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

Not an hour later, with several manuscripts spread before them on the room desk and bureau top, Osley told her much of the text was indeed written in Elvish. She was impressed that he managed to say it with a straight face. “Unfortunately,” he said, “much of this is in a dialect and style now beyond my powers of translation.”

“Os, that sounds a little too convenient for your first test.”

“Don’t despair! There does seem to be a name for it: Myrcwudu. It refers to both a forest and their language. Now, there are other writings, as well as extensive annotations. These are apparently by a historian who wrote hundreds of years after the events, later in the Fourth Age but still of times ancient by our reckoning. They are in a rude style of Lower Elf that lends itself to our reading.”

Her skepticism about Osley waned as he became very solemn and began writing on a yellow pad. Then he switched to hotel stationary (the Algonquin was over-generous in that regard). He progressed with the starts and stumbles of a rusty translator. An hour passed as he repeatedly consulted the key. Finally, he offered to tell her what the ancient scholar wrote. His words grew steadier, and like a weary gate, a tale of another world opened:

From Hertegest Historians (remnant):

The lesser race of Great Wolves is the Ulf-Ragen, sometimes referred to as warkylgen or wargs. They are the wolf-steeds of orcs. Once rogue outlaws to their kind, they now grovel before the orc fires.

The master race of the Great Wolves, purer, nobler and seldom turned to any will save their own, are the true Dire Wolves. They are Descendents of Amarog, the Yellow Eye, also known as Evilglint. Dire wolves stand six feet at the shoulders; they are stronger and more perilous than living man can imagine; and they bear a cunning wisdom, equal in their element to that of the Wood-elves. The last reported droug, or pack, was in the northern forest before the coming of the Great Winter that signaled the end of the Third Age.

“There’s a break here, let’s see. Yes.” His words soon trod the main path of Ara’s story:

Within an hour of passing through the last of the aspen groves, the road deepened into a gorge that rose up on all sides. There she felt a presence. Something, or rather several somethings, were moving stealthily behind her on both sides of the shadow-casting cliffs. She feared that Dire Wolves had found her. She hurried her pace, doubling back waist-deep in the dark brook. Soon the cleft opened into a plain that ran all the way to the blue teeth of the far mountains dividing the world. Only the hawk, soaring alone, cut the air with movement— that and the ash-like shadows of clouds that seeped from the mountains and dissipated to the west.

She camped in fear and without fire on an island in a broadening water flow. Better to wait there than further announce her presence by her smell on the road this night.

A bright moon-rind rose late. On the near shore, Ara saw them. They were phantoms silvered by the light, their breath rising pale in the cold from some primitive inner furnace that drove them to contort and leap in their solitary completeness. They stood on their hind legs and danced.

They licked and nuzzled and growled and yelped. They stopped all at once, one balanced upright on two legs like a dancer, one with forefoot raised in the air. Ears twitched. Their uncanny knowing spreading out to touch her.

Just as quickly, perhaps sensing other prey, they began to howl and loped away as the edge of the world ate away at the falling piece of moon.

All of it was so strange and perfect, Ara thought they were as beings self-designed, without need save as fit their own plan.

In the gray light of pre-morning, Ara once again heard the wolves howling, far away. She listened in the drawn-out stillness. Dew dripped off leaves, the water gurgled nearby, and a low sonorous bellow of frogs’ matings hung in the air. The hawk fluttered its wings. Beyond these she heard something else. She turned her head to the side, holding her ear just so. After awhile she was sure the wind carried the sound of blowing horns. But these sounded elaborate and full of meaning, not like the blare and blat of orc horns. The sounds soon faded, and the hunters, if such they were, passed on and out of this tale.

Osley ended his recitation and they stayed silent. Ara was stunned by his quickening facility to translate. No one could make this up on the fly, she thought.

“Snap!” she said. “That reminds me. I’ve got something to show you.” She dug in her purse, sorting through the papers she’d stolen from the Tolkien archives box. She put the napkin with the strange subway instructions back in her purse, but handed him a small piece of browned hide, perhaps four inches by five inches. On it were proud runic flourishes.

“Where did you get this?”

“My trip to the library basement that you were so worried about. Now, what’ve we got?”

After a studied moment, he held the fragment up, as if for a throng to see. “What we have here, my dear, is of vital importance. Despite its battered appearance, this is no ledgerscrap. The High Elvish inscribed on it withholds its full meaning from me as yet, but I know the main word. Here.” He pointed at a flourish with long trailing legs. “This is the symbol for ‘Vow’, a word not to be taken lightly. It perhaps is related to the Vow of Protection in that archaic poem by Pazal, the king-turned-wraith. In any case, it may be of more importance than the rest of these scribbles. Where you found it is telling.” Again he waved the piece of hide. “This is, if I trust my first judgment, something held precious by the best authority on deeper Elvish translation, Professor Tolkien himself!”

Chapter 20 INKLINGS VI

Part of the recording of this session was corrupted by, of all things, a melted Cadbury bar. The transcript begins somewhere midway in the evening.

“… no great imagination to believe that there was once real magic in the world. What is certain is that it no longer exists, save perhaps in little glimmers of wonder. It was lost, shattered into fragments. And with that shattering the world changed. Heroes and their feats were fated to shrink to misunderstood words garbled into turns of phrase and dusty poems. Things of great moment became mere lists. Heraldic honor rolls became names without import, save to stir troublesome feelings of something sadly lost. We are left with vague recollections of more vibrant times when each day mattered. What say you to that, Tollers?”

“Quite so, Charles, but even if such was the fate of their feats and their names, their tales deserve better! My goal, at least, is to resurrect some of that moment before the Loss of Magic. Who knows, just as characters in a story sometimes know they are part of a tale, so all of us might someday be in a story. Even you, Jack!”

Laughter.

“Now the ale is full to your taps, that’s for sure.”

“And we would be idiots to believe our ramblings benefit anything other that the cleaning rag that will follow our empty glasses.”

“If any of our musings were remembered by the listening walls and this stout-hearted carving post of a table …”

“Better yet, recorded so your outlandish remarks could be tallied against you in the future, Ian!”

More laughter and indecipherable banters.

“Perhaps, but regarding one’s life as a story, whether ultimately preserved or in time utterly forgotten, is still not the worst of philosophies.”

“So, how are your actual writings coming, Tollers?”

“Not so well. I have aspired to write a ‘philosophical thriller.’ Something a bit deeper about the nature of reality, perhaps. Put all this myth and legend into a modern time, let the struggles happen in a contemporary world somehow connected to the old. Yes …”

“And, Tollers, just last week you said that in the fantasy world you visit in your tales …”

“I said, to be precise, ‘In that world you are not dreaming, you are in a dream of another’s weaving.’ The questioning of this story-cauldron is about perilous realms and their shadowy marches. To put a point on it, whether elves are true and exist independently of our tales.”

There is a moment of silence.

“Are you in jest, Tollers? You would have us believe that?”