Sorry this took me so long to get up. Well, here it is. The Oxford
Libraries and the cute Professor and the insnae Tolkien fanatics Edith
flirts with.
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Chapter 6: Ode to Maps and Elves
Edith was driving this time, and as we drew nearer the University, my fingers were moving over the papers in the cigar box. Each page was frail, and the wrong movement could cause the paper to simply break apart. Pages were covered in character lists and descriptions of places.
In the bottom I found a folded piece of paper. It was thicker, and was newer, showing that it hadn't been buried as long as the others. I carefully exctracted it from the bottom, unfolding it and holding it an arm's width apart. It was a massive and giant map of Middle Earth itself. One of the original drawings. You could see where Tolkien had erased and redrawn scales and forests. He'd even labelled some wrong and had to correct them. It was weird to see the ALMIGHTY TOLKIEN making a mistake. I had to run this by Tobias. For puposes unknown. I, for some reason or another, had to shove his face in the fact that Tolkien was not: A) A God. B) A Great Man. Or C) All of the Above.
"What is it?" Edith asked, glancing over from the driver's seat. I shurgged, following the map with the same interest as my father had. He'd sit for hours examining the damn thing from his books and the posters he had on the walls. And then he'd leave for a moment and come back, a cup of coffee in his hands to look at it for another hour or so.
But this map was different somehow. I noticed this and sensed this almost immediately when I saw the very faint lines running across it to and fro. Edith noticed it to. I followed them dumbly with my finger.
"Well a map." I said. "But what are these lines on it?"
"Like a puzzle isn't it." She replied. I nodded. Definitely like a puzzle.
For fear I would ruin the map, I folded it back and looked through the papers. I looked them over, realizing they were only lists of characters that he had written descriptions about. It was odd to see them. Somehow I always though Tolkien just sat down and started writing one day, kind of like what I do. But no, here was the sheets of translations for several words in Elvish and character plots. I held them up for Edith to look over. I wondered why a moment later she shook her head.
"These must be the original ones. There are some differences on these." She said, emphasizing quickly a small portion of Arwen's characteristics. "Maybe he ended up changing them later." I shrugged.
"Maybe." I said, but some of this didn't make sense to me. Why wasn't all this stuff in his office or personal place rather then under the floorboards of that God Awful Tavern? Why was this hidden and the other pages, the pages Historians and such look at, are all somewhere boxed up. I set the pages back down into the box and closed it, setting it aside.
"What?" Edith asked, and took me out of my little thought trance. "I know when you're thinking now would you tell me what bothers you about this so maybe my tiny thought processes can possibly give you a hand?" I gave a small laugh to her final comment and leaned back against my chair, looking at the ceiling of the car.
"I just don't get why all these were kept hidden and the other papers are safe at the University." I commented. Edith looked over at me, and I thought she was asking me to elaborate, like she usually did. I continued anyway. "Think about it. There are thousands of these papers safe in his office...but these select few, big enough to fit comfortably in a cigar box, were chosen to be hidden away."
"Maybe these were his starting notes." She retorted. I looked at her oddly.
"Wouldn't they be kept with the others?"
"Maybe it's a Time Capsule." She said, looking slightly proud of herself as she gladly brought up an idea I did not. "Maybe it's his way of hiding his work from others." I looked at her strangely again, and she flipped on the radio and continued to sing Bohemian Rhapsody. I picked up the box again and shrugged, setting it aside once more.
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I always wondered why I allowed Edith to show me around places. She has the directional skills of two hobbits fighting over Lembas and mushrooms. Within the first five minutes at Oxford we narrowly escaped being flirted with by two scholars and being told off by crabby old teachers. And that's when I dragged Edith over to the Orientation center and got a map, fighting the urge to quite litterally, whack her over the head with it.
I followed the directions on the map and easily found where we were going. The Oxford libraries weren't that far from where Edith had gotten us, so the urge to whack her several times maliciously hard with the map were finally gone and I was now thinking about hugging her for somewhat leading us in the right direction.
It was huge inside the library, and that was saying a lot. I felt very bad for Edith, who was reminded of how tiny she really was everyday. I could see her give almost a grimace of pain as we walked inside. I knew how bad she felt. I'm not unnaturally tall but I still felt quite short in the rows and rows of books.
"So what are we looking for?" Edith whispered to me. I shrugged. Books? Papers? Something or anything on Tolkien? Something explaining why he would draw ever so faint lines across the maps of his books? I shrugged again, to show how absolutely clueless I was about the whole situation. Edith grinned and humphed, mumbling something under her breath about, "Having read the books," and her being "the almighty and powerful and wise Tolkien fanatic." This made me laugh under my breath, making Edith look at me strangely. I shrugged again.
"Well it would help if you knew something." She replied. I grinned.
"Alright, you Almighty Tolkien Fanatic, please tell me where I might find a Tolkien expert." Edith pointed to herself. "I mean one who can help us get some information on the git firsthand. I'm talking about a Professor." Edith looked hurt, but it was her turn to shrug, so she did and I decided, setting aside my less the popular people skills, that I would converse with the librarian for a moment.
The librarian was one of those cliche and snooty old ladies with extraordinarily sharp features. Her nose, for example with thin and pointy, and her lips were thinned out under her very distinct but at the same time very Very VERY sharp features. She looked like she had one too many bad face lifts and I was very afraid to speak to her. I swallowed my guilt that was triggered towards this woman for looking extremely odd and I approached the front desk. Her beady eyes were now upon me and I cleared my throat.
"Excuse me." I asked quietly. She was still looking at me, as if she was seeing right through me. "I'm a reporter for the London Times and I'm doing a piece on Tolkien. I was wondering if there was anyone I could speak to..."
"Everybody's doing a 'piece' on him these days." She retorted, just as snottily and as egotistically as I thought she would. "But if you're going to write what everyone else has written, I suppose there's no stopping you..." She looked me over with her lobster-like stare, "Young people. I suppose you would also like to know if that Bloom fellow ever comes here for tea."
"Well, you know me and all the other Young people." I replied with the same amount of sarcasm and just enough grotesque ego that she would get the message. "All we want to do is slander and publisize the man as being clinically insane. And does this Bloomn fellow come for tea? I've been dying to meet him since the movie?" She got up mumbling something about Young People, but I was too pleased with myself to care whether or not she hated me. She grabbed the phone off the wall inside her tiny little office and I heard her mention for a professor. I grinned slightly, amused with my handling the situation.
She walked back. "Professor Lurdin will deal with you. Room 137. I can't imagine what he sees in people wanting to study Tolkien. Especially YOUNG people." I grinned at her. I tapped the desk once more.
"Thanks for your help." I walked away listening to her mumbling again. I grinned and walked over to Edith, who was making small talk with two very handsome boys with Lord of the Rings on the top of their book pile. I yanked her away while she was screaming for their phone numbers.
I looked at the map again and found we were on the right track. Straight down from the libraries you could easily get to the '100' rooms as the map had called them. I was half dragging Edith, who was now mumbling about me not also being impulsive, frigid and repressed, but also that I probably not had a date in ten years and also a moron. I yank her wrist a little harder after that.
Room 137 was the usual lecture room for a University. I found it had terribly harsh lighting, and deducted that it was probably from the fact of the boredom triggered by this class's teaching plan. I looked around for the Professor we were supposed to meet, releasing Edith and looked at the chalkboard. I found we were in the right place to find Tolkien. All over the board were heavy duty notes on how to translate this Elvish language. I began to connect A to B to C and realized the woman in the library, no matter how pointy she had been, had steered us in the right direction.
I think Edith had a heart attack when she saw the board and took on the same realization I did. For Edith though, having the actual chance to learn the Elvish language was a dream come true. She immediately started reading the notes, while I looked around for a teacher.
"May I help you two?" There was a voice in the doorway, and I turned around. Edith was too consumed in her reading. The man in the doorway I was assuming was Lurdin. He couldn't have been over 35. He had nice, pleasant features, a full head of hair, and these soft blue eyes I was immediately infatuated with. He stepped inside, taking on who I must be and who Edith might be, but I think he was considering kicking Edith out of his class because she was now sitting on his desk looking over the notes on the board.
"Yes, we're looking for a Professor Lurdin." I asked him. He walked inside and nodded, and I took this as a sign that he was in fact Lurdin and not just listening to the sound coming from my moving lips. "I'm a Reporter for the London Times and this is my trained Howler Monkey." I pointed at Edith, who, consumed in her reading did not hear the Howler Monkey remark. "I'm doing a article on Tolkien and I wanted an expert."
"Well you'll want Lurdin Senior for that." The second man who enterred the classroom was in fact elderly. He was walking with a cane, moving slowly and like he would break apart at any moment. "Hello." He said finally, extending his hand, which I shook gently. "I'm Professor Lurdin. This is my son." The man at the door smiled and walked inside. "You said you wanted to know about Tolkien?"
"Well yes actually." I replied, leaning back against the desk. "I wanted to take a different approach though. Everyone focuses on the books rather then things like where the ideas for the books came from and who was Tolkien during his life."
"Quedos for originality." The son replied. I was referring to him as Lurdin Junior. "People come by here all the time asking for things like, 'How long did it take to finish the books'...."
"12 years." Edith piped in behind us, her eyes still fixed on the board.
Both Professors gave tiny laughs and Lurdin Junior continued. "How did he come up with the Elvish Language?"
"He was a Master Linguist." She replied. I glanced back at her again, finding that she was still staring, her eyes as wide as saucers at the blackboard.
"And how to translate the elvish word Mela and decipher it as Quenya or Tel'Quessir." Edith looked bahind her at the professor with an evil look on her face.
"Damn you. I was on a roll." She looked back at the board as he grinned from ear to easr, happy somehow that he stumped Edith.
"Well if there's anything you'd like to know..." Lurdin Junior said. I had to say he was one of the best looking, best dressed, and best smelling professors I had ever seen. He was wearing some kind of really nice cologne, along with a black dress shirt, black pants, and black tie. His coat must have been somewhere in the building, but honestly I could see he was toned nicely under the shirt. Hey! I'm not all frigid and repressed.
"I'd actually like to be able to see some orginal drawings or maps of Middle Earth." I replied. "If that's possibly." Lurdin Senior walked silently away, leaving his son to deal with the reporter and her Howler Monkey. He looked at Edith and showed me out of the room. I was worried to leave her there, but something told me she would be absolutely fine by herself.
"All of his books, papers, and other things we put into a large box and stored them in this office." He said. "Take a look." He turned on the light of a nearby office allowed me inside, where he looked prepared to leave. "I have a class right now but if you need anything just ask my father in the next room." I smiled at him and he left, as I was left alone with the box.
My hand hesitated over the covers. My father would have loved to see this. I could envision him doing what I was doing, like a child in a candy store, he would probably take to Oxford like a child took to a park. This box would have been a heaven for him. I dismissed the thoughts of my father dancing around this office singing the Sound of Music and pulled open the flaps. Whoever was in charge of taking care of Tolkien's things did a damn fine job. Everything was in perfect oder. The maps were rolled to one side, and I extracted them crefully, opening each. None of them had the lines across it. I decided the one myself and Edith had in the car was the only one. I set the maps aside.
It was an hour later easily when I finally came out of the office. With a quick thank you to both Lurdin's, I snatched Edith out of the classroom again, finding her flirting with those two fanatics once more. I think she had scored their phone numbers, because she was not as hesitant to go this time. I waved goodbye and we left in a hurry. This was triggered slightly by the fact that Lurdin Junior was extraordinarily cute, and I did not want to be caught with the papers from Tolkien's box that had found their way into my coat.
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Chapter 6: Ode to Maps and Elves
Edith was driving this time, and as we drew nearer the University, my fingers were moving over the papers in the cigar box. Each page was frail, and the wrong movement could cause the paper to simply break apart. Pages were covered in character lists and descriptions of places.
In the bottom I found a folded piece of paper. It was thicker, and was newer, showing that it hadn't been buried as long as the others. I carefully exctracted it from the bottom, unfolding it and holding it an arm's width apart. It was a massive and giant map of Middle Earth itself. One of the original drawings. You could see where Tolkien had erased and redrawn scales and forests. He'd even labelled some wrong and had to correct them. It was weird to see the ALMIGHTY TOLKIEN making a mistake. I had to run this by Tobias. For puposes unknown. I, for some reason or another, had to shove his face in the fact that Tolkien was not: A) A God. B) A Great Man. Or C) All of the Above.
"What is it?" Edith asked, glancing over from the driver's seat. I shurgged, following the map with the same interest as my father had. He'd sit for hours examining the damn thing from his books and the posters he had on the walls. And then he'd leave for a moment and come back, a cup of coffee in his hands to look at it for another hour or so.
But this map was different somehow. I noticed this and sensed this almost immediately when I saw the very faint lines running across it to and fro. Edith noticed it to. I followed them dumbly with my finger.
"Well a map." I said. "But what are these lines on it?"
"Like a puzzle isn't it." She replied. I nodded. Definitely like a puzzle.
For fear I would ruin the map, I folded it back and looked through the papers. I looked them over, realizing they were only lists of characters that he had written descriptions about. It was odd to see them. Somehow I always though Tolkien just sat down and started writing one day, kind of like what I do. But no, here was the sheets of translations for several words in Elvish and character plots. I held them up for Edith to look over. I wondered why a moment later she shook her head.
"These must be the original ones. There are some differences on these." She said, emphasizing quickly a small portion of Arwen's characteristics. "Maybe he ended up changing them later." I shrugged.
"Maybe." I said, but some of this didn't make sense to me. Why wasn't all this stuff in his office or personal place rather then under the floorboards of that God Awful Tavern? Why was this hidden and the other pages, the pages Historians and such look at, are all somewhere boxed up. I set the pages back down into the box and closed it, setting it aside.
"What?" Edith asked, and took me out of my little thought trance. "I know when you're thinking now would you tell me what bothers you about this so maybe my tiny thought processes can possibly give you a hand?" I gave a small laugh to her final comment and leaned back against my chair, looking at the ceiling of the car.
"I just don't get why all these were kept hidden and the other papers are safe at the University." I commented. Edith looked over at me, and I thought she was asking me to elaborate, like she usually did. I continued anyway. "Think about it. There are thousands of these papers safe in his office...but these select few, big enough to fit comfortably in a cigar box, were chosen to be hidden away."
"Maybe these were his starting notes." She retorted. I looked at her oddly.
"Wouldn't they be kept with the others?"
"Maybe it's a Time Capsule." She said, looking slightly proud of herself as she gladly brought up an idea I did not. "Maybe it's his way of hiding his work from others." I looked at her strangely again, and she flipped on the radio and continued to sing Bohemian Rhapsody. I picked up the box again and shrugged, setting it aside once more.
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I always wondered why I allowed Edith to show me around places. She has the directional skills of two hobbits fighting over Lembas and mushrooms. Within the first five minutes at Oxford we narrowly escaped being flirted with by two scholars and being told off by crabby old teachers. And that's when I dragged Edith over to the Orientation center and got a map, fighting the urge to quite litterally, whack her over the head with it.
I followed the directions on the map and easily found where we were going. The Oxford libraries weren't that far from where Edith had gotten us, so the urge to whack her several times maliciously hard with the map were finally gone and I was now thinking about hugging her for somewhat leading us in the right direction.
It was huge inside the library, and that was saying a lot. I felt very bad for Edith, who was reminded of how tiny she really was everyday. I could see her give almost a grimace of pain as we walked inside. I knew how bad she felt. I'm not unnaturally tall but I still felt quite short in the rows and rows of books.
"So what are we looking for?" Edith whispered to me. I shrugged. Books? Papers? Something or anything on Tolkien? Something explaining why he would draw ever so faint lines across the maps of his books? I shrugged again, to show how absolutely clueless I was about the whole situation. Edith grinned and humphed, mumbling something under her breath about, "Having read the books," and her being "the almighty and powerful and wise Tolkien fanatic." This made me laugh under my breath, making Edith look at me strangely. I shrugged again.
"Well it would help if you knew something." She replied. I grinned.
"Alright, you Almighty Tolkien Fanatic, please tell me where I might find a Tolkien expert." Edith pointed to herself. "I mean one who can help us get some information on the git firsthand. I'm talking about a Professor." Edith looked hurt, but it was her turn to shrug, so she did and I decided, setting aside my less the popular people skills, that I would converse with the librarian for a moment.
The librarian was one of those cliche and snooty old ladies with extraordinarily sharp features. Her nose, for example with thin and pointy, and her lips were thinned out under her very distinct but at the same time very Very VERY sharp features. She looked like she had one too many bad face lifts and I was very afraid to speak to her. I swallowed my guilt that was triggered towards this woman for looking extremely odd and I approached the front desk. Her beady eyes were now upon me and I cleared my throat.
"Excuse me." I asked quietly. She was still looking at me, as if she was seeing right through me. "I'm a reporter for the London Times and I'm doing a piece on Tolkien. I was wondering if there was anyone I could speak to..."
"Everybody's doing a 'piece' on him these days." She retorted, just as snottily and as egotistically as I thought she would. "But if you're going to write what everyone else has written, I suppose there's no stopping you..." She looked me over with her lobster-like stare, "Young people. I suppose you would also like to know if that Bloom fellow ever comes here for tea."
"Well, you know me and all the other Young people." I replied with the same amount of sarcasm and just enough grotesque ego that she would get the message. "All we want to do is slander and publisize the man as being clinically insane. And does this Bloomn fellow come for tea? I've been dying to meet him since the movie?" She got up mumbling something about Young People, but I was too pleased with myself to care whether or not she hated me. She grabbed the phone off the wall inside her tiny little office and I heard her mention for a professor. I grinned slightly, amused with my handling the situation.
She walked back. "Professor Lurdin will deal with you. Room 137. I can't imagine what he sees in people wanting to study Tolkien. Especially YOUNG people." I grinned at her. I tapped the desk once more.
"Thanks for your help." I walked away listening to her mumbling again. I grinned and walked over to Edith, who was making small talk with two very handsome boys with Lord of the Rings on the top of their book pile. I yanked her away while she was screaming for their phone numbers.
I looked at the map again and found we were on the right track. Straight down from the libraries you could easily get to the '100' rooms as the map had called them. I was half dragging Edith, who was now mumbling about me not also being impulsive, frigid and repressed, but also that I probably not had a date in ten years and also a moron. I yank her wrist a little harder after that.
Room 137 was the usual lecture room for a University. I found it had terribly harsh lighting, and deducted that it was probably from the fact of the boredom triggered by this class's teaching plan. I looked around for the Professor we were supposed to meet, releasing Edith and looked at the chalkboard. I found we were in the right place to find Tolkien. All over the board were heavy duty notes on how to translate this Elvish language. I began to connect A to B to C and realized the woman in the library, no matter how pointy she had been, had steered us in the right direction.
I think Edith had a heart attack when she saw the board and took on the same realization I did. For Edith though, having the actual chance to learn the Elvish language was a dream come true. She immediately started reading the notes, while I looked around for a teacher.
"May I help you two?" There was a voice in the doorway, and I turned around. Edith was too consumed in her reading. The man in the doorway I was assuming was Lurdin. He couldn't have been over 35. He had nice, pleasant features, a full head of hair, and these soft blue eyes I was immediately infatuated with. He stepped inside, taking on who I must be and who Edith might be, but I think he was considering kicking Edith out of his class because she was now sitting on his desk looking over the notes on the board.
"Yes, we're looking for a Professor Lurdin." I asked him. He walked inside and nodded, and I took this as a sign that he was in fact Lurdin and not just listening to the sound coming from my moving lips. "I'm a Reporter for the London Times and this is my trained Howler Monkey." I pointed at Edith, who, consumed in her reading did not hear the Howler Monkey remark. "I'm doing a article on Tolkien and I wanted an expert."
"Well you'll want Lurdin Senior for that." The second man who enterred the classroom was in fact elderly. He was walking with a cane, moving slowly and like he would break apart at any moment. "Hello." He said finally, extending his hand, which I shook gently. "I'm Professor Lurdin. This is my son." The man at the door smiled and walked inside. "You said you wanted to know about Tolkien?"
"Well yes actually." I replied, leaning back against the desk. "I wanted to take a different approach though. Everyone focuses on the books rather then things like where the ideas for the books came from and who was Tolkien during his life."
"Quedos for originality." The son replied. I was referring to him as Lurdin Junior. "People come by here all the time asking for things like, 'How long did it take to finish the books'...."
"12 years." Edith piped in behind us, her eyes still fixed on the board.
Both Professors gave tiny laughs and Lurdin Junior continued. "How did he come up with the Elvish Language?"
"He was a Master Linguist." She replied. I glanced back at her again, finding that she was still staring, her eyes as wide as saucers at the blackboard.
"And how to translate the elvish word Mela and decipher it as Quenya or Tel'Quessir." Edith looked bahind her at the professor with an evil look on her face.
"Damn you. I was on a roll." She looked back at the board as he grinned from ear to easr, happy somehow that he stumped Edith.
"Well if there's anything you'd like to know..." Lurdin Junior said. I had to say he was one of the best looking, best dressed, and best smelling professors I had ever seen. He was wearing some kind of really nice cologne, along with a black dress shirt, black pants, and black tie. His coat must have been somewhere in the building, but honestly I could see he was toned nicely under the shirt. Hey! I'm not all frigid and repressed.
"I'd actually like to be able to see some orginal drawings or maps of Middle Earth." I replied. "If that's possibly." Lurdin Senior walked silently away, leaving his son to deal with the reporter and her Howler Monkey. He looked at Edith and showed me out of the room. I was worried to leave her there, but something told me she would be absolutely fine by herself.
"All of his books, papers, and other things we put into a large box and stored them in this office." He said. "Take a look." He turned on the light of a nearby office allowed me inside, where he looked prepared to leave. "I have a class right now but if you need anything just ask my father in the next room." I smiled at him and he left, as I was left alone with the box.
My hand hesitated over the covers. My father would have loved to see this. I could envision him doing what I was doing, like a child in a candy store, he would probably take to Oxford like a child took to a park. This box would have been a heaven for him. I dismissed the thoughts of my father dancing around this office singing the Sound of Music and pulled open the flaps. Whoever was in charge of taking care of Tolkien's things did a damn fine job. Everything was in perfect oder. The maps were rolled to one side, and I extracted them crefully, opening each. None of them had the lines across it. I decided the one myself and Edith had in the car was the only one. I set the maps aside.
It was an hour later easily when I finally came out of the office. With a quick thank you to both Lurdin's, I snatched Edith out of the classroom again, finding her flirting with those two fanatics once more. I think she had scored their phone numbers, because she was not as hesitant to go this time. I waved goodbye and we left in a hurry. This was triggered slightly by the fact that Lurdin Junior was extraordinarily cute, and I did not want to be caught with the papers from Tolkien's box that had found their way into my coat.
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