Mechtild's

Happy Birthday, Shirebound!


I hope your special day is as festive as this one...!





~ 'Party at Bear's House', by J. R. R. Tolkien


Mechtild

~ detail from a manip by Bandwench.



It was marked on my kitchen calendar. March 25: "Fall of Sauron". The destruction of the Ring and the Tower of Barad-dûr, the rescue of Frodo and Sam, the 'eucatastrophe' from which the hopes of the Free Peoples rose out of the smoke and ash of the Dark Lord's ruin. Of course I would have to celebrate it. Jan-u-wine agreed. But I'd screencapped every bit of the film scenes. In image and verse we'd pored over the destruction and fall and the rescue by the Eagles and the recovery in Ithilien.

It was another, quieter but no less pivotal event that captured my imagination this year, jan-u-wine's too . Re-reading the draft of a letter Tolkien wrote in 1963 to Mrs. Eileen Elgar (who had questions about whether Frodo failed or not), the matter of Arwen's gift of the jewel and her passage to the Undying Lands caught my attention. I sent it on and it provided the catalyst for a new and beautiful piece of jan-u-wine poetry.

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The primary illustration for this piece is a manip Bandwench made several years ago, which she called "Prince Elijah". Although the source image was a photo of Elijah Wood, to my mind it was an image of Frodo, but Frodo no longer living in the Shire. To me it was Frodo as imagined across the Sea, dressed in foreign clothes (the Gaffer, surely, would not approve), yet clothes appropriate to one whom Gandalf called Bronwe athan Harthad, who was the King's friend, sung by minstrels, and hailed by armies. Bandwench had made the manip in an array of colour effects, but the one she did in 'gray scale' had the most magic for me, with its soft diffuse glow, revealing a bit of the inner light Gandalf had seen in Frodo as he recovered in Rivendell. I showed it to jan-u-wine and she, too, thought it was stunning, worthy of a poem.

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~*~


It's a little after the fact, the winners announced last week, but real-life doings have prevented this post till now.

Congratulations to jan-u-wine on her awards at the 2011 MEFA's. And thanks to Antane for nominating Jan's poems in the first place.

That I am pleased as punch can come as no surprise to readers of this LJ. Since 2005, I have featured well over a hundred of jan-u-wine's Tolkien-inspired pieces. Jan and I have become friends through working together, finally meeting in person in 2008. But while the posts inspired the friendship, it was the poetry that inspired the posts. Therefore I am very, very happy to see her work's excellence recognized.

Below is a list of the poems that placed, posted with the banners provided by MEFA volunteer artists. The titles of the poems link to their postings in this journal, although they can be read at their original location at LOTR Scrapbook, where all Jan's Tolkien-based work is archived.

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Happy 120th Birthday!


I am so grateful this man lived and created such wonders for so many to enjoy and cherish. And I love the photo below. It's from the cover of Tom Shippey's fine Author of the Century. The mood, the look of the sea, the time of day -- this is very much the way I picture the end of "The Grey Havens", Sam standing on the shore, looking long at the grey shifting sea over which Frodo has gone.

What Tolkien wrote, even if categorized 'Fantasy', always had the ring of 'been there, done that', from the external settings to the deepest experiences of the characters. He'd stood by the sea, he'd known irreparable loss. And turned it into unforgettable art.

Jan-u-wine, inspired by the photograph below, has written a beautiful tribute to the Professor for his birthday. It is posted below the image.


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Merry Christmas!

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Autumn is waning here in north-eastern Minnesota. This weekend the leaves are at their peak but they are about to fall. We are having what in the United States is called "Indian Summer", a time deep in the autumn when unseasonably warm weather grants what seems a return of summer. Knowing that it's a reprieve -- fleeting, not here to stay -- makes it all the more precious. Typically we would have had a hard frost by now. All the annuals would be dead, the perennial tops yellowed and wilted over their crowns, the leaves down. We'd be wearing jackets and mittens and caps, not sandals and t-shirts. The soft mildness is sweet, sweeter because one knows it will be gone any minute.

Perhaps something of the intense sweetness of this time, when the growing world is on the cusp between seasonal life and death, is captured in these two beautiful new poems. Frodo revels in the Shire's autumn, actual and remembered, the time when the colour and fragrance of the natural world -- as various and as intense as at summer's height, if the colours and scents are different -- is at its keenest, precisely because it is on the verge of being lost. If it is not to death, it is to something like death, when growth and the promise of life suddenly are no longer accessible to the senses. One must enter winter, head into the time of greyness, of dearth and want, sustained only by hope in what is hidden, but working its revivifying magic under the soil.

But that time is not come, not yet. Not here in Minnesota and not in the Shire of these poems. One more day has come when the natural world glows with topaz and ruby and garnet, living leaf-jewels twinkling in the soft fragrant air. One blast and down the leaves will come, all colour bled from the landscape, scents muted by frost. But not yet, not yet.
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What better way to celebrate The Birthday than with [manipped] photos by the late, great Pierre Vinet and a new poem from jan-u-wine. Happy Birthday, dear Bilbo and Frodo, our most beloved Bagginses.


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Jan-u-wine has written a new poem, "The Hill of Home", imagined from Frodo's point of view. Here it is, along with two paintings to set it off.

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'Ships on a Stormy Sea' by Jan Porcellis.


Best of luck and God bless you, East Coast friends, as you brace for Hurricane Irene.

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There's bears in them thar hills!

Yesterday evening, in deep dusk after a day of storms, I was reading in bed when my husband came dashing in to show me a photo he'd just taken of a black bear in our yard. Except for one that passed through the corner of the yard last summer, we haven't seen a bear in our yard for years, and have never got a good picture of the event. My husband was sitting in the dining room when he noticed a couple of young women standing in the street, snapping photos with their phones. A good-sized bear was heading into our yard. Seeing it was going to go pass between our house and the next, a narrow strip, he ran to get the camera. He snapped his photo from the side porch, just in time. "It was moving fast, all wet from the rain, and hustled into the trees at the back. I didn't get to take a second shot."

Here's the photo he took of the bear passing between our strip of river rock and the neighbour's wood pile (covered with plastic camouflage material):
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