Of Eru's Forgotten Children
		There is a little town at the foot of a cliff on the Mediterranean coast, that is familiar to all who have travelled from Spain to France by that route of the iron road. The town goes about it's dreamy life in it's own idyllic way. The occasional trainload of weary travellers, angered at being forced to change trains and stumbling into the dust strangely blends with the timeless scene. The little cafés, bars and fish restaurants survive on the travellers bold enough to wander that far down from the station. The station itself sits on an artificial plateau, built by the kings of long ago, shadowing the town with it's mighty arches of brick, and this fortress remains even more timeless than the town below. It is calm and dilapidated, yet great and proud enough to ignore the goings on at it's feet. The old knights who discovered the place named it Cerbère after the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to the classic underworld. Whether this reflects it's frontier position, or what I intend to describe in this article has been lost in the mists of time. The Elven Masters who built the town gave it another name, but they that knew it have passed across the sea, and we who are left behind have no means to ask them. Now many travellers do not care to leave the halls of the Iron Road, but drink mead in the attached inn, or watch the passage of time on the marble floors of the palace. Others prefer to take leave from the master of the hall and explore the little town below. There are several ways down to it and to the sea-front: There is a long twisting roadway along the cliffs, and there is, specially but not exclusively for dwarves, a tunnel cut into the ancient rock running at a steep incline down to the sea. The boldest who have passed here have honoured the town by cutting their names into the living rock, and those who care to inspect the carvings will recognise that such great masters as Zorro, F.C.Barcelona and Le Pen must have been here personally. And yet there is a third way down, a way I discovered on a more recent visit. Another tunnel, a longer one, starting some distance from the house of the iron road by a field where the master of that house grazes his mighty horses. No grass grows in that field, and it's soil is still scorched and black from a battle which was once fought there against Morgoth, the Evil One, when this world was still young and the Children of Illuvatar were pure, few and fearless. The tunnel entrance is shrouded and veiled, and all but the keenest of eyes would mistake it for a mere shadow caused by the immense mountains shielding the hidden kingdom. From here the passage runs down steeply. Steps are carved on half the breadth, and the water dripping from the ceiling oozes and slimes through a gulley on the other. Once inside, the tunnel is straight, but the end cannot be seen as it levels out slightly. Ahead and behind, the flickering of sparsely spaced neon tubes does it's best, if in vain, to cast shadows through the moist gloom and declare the shape of the dark brick arch overhead, of the rough steps below and of the silken threads brushing my face. Yet light is insufficient to tell whether the shape ahead is that of a discarded Orc helmet or a trick of the shadows. At the foot of the descent, the tunnel joins a larger one: A vast chamber hollowed out in the underworld; an ancient banqueting hall maybe? And shortly there is a shaft stretching upwards through the mountain so far that during daytime, I suppose, sunlight must reach even here. The tunnel twists on through the grimy underworld. A brief pause to discern whether the distant patter is the footsteps of some miserable creature out to regain a lost bithday present, or just the water dripping from the ancient arches. And finally the tunnel emerges on the edge of the town, and reveals that it is in fact a parched river bed. That tunnel was built by Dwarves, not in search of mithril, but at the service of the king who wished to see the river diverted to make way for his great house above. And now that he is gone, it is used by locals as the river's absence permits as a roadway to the fields beyond. And yet, leaving that tunnel and stepping out into the fresh sea wind under the darkened sky of a Mediterranean winter night, I wondered whether there are places, here or elsewhere, where the creatures of Middle Earth still survive. The passage of time may have done all it could to erase from the face of this world the traces of much of what Tolkien chronicles. The Vala have retreated to Valinor and care little for the world without. The Elves have left to join them or otherwise dwindled to insignificance. The Ents are diminished and their forests left unprotected. Dwarves and Hobbits, if any survive, are scarce and well hidden from all but the keenest of eyes. The dominion of Men that was foretold even in the Third Age is complete. All that remains of the earlier years is a sparse collection of partly contradictory manuscripts translated from ancient languages of which we have only fragmentary knowledge. Nobody can even tell for sure how old these tales really are, or when the Elves passed across the sea, or even where the described places are and what they are called today. The sad truth is that so little is certain, that most historians prefer to classify the tales of these early ages as pure fiction. So is Middle-Earth reduced to a mere para-historic shadow fit to live only on the bookshelf? Can it be reduced to a phase, to a phenomenon in 20th century literary history? An interesting attempt to bring mythology back to the bookshop? Many who have never met Elves, Dwarves or Ents or felt their prescence derisively speak of 'fantasy'. But whose fantasy? Tolkien (the alleged author) didn't invent Elves, Dwarves or Goblins and possibly not even Ents; even if he may have (allegedly) defined their natures to fit the consistency of his work. If there are no Dwarves or Elves, then storytelling apart, mankind stands alone; he has no other race of beings of his own state of mind with which he can communicate. It is said that stories of such beings were invented by Man out of his craving for equals. A craving which has not died even in the Space Age, as today's continuing search for life on other planets illustrates. Yet the belief in such other beings held by our ancestors was not entirely the product of their own imagination, but reinforced by the presence, and possibly living memory, of an earlier culture in their own lands, a culture they had displaced: The confrontation with barrows, doldrums and megaliths they did not understand must have sparked awe and respect for a vanished people, or maybe, so they wished, a people that hadn't vanished completely, but merely knew the art of living hidden and passing unseen. Tolkien's work is thus not merely drawing from myth and fairy tales, but goes back further, developing inborn human notions of other life forms, and so draws on the deeper knowledge, desire and intuition that is part of us. And that deeper intuition tells us we are (maybe) not alone. Who knows?
	This article was published in Aglared 14 (1999). <== back to article list
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