Across The Universe

The wind was on the withered heath,
but in the forest stirred no leaf:
there shadows lay by night and day,
and dark things silent crept beneath.

The wind came down from mountains cold,
and like a tide it roared and rolled;
the branches groaned, the forest moaned,
and leaves were laid upon the mould.

The wind went on from West to East;
all movement in the forest ceased,
but shrill and harsh across the marsh
its whistling voices were released.

The grasses hissed, their tassels bent,
the reeds were rattling— on it went
o’er shaken pool under heavens cool
where racing clouds were torn and rent.

It passed the lonely Mountain bare
and swept above the dragon’s lair:
there black and dark lay boulders stark
and flying smoke was in the air.

It left the world and took its flight
over the wide seas of the night.
The moon set sail upon the gale,
and stars were fanned to leaping light.

The Hobbit, "Queer Lodgings".

This is one of my favorite poems, and has been for some twenty years. I am disappointed beyond words that the film replaced it with a chase scene. A. Chase. Scene.

At any rate, I have it memorized, and I recite it to myself from time to time.

I also have a map of Middle-earth hanging on my study wall. (My back pain prevents me from spending much time in my study, but that's another story.)

Recently, it dawned on me that the wind is coming down from the north (the Withered Heath + the Grey Mountains), then turns east, then ends up in the wide seas. Now, my map of Middle-earth is right justified, in tune with Gandalf's "To the east I go not." But given that Middle-earth = Earth, albeit with slightly different geography (I have written, although not yet published, about this at some length), my mental extension of my Middle-earth map is a heck of a lot of land. I need to find the citation, but I think Alatar and Pallando are supposed to have inspired Middle Eastern and/or Eastern religions, which also implies land.

So the sea to the east of the Lonely Mountain took me very much by surprise.

It could be argued that this wind changes directions (although the references to the moon and stars imply it's continuing east), or that there's no indication of how much time passes between verses 5 and 6. But I submit that introducing a sudden jump in space or time, when all the other geographical features mentioned are in proximity to each other (enough to be indicated on Thror's map, even if only with an arrow), would be ad hoc and just as much in need of explanation. Nor do I see the sea of Rhûn as sufficiently "wide", nor to the east of the Lonely Mountain.

This is one reason I started rereading the History of the Hobbit closely. I checked to see if Rateliff addressed this rather startling feature directly, or if his treatment of the history of this poem would be enlightening, and the answer to both is no. The earliest draft we have of this poem is almost identical to the final draft, and no one else seems to have picked up on the wide seas to the east of the Lonely Mountain.

So I'm paying close attention to geography as I read. So far, the most relevant passage I've found is from the Encyclopedia:

In the cosmogony’s earliest version, Arda is a flat-earth world “globed amid the Void” (Lost Tales I, 56). An illustrated description from the 1930s shows its constitution. The Walls of the World form its spherical surface, transparent but impassable. The sphere’s upper half consists of air, its lower half of Middle-earth, a flat surface floating on the ocean. This ocean reaches almost to the Walls of the World, except that it is bounded in the east by the Walls of the Sun and in the west by Valinor (Shaping, 238– 51).

I need to go get my copies of these books and stare at the maps to see what I can make of this.

I would like to read The History of Middle-earth, with closer attention to detail than I've given it in the past, after this. Or you know, at some indeterminate point in the future. The main problem with this plan is that only the first 2 books are on Kindle, and my back pain does not allow me to read physical books yet. I mean, I'm hoping to fix that eventually, and who knows how long it will take me to read Rateliff + the Encyclopedia + the two Books of Lost Tales, but it is a concern.

The real problem is that not all the books are on Kindle! Come on! I actually had to buy the Index to the HOME, in lieu of a decent search function. It arrived today, and Tolkien books always make me happy, but I grumble every time I have to buy a physical book. (I have reservations about the long-term viability of Amazon's business model around e-books, but they're the best I've got rn.)

Mind you, I would have killed for the index when I was writing my first Tolkien paper, on Elladan and Elrohir. It had only recently been published, and I wasn't aware of it. I checked the indices of the individual volumes, but they were missing a reference that would have cleared up something in my paper that I left an open question. Which reminds me, I should check to see if it made it into the single-volume index.

I have no idea if my observation will result in anything publishable, but at the very least it, and my Huan idea, are giving me something to focus on when reading through a bunch of Tolkien scholarship. I always have an easier time sustaining concentration when I've got something specific in mind I'm reading for.