the movies and thought the Balrogs were really cool. Or they were thirteen-year-old girls who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought that Orlando Bloom was really hot.
These brief posts were outweighed by mighty articles from the obsessives, who wrote thousands of words on obscure aspects of Middle Earth, Tolkien’s invented world. There were disputes about whether those Balrogs had real wings or metaphysical ones, or about why there were no young ents, or about exactly who or what was Tom Bombadil.
Magnus hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings since he was thirteen himself, and he had only a vague recollection of all these characters. But it wasn’t just the obscurity of the arguments that surprised him, it was the passion and occasionally vitriol that accompanied them. To a great many people all over the world, The Lord of the Rings was clearly very, very important.
After two hours he found a posting from a man named Isildur. An obsessive. It consisted of several paragraphs commenting on a long academic article by someone called John Minshall on the nature of the power of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings.
There are a number of rings of power in Tolkien’s book, all made by elves, except for the greatest of them, the One Ring to rule them all, which was made by Sauron, the Dark Lord. Long before the events of the book took place a desperate battle was fought between the evil Sauron and an alliance of men and elves; a battle which was won by the alliance. The ring was cut off the Dark Lord’s hand by a man named Isildur. But afterwards, on his march home, the victorious Isildur and his men were waylaid by orcs. As Isildur tried to escape he jumped into a river, where the ring slipped off his finger and was lost. Soon afterwards the orcs caught him and he was shot through with arrows.
The ring lay at the bottom of the river for centuries until it was discovered by a hobbit-like creature named Deagol who was fishing there with his friend Smeagol. Smeagol was overwhelmed with desire for the beautiful glittering ring, and when his friend refused to give it to him, he strangled him and put the ring on his own finger. Over time Smeagol was consumed by it, becoming a slithering, obsessive creature called Gollum, until eventually, centuries later, the ring was taken from him by Bilbo Baggins, the hero of Tolkien’s first book, The Hobbit.
The ring has all kinds of powers. The keeper of the ring does not grow old, but eventually he becomes weary and fades away. If the holder wears the ring, he becomes invisible to normal mortals. Over time, the ring exerts a power over its keeper, causing him to lie, cheat or even kill to maintain possession of it. Wearing it becomes an addiction. But most importantly, Sauron, the Dark Lord, is searching for the ring. When he finds it he will gain total domination of Middle Earth. The only way the Ring can be destroyed is if it is taken to Mount Doom, a volcano in the centre of Mordor, Sauron’s own country, and thrown into the ‘Crack of Doom’. This becomes the quest for Bilbo’s nephew, a hobbit named Frodo.
Minshall argued that the powers of the ring showed that Tolkien had been inspired by Wagner’s Ring Cycle of operas, in which the gods compete to take control of the Ring and dominate the world.
This idea seriously upset the present-day Isildur.
He quoted Tolkien himself who denied that there was a connection, claiming that ‘both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases’. Then Isildur launched on a long discourse quoting from the Saga of the Volsungs and the Prose Edda, both written in Iceland in the thirteenth century. He claimed that Tolkien had read the Volsung Saga when he was still a schoolboy and that it had inspired him for the rest of his life.
Both these sources describe how three gods, Odin, Hoenir and the trickster god Loki, were travelling when they came upon a waterfall where a dwarf named Andvari was fishing in the shape of a pike. Loki caught him, and stole some gold from him. Andvari tried to keep back a magic ring, but Loki spotted it, and threatened to send the dwarf to Hel, who was Loki’s daughter, the goddess of death, unless he gave the ring to Loki. Andvari laid a curse on the ring and disappeared into a rock. During the rest of the saga the ring passes from person to person, creating mayhem wherever it goes. Isildur seemed to believe that both J.R.R. Tolkien and Richard Wagner had read the Saga of the Volsungs, which explained the similarity between the two stories.
There followed a series of ever more heated postings back and forth, until a third commentator appeared calling Tolkien a liar and a plagiarist. This seemed to unite Minshall and Isildur in defence of their hero, and the subject was laid to rest there.
Magnus strongly suspected that this was the same Isildur who was Steve Jubb’s partner: both of them shared an interest in the Volsung Saga. Fortunately the web page included a link to the e-mail address of the people posting the commentaries. Isildur’s address indicated an Internet Service Provider from the US. The question was, how could Magnus find out who he was?
There was a small chance that sending him an e-mail asking him to help the Reykjavik police with a murder inquiry would elicit a response. There was a much greater chance that it would tip Isildur off that the police were on to him, and he would go quiet.
The previous year Magnus had been involved in the investigation of the rape and murder of a woman in the middle-class suburb of Brookline. She had received anonymous e-mails from a stalker. With the help of a young technician named Johnny Yeoh in Computer Forensics, Magnus had tracked down the IP address of the computer from which the e-mails had been sent, despite all kinds of ploys the sender had used to disguise it. It turned out he was the woman’s next-door neighbour. He was now serving life in Cedar Junction.
Magnus had Isildur’s e-mail address. All he needed to do was provoke an e-mail response from him, which would include a ‘header’ divulging the IP address of Isildur’s computer.
He thought for a minute and then tapped something out.
Hi Isildur,
I found your comment about the Saga of the Volsungs very interesting. Where can I get a copy?
Matt Johnson
A simple, if slightly dumb question which would take Isildur only a few seconds to respond to, with luck not enough time to worry about the e-mail address from which it was sent. Worth a try.
The problem with e-mail correspondence was that you never knew how long a reply would take to arrive. It could be a minute, an hour, a day or a month. While he was waiting, Magnus checked how Arni was doing. He had made some progress: he had found a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New South Wales who claimed to be an expert on Tolkien’s invented languages, of which there were supposed to be fourteen. Like Magnus, he had sent an e-mail inquiry and was waiting for a response.
Arni had also found traces of an Isildur. There was someone using that nickname who seemed to be trying to build an online translation service into and out of Quenya, which was one of Tolkien’s most detailed Elvish languages. Whether it was the same Isildur or some other Lord of the Rings obsessive using that name, they could not be certain.
Magnus went back to his own computer. He was in luck. There was a brief e-mail from Isildur.
Hi Matt
You should be able to get a copy from Amazon. There is a good Penguin Classics edition. It’s well worth reading. Enjoy.
Isildur
Magnus hit a few keys on his computer, and a string of codes and numerals was revealed, the e-mail header.
Pay dirt.
‘Arni. Do you know anyone in your Computer Forensics department who could check out an e-mail header for me?’
Arni looked doubtful. ‘It’s Saturday. They’ll be at home. I could try to get hold of someone, but it will take a while. We might have to wait until Monday.’
Monday was no good. Magnus checked his watch. It was about lunch time in Boston. Johnny Yeoh was a civilian, not a police officer, but he was the kind of geek who would drop everything to be helpful if he was interested. Magnus and he had gotten on well, especially since Magnus had made sure that Johnny had received plenty of credit for his work in tracking down the Brookline killer. This would be just the kind of task to get Johnny’s juices flowing.
Magnus tapped out a quick e-mail, cutting and pasting the header from Isildur’s message. He made sure that there was nothing in the text of the e-mail that might suggest that he was anywhere but some city in the heart of America. He considered sending it to Johnny’s Boston PD address via Agent Hendricks. The problem was Johnny wouldn’t get it till Monday. Magnus needed a result more quickly than that.
