While many LOTR fans are silently dying inside thanks to such catastrophes as Rings of Power and The Hobbit, they have always had the classic books to fall back upon. I've finally decided to read the Silmarillion (on the library wait list!) but whilst searching for that book, I ran across a collection of short stories and poems by the infamous author. While I didn't make it through Roverandom, some of the other bits of story and nonsense are pretty good, though I almost felt I was reading George MacDonald at times. I haven't finished yet, but certainly an interesting bit of side salad for Tolkien fans discouraged by modern interpretations. It also gives a primordial writerling hope, that if one considered a master of the craft can publish such stuff, perhaps there is hope for the least of us as well. But what is even more interesting is the subject of all these little stories: mere mortal glimpses of Faerie, something hardly noticed in the epic seriousness of the great tomes, but with all the flitting and impish mischief of fairy children playing hide and seek amid the garden flowers but all the mystery and splendor of the mountain heights wrapped in shadow and snow and mist in the dawning. And it is the same glimpse one finds in MacDonald, Lewis, Chesterton, and L.M. Montgomery: humor and mystery and sorrow and awe and wonder and joy. The very heart of a Child of the Kingdom.
It is the something missing in this age of mere information, much of it wrong. We only want to know the what of the moment, having no time for the why or the how thereof. Information scans through our brains like data through google and we skim what we like, discarding it almost as soon as we notice it, never finding 'the answer' but merely fretting ourselves sick with what we might not know or in knowing it a moment too late. We don't know how 'to be still and know.' We gorge like pigs at a trough, uncaring of what we swill down, only that we must get our share. But these pretty little books are a journey, a slow unveiling, a call away from the hustle and bustle and nonstop busyness and 'in the know' of our daily grind. A call from the Shepherd to go out into the hills and be. To watch the sun set and hear the birds sing, to contemplate the ocean's breadth and wonder what might dwell in its hidden depths. To ask what lurks on the far side of the moon and what it would be like to dance among the stars.
We want to be our own gods, the source of all things, to define reality as we would have it, but we are fooling ourselves and making our lives miserable for no gain: mice running on a wheel, no better off for running harder, longer, or faster, for you always end where you begin. But Faerie is calling, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, to step off the highway of modern life into the forgotten, misty lanes that run 'East of the Moon, West of the Sun.' For 'not all who wander are lost,' for they are on a Journey indeed. Forget everything modern and shiny and new, seek out the twilight, the shadows, the wooded edge of the meadow, the misty fields and silent stars, fireflies and mountains and Saturn and the dappled green of a spring morning under shining leaves. Be still and know, Know as ye have ever been Known. When the Deep cries out to your Deep, will you hear its resounding cry? For to such belong the Kingdom!
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