Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien

evoke stories unbidden and feelings foreign and troubling.’”

“I have already have met this oracle. And I fear I know the truth of this message all too well.”

“Tollers, let me ask this respectfully, is there more here than you are saying? This document trove, of which you tell us little, has clearly upset you. What is your disquiet? Do those ‘words’ whisper to you, separate from their voice on the page?”

“Cecil, I detect your cynic’s ear. My answer is yes. Better still, we have with us a witness, quite able to testify on this strange aspect. Here! My summer assistant, Mr. Osley, whom you have met, has had to sit here and slurp his ale double-time to keep measure with you and Jack.”

“Here! Here! Don’t be shy now, not becoming to a Yank. Speak up lad!”

A new voice is heard, barely audible to the hidden microphone.

“Well … uh … since you ask, I know this. Professor Tolkien has asked me to work on organizing and translating an unusual collection of documents. Some of them are in a language that I would say is — I know this sounds odd — true Elvish. It is not invented or imagined, but as real as Mr. Lewis’s breathless prose. It is a proper language in all respects except this: it is alive. The more we study it, the more … restless it becomes. Meanings change. They scurry on an unstill path.”

“Well, young master, you learned to dance well at the foot of your mentor. May I offer one compass for your stay here at Oxford?”

The sly winks and nods are almost audible.

“Why, yes sir.”

“On those forest paths, stick hard to the real trail. Keep your feet on the ground and your nose for those six points of Sheaf’s Stout to which Jack has introduced you. I have no doubt that, in the morning, the sheer size of your head will keep you grounded.”

Chapter 13 OCTOBER 21: MORNING

By nine a.m., Cadence was eating breakfast in the Algonquin’s Round Table Room and taking in the ambiance of the hotel. It truly was a grand old great-aunt of a place. It was partial to dark wood paneling and presided over by a highly competent if entrenched and fuss-budget, staff. The hotel manager brought her the New York Times and unfolded her napkin for her and asked if she was enjoying her stay. He exited with a professional grace. Just as her orange juice came, she settled back and opened the paper.

Her cell phone rang to the high brass notes of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. She muted the sound and checked the screen. The display read CALLER ID UNAVAILABLE. As she accepted the call, the voice launched right in.

“Any progress?” It was Mel.

“Sort of. I’m here having breakfast at the Algonquin. Thank you for that. I went to a strange bar on the Upper West Side. Remember the menu I showed you that’s initialed JRRT? That place. I met a one-eyed bartender. Oh, and I talked to a madman, a street person who speaks bad Shakespeare, like a C-list Marvel Comics character. Anyway, he says he met both Tolkien and my grandfather. He’s a loon, but he may be all I’ve got. I also got rained on big time and had a weirdo for a cab driver,” she added, even as she could already hear Mel’s fingers drumming on a table. “Not much progress, huh.”

“You’ve been there maybe twenty-four hours, relax.”

“Oh yes, it seems Tolkien, or someone pretending to be him, hung out at the West End. Years ago.”

“Uh-huh. Listen, don’t despair, because I’ve got news about our good professor Tolkien.”

“Like what?”

“Get this. The critics at first hated him, then, as with all successful writers, they adored him. But they all call him the Great Borrower because he treated prior stories and sources like, as they put it, a dragon’s horde — something to be routinely looted. Or more politely, to be ransacked at will and without attribution. His stories are populated with creatures, proper names, places, happenings from works by Shakespeare, Finnish literature, Sir Gawain, you name it.”

“Yeah, I thought that …”

“Here’s just a few examples of the borrowed names, nouns, and other stuff. I jotted them down for you. For starters, the word hobbit. Then it goes from there: Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, Middle Earth, Bag End, Hasufel, Edoras, Mirkwood, Midgewater, Wormtongue, Medusheld, ents, wargs, balrogs, woses, and roughly two-thirds of the various dwarf names. The list goes on and on.”

“OK, but what’s wrong with borrowing when he used it to create such great stuff?”

Her waiter unobtrusively placed her breakfast before her.

“Precisely, my dear. Tolkien felt no unease in this. To him, every name and every tale was a place to begin a new story. Which reminds me. Hell, I’m just a professional middleman, but I’d say Wagner’s opera, The Ring—about the one ring that could rule the world, and the remaking of the mythical sword that was broken — all sounds pretty familiar. Except Wagner wrote it in 1869. In any case as Tolkien said, the road goes on and on.”

“Yes. So?”

“So it means we’ve got the moral high ground. Tolkien’s view was that any story that borrows from older stories is a fair and natural part of the process. You see, creativity and innovation thrive on borrowing.”

“Mel, don’t take this the wrong way, but your inner poet must be trying to get out. You don’t strike me as one to rely on moral high ground very much.”

“Very true!” he laughed. “Nor will the ones I am about to talk about. They are the wielders of the power. They will seek to stifle and destroy anything new that is attributable to Tolkien even if it is authentically his.”

“Well, if you read what’s barely readable in this so-called fourth book, it looks like maybe he wrote, or at least translated, some small part of it, but by far most was written by other people, maybe at different times in the past. As in long, long ago. If you read it literally, it comes from some very strange place. Not his story book Middle-earth, but someplace different. The real one. The one he tried so hard to imagine. Ninety percent of it needs translation if that’s even possible. It’s just runes and stuff.”

“Let’s don’t get carried away. Parts of this may seem a little strange, but no matter.”

Cadence turned away from a nearby table of patrons and hunched over the phone. She dropped her voice. “‘Strange’ seems to be the operative word here.”

“Well”, he said, “I could have said ‘curiouser and curiouser’. In the vein of odd things, though, I just learned an interesting factoid about our Good Professor.”

“I can’t wait. No, honest, I want to hear it.”

“He was a spook.”

She rolled her eyes and laughed, as if he was a pure nut case. “You mean Tolkien’s a ghost?”

“No, stupid, a spy, a secret agent. As in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Because of his linguistic skills, he was recruited as a code-breaker at the beginning of World War II. You know, deciphering the Nazi Enigma Code, all that movie stuff. Anyway, he only did it for a short period. It’s a blurb in the news today. Declassified by M16.”

“How in the hell is that going to help me?”

“I don’t know. Who knows all the twists and turns in this? To answer your question, it probably doesn’t help. Only you can do that, with support from me.”

Cadence sat back and stared at her rapidly cooling scrambled eggs, wondering if things were about to get a lot curioser. “You know, Mel, I’m not sure what all this is about either. What I really care about though, more than anything, is finding out who my grandfather was and what happened to him.”

Cadence heard a voice in the background on Mel’s phone, “Mr. Chricter, Mr. Jackson’s office on 2.”

“Hey, uh … Cadence, hold on. I’ll be right back.”

She heard him put the phone down, get up, and talk on a speakerphone somewhere else in his office. It was dim but clear.