Heart's ease...

I'd like to relate something personal. I haven't felt very optimistic of late, and what with pressure at University and an impending Disciplinary hearing next week at work, I have felt understandably depressed with it all (despite the odd high moments, such as my joke the other day).

But just a few moments ago, I received a nice word from a good friend of mine (probably oblivious to all these personal afflictions, not that it matters, and he is undoubtedly an instrument of Almighty God) and I have been cheered up somewhat. The feeling is ineffable, so I shall just compare it to this scene from The Lord of the Rings:

''So they passed into the northern marches of that land that Men once called Ithilien, a fair country of climbing woods and swift-falling streams. The night became fine under star and round moon, and it seemed to the hobbits that the fragrance of the air grew as they went forward; and from the blowing and muttering of Gollum it seemed that he noticed it too, and did not relish it. At the first signs of day they halted again. They had come to the end of a long cutting, deep, and sheer-sided in the middle, by which the road clove its way through a stony ridge. Now they climbed up the westward bank and looked abroad.

''Day was opening in the sky, and they saw that the mountains were now much further off, receding eastward in a long curve that was lost in the distance. Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down into dim hazes far below. All about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs. The long journey from Rivendell had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.

''South and west it looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Dúath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away. Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages [purple saxifrage is my favourite flower by the way] and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass besides the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.

''The travellers turned their backs on the road and went downhill. As they walked, brushing their way through bush and herb, sweet odours rose about them. Gollum coughed and retched; but the hobbits breathed deep, and suddenly Sam laughed, for heart's ease not for jest...'' (The Lord of the Rings, Book IV, Chapter IV, Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit, Italics my own).

Forgive the length of the quote, but I had to establish a context for Sam's laugh. This is one of my favourite passages from The Lord of the Rings, and represents Tolkien's genius in yet another subtle light. For the hobbits have passed out of the bleak Emyn Muil (the horrible and almost ''shrunken'' (in the sense that the few trees that are there, mostly birch and the odd fir, are described as twisted, gnarled, stunted, dead and gaunt) hill region east of Nen Hithoel), they have traversed the Dead Marshes, a grotesque country of stagnant pools, riddled with the foul arts of Sauron, and have fled the desolation about the Black Gates of Mordor. Now they have come, by the guidance of the creature Gollum, to the fair lands east of Anduin and immediately west of Mordor, called aptly the ''garden of Gondor,'' a comfort and a break in their arduous journey for salvation. Tolkien's genius finds expression not only in the superb prose and his encyclopedic knowledge of wild-life, but in the emotive character of Sam, one of my favourite characters (if only for his simplicity, plainness - his name is Anglo-Saxon for ''plain-wise,'' or in a derogatory sense, ''half-wit'' - and his fidelity and goodness to his master, Frodo). Sam's laugh more or less encapsulates what I just felt. I am in tremendous difficulty at the moment, and am in sore need of prayer, the Intercession of Our Lady and the Grace of God. My ''heart's ease'' has been conveyed by a few nice and considerate words, and nice words go a long way. Of course, I am still worried, but the worry has been abated (though is still present - rather like the journey of the hobbits through Ithilien - the menace of the Mountains and the common peril they all share is still felt, but in the garden of Gondor, at least the feeling is covered by a dishevelled veil of natural beauty). Moments like this make me ever the more glad to have Faith and to Hope in God.

This is not to say that my own, confessedly, self-inflicted troubles are so noble as to merit mention, or are even applicable to The Lord of the Rings, but I never cease to be amazed at Tolkien. While high, remote, so-far removed from anything pertaining to me, and in a certain sense austere, he can be so familiar, as familiar and simple as an apple or an orange (as seen in his time with the children during and after Mass whilst staying with George Sayer in 1952, see my previous post). In a certain sense, Tolkien seems to be a relic of a more perfect world - say, the 12th century - the nostalgia (it is not a bad thing you know) for literae humaniores, while still enjoying their immediate presence, the memory also of the contribution of the Saxons to the regal history of this country, of Christendom, of the Holy Mass (its sheer perfection, the harmony achieved by the marriage of Heaven and Earth, after the manner of Our Lord's Incarnation, leading to our Redemption), of chivalry, of castles, of old Monasteries etc; in days when knowledge of Latin and Greek was not scoffed at as being the province of snobs, academics and upper-class twits. And yet he is also present to us, doomed to wander the world in these latter days, days of profound darkness and apostasy.

It all rather reminds me of the image of the Lady Galadriel, the principle Marian archetype in The Lord of the Rings; that to the shrunken, fallen world of Middle-earth she appeared thus: ''Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.'' (The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Chapter VIII, Farewell to Lórien). And so, another Catholic dimension of Tolkien's work (ignored or unnoticed by any Tolkien scholar that I have read) is its consolation; a last refuge (or one of the last) for any sincere and orthodox Catholic in a world which is fallen. The Lord of the Rings is almost a Sacramental book, depicting a Sacramental world - it is there to provide consolation (and through that, even God's Grace) along the road; in a certain sense then, The Lord of the Rings is Viaticum.

Are these ramblings? Please forgive me, but it's late and I haven't the time to put this into proper literary form, and I have a long day tomorrow. The above image is Ted Namith's rendering of the hobbits' First Sight of Ithilien. Notice the receding menace of the ominous mountain-wall of Mordor. The fair lands about them, then newly under the dominion of the Dark Lord, still retain their natural beauty as the book says, but they are desolate of all people, save the servants of the Dark Tower and of the White.