Phantasm

Well, I never was very faithful in the blogging department, but since I've been at Uni, I've been perfectly hopeless. I took to writing poetry over the summer... a requirement for the course I was doing. And would have enjoyed it, too, if it weren't for the deadlines. This is the one I think is best.

Phantasm
Westward lies a distant land
Where faeries dance ‘pon elven strand
By lee of hill all crowned in white:
A city fair and bathed in light.

A chink into another wood
Where summer’s golden grace’s withstood.
Encastled thrones, the Lion’s breath,
A deeper life beyond the death.

The Alder, Ash and lovely Beech,
The winding road, no end in reach,
The haunted shadow found and lost,
Redemption gained at greater cost.

And down the hill the war-horn cries:
Come thund’ring hooves! Come foe’s demise!
Come flash of steel! Come quick’ning dawn!
Come ev’ry man to goodness sworn!

This call is loud, this yearning strong,
A weighty, trembling, broad’ning song;
Its shafts return to strike anew
And pierce my bursting organ through.

A Elbereth Gilthoniel!
And unto Aslan’s sake as well!
His golden mane, Her glint of stars,
I’ll gladly bear their joyous scars.

Beowulf

I started reading Beowulf again the other day. I read it once several years ago (Seamus Heaney's translation. No, as much as I would like to, I don't read it in Anglo-Saxon. I only know about four words of the language. Hwaet, werguild, wyrd, and wyrm, if you care to know.) I wasn't that impressed with it then. The story was good - I could see that - but I felt let down by the words Heaney used to translate it. They didn't seem to me to fit, somehow. The story would be soaring along and then some jarring, modern word would intrude. I suspect that this was chiefly because I had just finished reading Tolkien's The Lay of Leithian (which is an awesome epic poem, by the way, though it be incomplete) and he matches his style his theme. This time round I laid hold of different translation. Strange to say, I'm finding I don't really care about the style it's told in - the story's simply too wonderful. It feels almost as if I'm reading Lord of the Rings in verse, even to the point where they seem to share the same characters. Its even set in Middle-earth, or Middangeard.I read somewhere recently (can't remember where) that Tolkien himself said that Beowulf was one of the greatest influences on his work.
I took the book to the beach with me yesterday, found a lonely rock upon the silver strand and, to the sound of the waves (I can never decide if they sound mournful or joyous) read a good bit of it aloud to myself - the part where Beowulf is preparing himself to wrest with the demon Grendel. Ah! But it was stirring!
I remember the basic plot line, but not the details of the rest of the story - may it meet my expectations and hopes!
And just for the record: Beowulf is NOTHING like the despicable film that has been made based on it. Beowulf is really a hero! Suffice to say, I have not seen the film, but when I heard the movie had been released, I read a review and was shocked - nay - scandalized by the changes they'd made.

Tolkien On Imagination

From the Notion Club Papers, which is included in Sauron Defeated. I thought it rather interesting.

‘When you are writing a story, for instance, you can (if you’re a vivid visualizer, as I am, and are clearly visualizing the scene) see two places at once. You can see (say) a field with a tree and sheep sheltering from the sun under it, and be looking round your room. You are really seeing both scenes, because you can recollect details later. … As far as my own visualizing goes, I’ve always been impressed by how often it seems independent of my own will or planning mind (at the moment). Often there is no trace of composing a scene or building it up. It comes before the mind’s eye, as we say, in a way that is very similar to opening closed eyes on a complete waking view. I found it difficult, usually quite impossible, to alter these pictures myself, that is my purpose. As a rule I find it better, and in the end more right, to alter the story I’m trying to tell to suit the pictures. If the two really belong together – they don’t always, of course. But in any case, on such occasions you are really seeing double, or simultaneously.’

C. S. Lewis mentioned something like this, too, I think, when talking about how he came to write Narnia. He had ‘pictures’ of such things such as a faun standing in the snow with an umbrella. I wonder if the pictures they talk about predate the stories they wrote, or as they wrote the stories or thought them out, the pictures cropped up. Hm.
If these pictures are such as I suppose them to be, then I know of one instance where I had to alter my story to fit the ‘picture’ that I have of a scene. Not very interesting to others, perhaps, but my hero was meant to be walking through a valley that came out onto a plain, but instead I saw him standing on top of a cliff looking out over that same plain. And the mountains that I’d put in my map were in different places in the picture. Darn.
But they do seem to come prefabricated, to a certain degree, which helps in describing detail. Anyhow, I, as I said, thought it was an interesting quote.