1970 AGAIN: SEPARATE, STILL AND SECRET
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On his fifth and final day in America, Professor Tolkien was hunched over in the long aisle between tiers of steel shelves in the Teachers’ Archives section in the basement of the Butler Library. Looking over his shoulder every few seconds, he turned sideways to catch the tepid light from a bare electric bulb down the aisle. He had in his hands a pen and a few pieces of paper. At his feet sat a small cardboard letter box. He scribbled some more notes on his papers and surveyed his work.
As he corrected a word, he knew this moment, this trip, should be completed in even greater haste. His muse whispered: Hurry. Where the boundaries between realms meet, it is dangerous to tarry. The gates may shut and the lax be caught forever!
He started to put the pen in his pocket and hesitated. Ever the editor, he reviewed his note one last time:
To Whom May Follow:
Be warned! As a “spell” means both a story told and a power over men, so I write this note to close and bar a gate behind me. I am leaving a perilous realm not just of my imagining. Time now makes me blunt as a peddler late to his errands.
Take heed, because things of which we weave tales in fact are true, and exist independently of our minds and purposes. As I have imagined and written Elvish, there are Elves. As I have woven a mythology, it exists. It has a living form and color.
And it does not rest!
Like a changeling infant abandoned on my doorstep, a box of ancient documents was left on my threshold one day. Its heritage was anonymous and perhaps untraceable, save for the unease of having seen a sample of similar material before the war. In any case, I studied these documents, and from their depths grew rumors and a disquiet that would not leave. They stir, and like the moors and fen beyond the keep, they breed monsters that slouch and bellow just beyond my reach.
And yet, within this wreckage of ancient histories, there were fascinating tatters, fragments, and even full scrolls. Many of these were written, I no longer doubt, by Elvish hands, masterful hands now long departed from the world. These—precious (I will leave the word, yes) writings have a power of their own. They twist and turn and lead the mind down shifting paths as if they were the very essence of Mirkwood itself. Their language, vast and deep, makes my poor scratchings as but the work of whimsical ants before the soaring range of those mountains they call Everdivide. I have glimpsed this through the agency of a single document, a key that is like an Elfin guide through Mirkwood. I cannot bring myself to destroy it. It is hidden here with this note. May it long rest undisturbed in this musty graveyard of unwanted archives. To whoever may read this note, beware! The key is dangerous, for these phantoms sense its power.
For me, these vague monsters do not depart. They stalk me, and seek not only this trove, but to intervene even in the tales I would tell. Tales that have been unearthed, I thought, solely from my own imagination delving into the bedrock of myth.
The other documents have been sent away. As with these few papers I leave here, I could not be the author of their destruction. I have entrusted them to an itinerant who is fated to wander. These are actions I once held unthinkable.
Now I bury the last, push close the gate, and take my leave forever from this shore.
JRRT
P.S.: Other materials, fragments of Old English poetry, only slightly less disturbing, I have also included here.
He folded the paper and stooped, putting it in the letterbox that the library staff had already labeled with his name. He was nervous. His pipe fell from his coat pocket and scattered dottle and unburnt tobacco all about. He picked up the pipe, sealed the box with tape, lifted it to the dusty shelf, and squeezed it between other file boxes marked with other names and dates. Most were unreadable. Just another ossuary in the mausoleum, he thought. He studied his pocket watch in the dim light, knowing that the taxi to Idlewild would take two hours, cutting close his departure to Heathrow. His work here was done. It would be so good to be home.
He studied the location of the box, the burial ground of the Elvish key, one last time. He was confident that it would never be found. As for the rest of the documents, the sharpener of scissors who carries them was adrift where none could track him—carrying his burden into the untraceable byways of the Great American Night.