I’m going to tell you a little story. It probably won’t mean much to you but it makes me chuckle.
In my professional life I study the theory of search engine optimization (which is an esoteric profession — I’m not sure you could count on two hands how many people are paid to study search engine optimization theory). I was glancing at some articles about linking this morning — that’s the sort of thing one reads a great deal about in SEO — so naturally I was quickly transported to Technorati.
I have no idea how I got there but I realized I had long ago created an account for my personal blogs so I logged in and noticed that I had never claimed this blog for Technorati. Well, that chore is now taken care of but part of the process of claiming a blog allows you to mention up to three other blogs that link to your blog (not that any of this has much of anything to do with search engine optimization, but it’s a small corner of the vestibule of SEO).
I honestly have no idea of which blogs (other than my own) link to this blog so I ran a quick search and found The Tolkien Advocate which seems worthy of mention here on Tolkien Studies on the Web. And how fortuitous was the finding for by the good grace of excellent timing I clicked through to the home page of the site and found a link to The Festival in the Shire Journal an online magazine devoted to all things Tolkien.
I should review the site some day when I find time. Nonetheless what led me there was a link to an interview article that no longer works (alas! many Web designers don’t understand the importance of maintaining link stability).
The articles open up into popup windows (not really the best user experience out there) and I found this Clyde S. Kilby article in Issue 2 (and it’s not the article I was looking for).
Naturally I started reading the article (written by Kilby in the 1960s). There are a number of passages in the article that made me smile. For example on assessing The Silmarillion Kilby wrote:
Two things immediately impressed me. One was that The Silmarillion would never be completed. The other was the size of my own task. How could I in a few weeks read analyze and give a critical judgment on such a mammoth literary effort? Actually I spent one entire day on a six-page section of the manuscript.
And this one made me chuckle:
One of my friends had been told by C. S. Lewis that one might ask Tolkien questions but one would not necessarily get the answers expected. One might find him talking on an entirely different topic to which he had seen a relationship lost to the questioner. I soon found this to be true. Discovering that efforts to discuss portions of the manuscript with him would not succeed I began to write out my comments and simply attach them to the manuscript.
I was quite reminded of my own voluminous essays on Tolkien’s works which tend to wander the map of the imagination and human experience in an effort to trace or reconstruct all those seeming connections one finds in Tolkien’s prose. People have occasionally (okay frequently) accused me of making it all up. While my work has necessarily entailed considerable speculation most of the stuff I have been specifically accused of contriving was in fact contrived by the Professor himself (which I suppose is a rather grim testimony to the appeal — or lack thereof — of the workings of my imagination).
But here is what really caught my attention:
When I was with him he once began to read me a passage in Elvish then stopped came up close and placing the manuscript before me said that Elvish ought not to be read but sung and then chanted it in a slow and lovely intonation.
I have on a very few occasions spoken about Tolkien’s use of song in his Middle-earth mythologies. There used to be an audio file available on the Web of a talk I gave at Dragon*Con 2000 called “Reconstructing Middle-earth” but I believe it has been taken down. I remember discussing song at that convention and I think it was in that section (because I illustrated a point by singing something like “I am making a powerful orc-slaying hammer”).
Song is an incredibly resonant motif in The Lord of the Rings — it was very important to Tolkien and perhaps became even more important to him later in his life. Song is a medium of expression that conveys emotion much better than simply speaking (not to take anything away from great orators and actors alike music just lends itself to creating a level of emotional connection that mere speech by itself cannot achieve).
So Kudos to Colin Duriez and his team at the Festival in the Shire Journal. I think they’ve done a smashup job of publishing some very interesting Tolkien research on the Web — and I say that only on the basis of the limited sip I’ve had on which to judge the taste of their work. I look forward to reading more articles in the near future.