilogy titled Where No Thoughts Go, with three titled volumes:

• Low Owl

• Lava Hawk

• Gamma Wolf

I won’t share more at this point about its themes and flavor than what I have above. Suffice to say, that while it is not a pure allegory — for those who know their Tolkien, that is my way of saying that I don’t think masking reality or history with fantasy works well as a one-to-one association game — it will most certainly be a fairy tale. That is, it is most certainly concerned with the fantastical, and the metaphorical, the imagined, and the real. And, it is at its heart, spiritual.

Now, that’s a word that was tiring to hear in the 1990s, when it seemed to me that every earnest new age traveller, West Coast intellectual, and indeed internet do-gooder, was in search of the “spiritual,” or thought of themselves as not religious but “spiritual,” and thus the last 30 years of technological progress, and its resultant techno babble and psychic chaos, are anything but.

Which is simply to say, that it seems to me that we’re in need of mythologies that can speak to the unrest; and that our deeply confusing and fractured civilization can use to help rethink, reground, and even re-enchant our sense of faith in the present. We live in a time when the line between magic and the machine is blurring beyond recognition. Fantasy and science fiction are one. But the juxtaposition of the two is less important than the spirit behind them.