A little bit of literature

“‘Ah!’ said Gandalf. ‘That is a very long story. The beginnings lie back in the Black Years, which only the lore-masters now remember. If I were to tell you all that tale, we should still be sitting here when Spring had passed into Winter. 

‘But last night I told you of Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord. The rumours that you have heard are true: he has indeed arisen again and left his hold in Mirkwood and returned to his ancient fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor. That name even you hobbits have heard of, like a shadow on the borders of old stories. Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.’ 

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. 

‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black. The Enemy is fast becoming very strong. His plans are far from ripe, I think, but they are ripening. We shall be hard put to it. We should be very hard put to it, even if it were not for this dreadful chance. 

‘The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness. He lacks the One Ring.” 

Vocabulary build-up

The noun respite means “a usually short period of rest or relief; a pause from exertion; interval of rest.”

The adjective ripe means “fully developed; thoroughly matured, as by study or experience; fully prepared to do or undergo something; ready.”

Comments

J.R.R. Tolkien, in full John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, was born in South Africa in 1892. At the age of four, after his father (a bank manager) passed away, Tolkien, his mother, and his younger brother moved to a small city near Birmingham, England. During World War I he saw action in the Somme. After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to “trench fever”, a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and in early November was sent back to England, where he spent the next month in the hospital in Birmingham. When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Tolkien had already been trying to obtain academic employment, and by the time he was demobilized, he had been appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary. For most of his adult life, he taught English language and literature, specializing in Old and Middle English, at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford. In private, Tolkien amused himself by writing an elaborate series of fantasy tales, often dark and sorrowful, set in a world of his own creation. To entertain his four children, he devised lighter fare, lively and often humorous. The longest and most important of those stories, begun about 1930, was “The Hobbit.” Seventeen years later, Tolkien wrote his masterpiece, “The Lord of the Rings”, a story that you all know very well. Tolkien’s writings have often been accused of embodying outmoded attitudes to race, such as eugenic theories, scientific racism, and moral geography, with good in the West and evil in the East. The author, however, has an extensive collection of letters that proves his anti-racism and anti-apartheid. He even refused to declare that he had an “Aryan” origin so as to publish “The Hobbit” in Nazi Germany. His work has been controversial, as some critics consider his books to be children’s literature, while several polls since 1996 have named “The Lord of the Rings” the best book of the 20th century, and its success has made it possible for other authors to thrive by writing fantasy fiction.