Christmas Lecture

Disclaimer: I am not now, and never have been, the author of the Lord of the Rings.

A random piece of nonsense for all of you who enjoyed Adventures outside Middle Earth, especially Sleepy Hollow, SandyWMD and Animepercystyle.

You can find the link to the paper by R. Brown on my home page (together with its Elvish and Dwarvish translations).

I have taken the liberty of giving Oxford University a geophysics degree. And stolen some phrases (used by Éomer) from Borys because they're just brilliant and deserve a wider audience).

Legolas blamed the dwarf. As usual. He was of course reluctantly forced to admit his own decisions following the conversation were partly to blame. But mainly it was the bloody dwarf. It was Gimli's fault he was sitting in a lecture theatre watching a bunch of rugger-buggers hang some mistletoe above the lectern. Actually, they may not have been rugger-buggers. They were certainly... what was that phrase Matt had used? Oh yes, "public school arseholes." Legolas loved the way English lent itself to such inventive swearwords. The only language in Middle Earth that came close was Rohirric. (He had fond recollections of Éomer's comments about "Dunlander piss" and "orc turds.")

So, Gimli's fault. As Legolas had predicted, Gimli loved all the technology in Helena's world. He'd been particularly taken with metallurgy, not surprisingly, and had spent ages reading up about alloys and annealing processes. Legolas had found this deathly boring. Even Helena and Matt had admitted it wasn't their favourite bit of physics (in fact, Matt had muttered something about "bloody stolid state physics.") However, Gimli's curiosity ranged far and wide. One day, as he was surfing the internet, he suddenly burst out laughing.

"Here's one for you, Master Elf. Turns out Radagast the Brown is on sabbatical at a university here. He's written a paper on climate change. Someone's let him loose with a supercomputer and a climate model. Apparently the Shire has a climate like modern day Lincolnshire, while Mordor is like Texas, or maybe, given the smog, like Los Angeles."

Legolas peered over Gimli's shoulder. "It's in Khudzul," he said in an irritated voice.

"There's an Elvish translation too," said Gimli. A few clicks of the mouse, and there it was. Legolas began to read.

A few hours later, he was hooked. He had discovered environmental science, and more particularly, climate science. Everything about it appealed to him. The sense of a quest to save the world (though he couldn't see how that Al Gore bloke could ever hold his own in a half-way decent battle. A troop of orcs? The guy couldn't even see off the Republicans). Saving the forests - the Amazon was at risk, and it reminded him keenly of a warmer version of Mirkwood (Gimli had muttered something about "bloody tree shagger" at this point). Stopping the rise in sea levels in its tracks? He might still intermittently suffer from sea-longing but that didn't mean he wanted the whole world flooded.

Legolas had a quiet word with Matt, who spent a couple of months drilling him in maths, then put him in touch with the guy who ran the course, Prof. Millen. Like many universities, Oxford still had a system whereby mature students could be considered on the basis of interview alone, with no paper qualifications. Legolas was very careful not to mention Helena: he wanted to do this on his own. Millen seemed quite impressed, and ready to agree that, at two thousand or so years old, Legolas did make the cut as a "mature" student.

All of which explained how Legolas came to be sitting in the lecture theatre in the Natural History Museum in December with the rugger-buggers and the mistletoe. Waiting for the Prof to come and deliver the last calculus lecture of term. Not Prof. Millen, though – the rugger-buggers didn't go to the trouble of hanging mistletoe for him. No, they were hanging it for the newly appointed professor of quantum cosmology, hot tip for next year's Nobel physics prize, and mother of Legolas' children, Prof. Brodie.

Not many of the other students knew about him and Prof. Brodie. They'd kept things reasonably quiet. Half way through term, two of his fellow geophysicists, Fran and Pete, had realised. The twins had come down with a D&V bug, and managed synchronised projectile vomiting for most of the night. Legolas had volunteered to skip the lecture on the grounds that his presence was less important than Helena's, so a spaced-out Helena had attempted to introduce solution methods for partial differential equations while Legolas wheeled the pushchair round the museum. Fran and Pete had come across the family, tucked in a quiet corner, after the lecture. Helena was asleep on Legolas' shoulder while the elf rocked the buggy to and fro with one foot.

Overall, Legolas had found Helena's lectures to be an entertaining experience. There was the heady atmosphere of testosterone, for a start. About 80% of the physics students were male, and Helena was undeniably very beautiful (well, Helena was still in denial about that, or perhaps more accurately, in naïve and blissful ignorance, but then, the elf reflected, this was a woman who managed to get to ten centimetres dilated while still in denial that she was in labour). Then there was the fact that she put the students in fear of their lives (again, without even trying). Some of them tried talking in the first lecture of term. She had stopped, and told them to shut up or leave. They made the somewhat foolish mistake of keeping on talking. She had stopped again, told them to leave, then stood in icy silence at the front of the lecture theatre, arms folded, and stared them down until they did leave. Her stare reminded Legolas uncomfortably of his father and Thorin Oakenshield. Or possibly his father about to decapitate an orc. No-one messed Helena around twice. The thing that particularly tickled Legolas about this was that in their domestic life together, Helena was the softest, gentlest person imaginable.

But it seemed that Yule, or rather, Christmas, seemed to have led to a temporary outbreak of insanity among some of the male students. Legolas watched their antics with anticipation of the fun and games to come.

Helena did not disappoint. She turned in what Legolas could only think of as a bravura performance. A slight raise of one eyebrow revealed (if one knew what to look for) that she'd seen the mistletoe immediately. But other than that, she gave no indication that she'd noticed. Then she delivered the lecture without going near the lectern. She made some excuse about IT problems, and proceeded to resort to chalk-and-talk, using the antiquated roller blackboards, five abreast, reaching to the lofty ceiling of the theatre (which was high enough to accommodate a balcony, much used by the budding aero-engineers, who used it as a launch pad for paper planes in lectures by the milder-mannered members of staff).

Every so often she would pause, turn to face the audience to enlarge upon some point, straying tantalisingly close to the lectern. Excitement would mount among the rugger-buggers, who (uncharacteristically) were sitting right at the front (rather than napping at the back of the balcony). Legolas could see them readying themselves to spring. At the last minute, Helena would veer away, to a collective sigh, almost like the groan a football crowd emits when the ball hits the cross-bar. Again and again, this teasing scenario was played out, and in between times, Helena scribbled up line after line of mathematics on the board, neat, crystal clear, with just enough explanation as to why each line followed from the previous one. Finally at five to the hour, she made one final pass teasingly near the lectern, before coming to rest a few feet away.

She beamed at the assembled students. "Any questions?"

Legolas smiled and put his hand up. To his amusement, Helena's sang froid finally appeared ruffled by this – her eyebrows shot up. But she managed to keep her voice level.

"Yes, Legolas?"

"Not so much a question. More of an observation, for the benefit of my fellow students." Legolas swung his long legs over the barrier before the front row of seats, and strode towards her, plucking the mistletoe from its string as he went. "If you want to kiss a beautiful woman under the mistletoe, this is how you do it." He held the mistletoe above their heads, pulled Helena into a clinch and kissed her, tipping her back dramatically and doing his best to imitate the sort of passionate kiss one saw in 1930s movies. There was a stunned silence, then he heard whoops and wolf whistles. Rather reluctantly, he released her – she looked pink and cross, and he suspected he was in for trouble later on. But it was worth it. He turned to his audience.

"But if you want to do it," he added, "Do it with a woman who is not my wife."

There was an audible clunk as two hundred lower jaws dropped open.

Helena, of course, got the last word. "Legolas Thranduilion, you are doing all the nappy changes for the whole Christmas vacation. For both twins."