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Date: 03 October 2008 11:25:31
It was touch and go at several points, but all work that needed doing was done. The next two weeks look less stressful.
Anyway, I don't really have time to write much so here is something I wrote for one of my classes this week. They liked it, so here you go. Don't worry - nothing heavy and theological.
Imagine if you will a 13 year old, shopping in the local town on a Saturday morning. In John Menzies the stationer's and bookstore, on the upper floor on the left near the back of the shop there is a particular section of books. This girl goes to look at this shelf nearly every time she comes to town. And why?
On the bottom shelf is a huge brick of a book with shiny gold bits on the cover and a picture of an old man in a grey cloak, carrying a staff, striding through a forest. Something about that picture captivates her. Week after week she goes back. Along the gold edging something is written, although not in English. What does it say?
Eventually she finds herself with £10 - probably birthday money and she buys it. It must be just before a half term break because for the next 4 days, apart from eating and sleeping, she immerses herself in this new world of The Lord of the Rings, finding that the old man on the cover is Gandalf, on his way to the Shire to set some Hobbits off on a great adventure.
Perhaps it is the epic nature of the adventure, the cast of thousands, the heroes, the elves. It almost certainly wasn't the poetry, which interrupts the flow of the story. Yes, it was the story that kept her gripped until the end, the highs and lows, good overcoming evil, despair turning to hope, betrayal, love and loss, the story that kept her reading until the last line of page 1069. “'Well, I'm back', he said”. But there are lots of good stories in the world. Why this one?
The thing that kept her going back to this book time and time again were the extra 200 pages after that final line: the appendices. Here is contained a glimpse into a wider world of which this story is a fairly insignificant part. There is history, chronology, genealogy, including family trees to help keep all the characters in order, there are details of the calendars in use and then, most fascinating of all there is Appendix E: On Writing and Spelling. Finally, the funny script on the cover can be identified as the Angerthas and deciphered. The other script, the Tengwar, the curly one on the gates of the Mines of Moria takes longer to decipher, but is far more satisfying to play with. Later still there are invented languages to discover. All of this information is only scratching the surface of the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings is a gateway into his universe, one which took one man a lifetime to create and seems to offer scope for a lifetime of wonder for those reading it.