laden high with books and boxes and casting an improbable shadow. She laughed out of fright. After a moment she turned around to look at different rows of boxes, squinting at the labels, realizing time was moving on. Q … R … S ….
Tolkien’s box, when she found it, was exactly in place and disappointingly small. It was sealed with masking tape that had long since given up its glue to the dry heat from those creaky radiators standing as derelict sentinels along the walls. The tape fell away as she pulled on the lid. As she opened the box, she smelled, amazingly, the earthy scent of pipe tobacco. She saw clumps of partially burned tobacco scattered over a stack of papers, as if carelessly left there by a harried pipe smoker. On top of the papers was a note, precisely placed and long since yellowed. It was scrawled in an unsteady hand that looked like the Professor’s. She turned and moved over to catch the light from an incandescent bulb that looked like it had burned without interruption since Edison.
She unfolded the note. It began, “To Whom May Follow.” She read the note, uncomfortable as an outsider witnessing a private ritual. She paused over Professor Tolkien’s warnings.
She fingered down through the other papers. There was an article dated 1967 from the University of Leeds Review:
A remarkable document has been discovered in the collection of antiquities found in the estate of the late Grivendall Thurston, Earl of Haymart, and attributed to the library of his great-great-grandfather, the (at the time) notorious eccentric, and now merely famous, “Mad Librarian,” Sir Robert Cotton.
The document apparently was saved from the great fire at the improvidently named Ashburnham House in 1731. The world’s only original of
“These things surface from time to time,” said Allison Mansur, the head librarian at Columbia University. “After all, Beowulf itself, so far as we can tell, lay lost and unread for seven hundred years, from the time of the Norman Conquest until its discovery in a Copenhagen library in 1815.”
“But,” he continued, “this specimen is rather remarkable for both its age and its potential place in Anglo- Saxon studies. Some of the material has yet to be translated, due to the strangeness of its symbols, a system not heretofore seen. In a nutshell, it appears to be a lament written by an ancient king in his own hand. The manuscript, as part of the bequest, is housed at Columbia University, where the Earl maintained close ties since his days as an exchange student.”
Stapled behind the article was a page of notes by the Professor:
The manuscript, which I have now translated, is by all indications authentic. That means that it is well over twelve hundred years old. The unaccountable fact, unless I have misplaced my wits somewhere, is that this poem echoes elements of my forty years of writing. Perhaps my musings and myth-creation have not been far off the mark!
Cadence was hungry to see the actual translation. She found the pages and stepped further down the aisle, directly under the bare light bulb. She whispered out loud the Professor’s rendering of those ancient words, the hushed sound spilling over into the empty stacks:
She skipped down and started again, reading what seemed to be an important passage:
Tolkien had scribbled a note here: “The blunt energy of these lines, the gold of men of old, enmeshed in woven spell, is the bard’s gift to us today.”
Waiting for the enemy that came only by rumour As creeping fog and distant sounds that give no battle But unsettle as no din of war could ever muster!
Here Tolkien had underlined portions of the text:
