Lost in the liminal spaces

When I last read The Lord of the Rings, I did so aloud, to children.  As a result, I found myself "skipping a bit" when I got to long descriptive passages like this:

The day was drawing to its end, and cold stars were glinting in the sky high above the sunset, when the Company, with all the speed they could, climbed up the slopes and reached the side of the lake. In breadth it looked to be no more than two or three furlongs at the widest point. How far it stretched away southward they could not see in the failing light; but its northern end was no more than half a mile from where they stood, and between the stony ridges that enclosed the valley and the water's edge there was a rim of open ground. They hurried forward, for they had still a mile or two to go before they could reach the point on the far shore that Gandalf was making for; and then he had still to find the doors. 

When they came to the northernmost corner of the lake they found a narrow creek that barred their way. It was green and stagnant, thrust out like a slimy arm towards the enclosing hills. Gimli strode forward undeterred, and found that the water was shallow, no more than ankle-deep at the edge. Behind him they walked in file, threading their way with care, for under the weedy pools were sliding and greasy stones, and footing was treacherous. Frodo shuddered with disgust at the touch of the dark unclean water on his feet. 

As Sam, the last of the Company, led Bill up on to the dry ground on the far side, there came a soft sound: a swish, followed by a plop, as if a fish had disturbed the still surface of the water. Turning quickly they saw ripples, black-edged with shadow in the waning light: great rings were widening outwards from a point far out in the lake. There was a bubbling noise, and then silence. The dusk deepened, and the last gleams of the sunset were veiled in cloud. 

Gandalf now pressed on at a great pace, and the others followed as quickly as they could. They reached the strip of dry land between the lake and the cliffs: it was narrow, often hardly a dozen yards across, and encumbered with fallen rock and stones; but they found a way, hugging the cliff, and keeping as far from the dark water as they might. A mile southwards along the shore they came upon holly trees. Stumps and dead boughs were rotting in the shallows, the remains it seemed of old thickets, or of a hedge that had once lined the road across the drowned valley. But close under the cliff there stood, still strong and living, . two tall trees, larger than any trees of holly that Frodo had ever seen or imagined. Their great roots spread from the wall to the water. Under the looming cliffs they had looked like mere bushes, when seen far off from the top of the Stair; but now they towered overhead, stiff, dark, and silent, throwing deep night-shadows about their feet, standing like sentinel pillars at the end of the road. 

This stuff drove some critics nuts, but if you have time it is worth sitting back and savoring it.  Tolkien's landscape descriptions often use words that are far out fashion, sometimes even extinct or invented, but words well-grounded in the experiences and languages of ancient people.  As noted in this estimable work from the University of Alberta,

Tolkien wrote that the place-names of the Shire are “devised according to the style, origins, and mode of formation of English (especially Midland) place-names” (Letters 360).

Outside the Shire, the area surrounding Bree also has a kind of British character hidden in the etymons of its place-names. Bree itself is the same name as the Welsh word for “hill” while the etyma of Archet and Combe are the Welsh archet “the wood” and cwˆm “valley” (Shippey 64-65). In one passage of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien describes the river Withywindle, the description of which, as well as its name, was inspired by the Cherwell. Shippey posits that Tolkien derived the name from Old English *cier-welle, the first element of which comes from cierran “to turn” (63). He also notes that Windsor, found a little further down the Thames, may take its name from *windels-ora “the place on the winding stream,” while “withy” is an old word for “willow.” 

It is ironic that as we enter Middle Earth as a place of escape, we are not entering some paradise (except The Shire, which we immediately depart), but a ruined world full of names that encode a lost past.  After some reflection the whole work strikes me as a meditation on the liminal spaces, the in-between areas between great cities, between Kingship and anarchy, between The Shire and Mount Doom.  And I think part of the unique charisma of Tolkien's work is that this liminal space is essentially infinite - ungoverned, lost to civilization.  Full of terrors, shocking beauty, the monuments of lost Kingdoms, and most of all abandoned space - it touches something in our imaginations, something that yearns to walk into the emptiness.

This way to Steller!

I had thought Tolkien had had the last word on wistful landscape meditation, but Robert Macfarlane will have something to say about that.  I have not read enough of Macfarlane to know for sure, but I suspect he might be one of those authors, like Bart Ehrman, who (some say) writes the same book over and over, but is redeemed at least somewhat by the fact that it is a very good book.

Here are some of Macfarlane's works:

• Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit
• The Wild Places
• The Old Ways:  A Journey on Foot
• Landmarks 

and, this year, Tolkien-like:

• The Lost Words

(or should it be "Worlds"?)

Macfarlane mentions Tolkien in this interview about Mountain of the Mind:

It's a book not just about mountains, but also about how history works: why is it that people go into the wild, and escape nurturing, and experience things in a primary way? The "wild places" are often in children's literature. They're not just geographical spaces. They're also where kids go where they read. Tolkein. Narnia. Sendak. Wind in the Willows, The Wild Wood. The way you read landscapes and interpret them is a function of what you carry into them with you, and of cultural tradition. I think that happens in every sphere of life. But I think in mountains that that disjunction between the imagined and the real becomes very visible. People die because they mistake the imagined for the real. 

You don't have to go very high or very far to find somewhere you can hurt yourself on a mountain. But this feeling wells up in you; this desire to be somewhere high, somewhere cold, somewhere beautiful, somewhere sunlit, somewhere that isn't a city.

Nevertheless, I could go for a cappuccino right now...

I mention all this because I am trying to get through The Old Ways but making very slow progress.  It's not that Macfarlane writes badly, quite the contrary.  But let's face it, there's only so much objective information to convey about a walk on a dirt path.  Filling in the blanks requires that his style become his subject, and this is more apparent with him than anymore I've read since John Fowles.  At his best/worst he has a pronounced Anglo-Saxon accent and is compulsively spondaic:

It wasn't until last light that I reached Ivinghoe Beacon, whose great chalk summit is crowned by an Iron Age hill-fort.  I scrambled up to one of its grassed-up ramparts, sat facing westwards and let the setting sun soak me with its warmth.  I took off my shoes and socks.  My feet were puffy as rising dough.  Across the land, millions of bindweed flowers completed their final revolutions of the day, buttercups returned their last lustre to the sun, the wallabies of Whipsnade settled to sleep and the day slowed to its close.

Alexander Pope high five!  And then we're back to names...

Sitting there in that buttery sunshine the many different names of the path - Yken, Ychen, Ayken, Iceni, Icening, Ickeneld, Ikeneld, Ikenild, Icleton, Icknield - seemed to melt and combine, such that the Way seemed not like a two-dimensional track but part of a greater manifold, looping and weaving in time even as it appears to run singularly onwards in space.  I could not find a beginning or an end of the Icknield Way...

I take your point

But it is not all this.  As I skip through the book I spot signs of well-told trek tales:

In early winter my friend Jon Miceler called to ask if I wanted to join him on a short expedition to Minya Konka, following the trails that once connected the tea-growing regions of Sichuan with Nepal and Tibet, and then the pilgrimage routes - some of them more than 700 years old - that converged on the peak.  My interest in pilgrimage was growing increasingly strong, and my hunger for high mountains has long been unseemly.  I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do, so I travelled to Chengdu...

That gives me a CORKER of an idea for a song.

...the capital of Sichuan Province in western China and met Jon at his apartment there.   

He'd just returned from an attempted three-week vehicular traverse of the Burma Road.
'Failed,' he said ruefully.  'Gumbo mud.  Permit trouble.  And way too many leeches.'

So this is interesting.  My ambivalence about Macfarlane's style counts for little, he has won the Guardian's First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the coveted Boardman-Tasker Award.  His work has been reviewed and found superb, so I will not quibble.

But...what is all this reminding me of?  [He stares off into the middle distance, his eyes catch the light from a tree stand, the leaves still in the noon sun...] Something about time...time...time...oh yes:

Time present and time past 

Are both perhaps present in time future, 

And time future contained in time past. 

If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable. 

What might have been is an abstraction 

Remaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world of speculation. 

What might have been and what has been 

Point to one end, which is always present. 

Footfalls echo in the memory 

Down the passage which we did not take 

Towards the door we never opened 

Into the rose-garden. 

My words echo 

Thus, in your mind.

It is a fine English sport, going outdoors and ruminating on the unity of time and infinity of distance.  But I say when you have gone out, you have to try to come back - or get back - to the garden.




Who knows where the path will end?  Bilbo and Frodo made their way back to The Shire, but there are no guarantees.  Boardman and Tasker - the men that literary prize is named after - remain on Everest, probably forever, among the pinnacles they sought to conquer.

I think I will keep trying with Macfarlane.  He has his quirks, but he seems to know how to play the game.  I wonder if he can go a little further.  Can he see, as Eliot did, hope for our souls as we transit?  

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.