___
As he deplaned at what was then Idlewild Airport, the old man was scarcely recognizable as the chipper Merton Professor of Anglo-Saxon Literature who enthralled his students at Oxford. His lively gait had slowed to a shamble. He hugged a barrister’s document case, its contents bulging, its latch reinforced with knots of twine. His flashing brown eyes retreated beneath brows that sprouted like dark, untended weeds.
He shuffled through a turnstile at customs, glanced at himself in a mirror, and cut his eyes away. His gaze returned to study his image in the glass. Gone were the smile creases that always radiated from those eyes. The forehead, usually noble, now mapped a gulag of deepened liver spots. His hair, typically a groomed roller of white-capped gray, retreating as if into some mythical northern sea, now splayed out like moldy hay.
Why be surprised? he thought.
His trans-Atlantic sleep had been elusive, shattered by dreams of menace and chase. It distilled, as always, into the nightmare of the giant spider — the apparition that haunted him since he was bitten as a child in his native South Africa.
Moments before, as the plane banked in approach, he had glimpsed the Manhattan skyline rising through a pinkish, fog-shoaled dawn. The World Trade Center towers, each under construction and exotically aglow, regarded him like outlandish stalks bearing glassy, multi-faceted eyes. His muse of myth and language hovered near. Watchers, she had whispered, guardians over secret gates.
He weaved through the crowds to arrive at baggage claim. He felt panicked, as if slipping unmoored into a churning river of people and unintelligible loudspeaker announcements. Two awkward turns and he finally saw the sign. Taxis, yes. He fumbled in various pockets and pulled out a note. Despite being jostled, he stood his ground. He held the note outstretched in one hand while his other hand clutched the barrister’s case tightly to his chest. On the note was typed:
Algonquin Hotel. 59 W. 44th Street. Four nights
Someone, perhaps his wife Edith or his travel agent, had hand-written below this, “Nice place for writers, a favorite of your fellow Inklings.” Then the typeface continued:
Columbia University. 116th and Broadway. Department of Old English Studies.
A final notation was scrawled in his own eccentric hand: “See Os! West Inn (?) Bar. Beware Myrcwudu.”
He crumpled the paper against his chest, put it back in his pocket, gathered his other bag, and set out in the direction of the taxi sign.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien steeled himself. Go now and bar this fell gate, the muse breathed. Before it is too late!
For a man about whose life it would be observed, “after 1925, nothing much happened,” this lion of letters trudged in fear for the first time since he was eighteen at the Battle of the Somme.