"Sing a tree for me" by shadowbrides
Mar. 10th, 2013 07:50 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
shadowbrides.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
b2memB2MeM Challenge: Wildcard (Athelas)
Format: Non-Fiction
Genre: autobiographical
Rating: Gen
Warnings: None
Characters: Me, lots of dead elves, semi-sentient music.
Pairings: Silmarillion/Me
Summary: I didn't start with the Lord of the Rings or even the Hobbit; the music in everything was what seduced me, and the sadness.
Unlike saner people, I picked up the Silmarillion first.I think I was eleven at the time and very into all things early medieval and vaguely celtic; I suppose it was a logical choice, as I preferred my reading material dry and with lots of interesting names. The "silmarillion" sounded like an interesting word; it was 2001 and my older cousin was raving about the film to be released later that year, The Fellowship of the Ring, based on a book by a certain professor named Tolkien. I recognised the name on the spine of a big, black book and was curious; I also adored my older cousin and thought that if she liked it, it was bound to be good. So I borrowed it from the library and curled up with it on my bed.
What then happened was actually very simple. What happened was this; I read this sentence;
Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.
...and fell in love.
The idea that the world could be created by music so resonated with me that I couldn't but love all the rest. It was utterly new and tempting to imagine, so different from any other idea about how the world came into existence I had heard before. I was already a budding musician and couldn't help but love the idea that somehow music had power, because that was what I believed already, although of course not quite in the same way. I tried to imagine what something would have to sound like to create a world. I imagined symphonies, colours erupting out of sound and forming trees and mountains. I tried playing a tree, couldn't figure out what it should sound like. I spent a lot of time with the book closed imagining music becoming somehow solid and fixed in time. An entire story about a world made of sound was simply amazing. I remember being very annoyed by the repetitions and sometimes clunky translation; but I would not be stopped by that.
then there were sentences like
In the changes of the world the shapes of lands and of seas have been broken and remade; rivers have not kept their courses, neither have mountains remained steadfast; and to Cuiviénen there is no returning.
and there was a certain heaviness in it I could understand (probably shouldn't have understood already), the feeling that the world is constantly changing and that once some things are lost you can never, ever regain them. The inherent, unavoidable sadness of the world. It seemed like this theme came back again and again, especially when elves were around. Everyone loses in the Silmarillion, eventually. Fate is heavy and presses everyone down into their stories, whatever they think they are going to do. Names contain destinies. Nothing lasts. Not even continents.
Along came Lúthien.
I will never care about Beren or love but; the idea that somehow, she broke the world. No. She steps out of her own story and says no to every rule in place; to her father's rule; to the simple rules of probability; to the rules of the world itself; to fate. Sings herself out of her story, moves the immovable judge. The isle where she and Beren end up living out their days is separate from the world to me because they are not really in it anymore. Because nothing happens like that in real life. Real life is loss and death and irrecoverable beauty. Nothing like that. Well, anyway, not for anyone else.
Other things; the Teleri, their reluctance, and their ships shaped like swans; the idea of jewel covered beaches glittering in a myriad of colours at sundown; glowing trees blooming; dark, enormous woods illuminated only by starlight; the beautiful names and and many more things, no doubt, but it was the very last sentence that broke my heart and made me read more, because if you break my heart in a certain way I will always love you, and the last sentence did so very effectively. I suppose I had fallen in love with the idea of elves, maybe, or the idea of things being more, not just beautiful but beautiful in a way that is impossible, ageless, larger than life, even the colours more intense, enchanted, and so I felt impossibly betrayed by this:
In the twilight of autumn it sailed out of Mithlond, until the seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high airs above the mists of the world it passed into the Ancient West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.
Of course I needed to read more. I wasn't about to let them slip out my hands that easily.
And that, I guess, is the story of how I became a Tolkien addict.
Format: Non-Fiction
Genre: autobiographical
Rating: Gen
Warnings: None
Characters: Me, lots of dead elves, semi-sentient music.
Pairings: Silmarillion/Me
Summary: I didn't start with the Lord of the Rings or even the Hobbit; the music in everything was what seduced me, and the sadness.
Unlike saner people, I picked up the Silmarillion first.I think I was eleven at the time and very into all things early medieval and vaguely celtic; I suppose it was a logical choice, as I preferred my reading material dry and with lots of interesting names. The "silmarillion" sounded like an interesting word; it was 2001 and my older cousin was raving about the film to be released later that year, The Fellowship of the Ring, based on a book by a certain professor named Tolkien. I recognised the name on the spine of a big, black book and was curious; I also adored my older cousin and thought that if she liked it, it was bound to be good. So I borrowed it from the library and curled up with it on my bed.
What then happened was actually very simple. What happened was this; I read this sentence;
Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.
...and fell in love.
The idea that the world could be created by music so resonated with me that I couldn't but love all the rest. It was utterly new and tempting to imagine, so different from any other idea about how the world came into existence I had heard before. I was already a budding musician and couldn't help but love the idea that somehow music had power, because that was what I believed already, although of course not quite in the same way. I tried to imagine what something would have to sound like to create a world. I imagined symphonies, colours erupting out of sound and forming trees and mountains. I tried playing a tree, couldn't figure out what it should sound like. I spent a lot of time with the book closed imagining music becoming somehow solid and fixed in time. An entire story about a world made of sound was simply amazing. I remember being very annoyed by the repetitions and sometimes clunky translation; but I would not be stopped by that.
then there were sentences like
In the changes of the world the shapes of lands and of seas have been broken and remade; rivers have not kept their courses, neither have mountains remained steadfast; and to Cuiviénen there is no returning.
and there was a certain heaviness in it I could understand (probably shouldn't have understood already), the feeling that the world is constantly changing and that once some things are lost you can never, ever regain them. The inherent, unavoidable sadness of the world. It seemed like this theme came back again and again, especially when elves were around. Everyone loses in the Silmarillion, eventually. Fate is heavy and presses everyone down into their stories, whatever they think they are going to do. Names contain destinies. Nothing lasts. Not even continents.
Along came Lúthien.
I will never care about Beren or love but; the idea that somehow, she broke the world. No. She steps out of her own story and says no to every rule in place; to her father's rule; to the simple rules of probability; to the rules of the world itself; to fate. Sings herself out of her story, moves the immovable judge. The isle where she and Beren end up living out their days is separate from the world to me because they are not really in it anymore. Because nothing happens like that in real life. Real life is loss and death and irrecoverable beauty. Nothing like that. Well, anyway, not for anyone else.
Other things; the Teleri, their reluctance, and their ships shaped like swans; the idea of jewel covered beaches glittering in a myriad of colours at sundown; glowing trees blooming; dark, enormous woods illuminated only by starlight; the beautiful names and and many more things, no doubt, but it was the very last sentence that broke my heart and made me read more, because if you break my heart in a certain way I will always love you, and the last sentence did so very effectively. I suppose I had fallen in love with the idea of elves, maybe, or the idea of things being more, not just beautiful but beautiful in a way that is impossible, ageless, larger than life, even the colours more intense, enchanted, and so I felt impossibly betrayed by this:
In the twilight of autumn it sailed out of Mithlond, until the seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high airs above the mists of the world it passed into the Ancient West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.
Of course I needed to read more. I wasn't about to let them slip out my hands that easily.
And that, I guess, is the story of how I became a Tolkien addict.
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no subject
Date: 2013-03-10 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-10 07:18 pm (UTC)There truly is so much power in Tolkien's words, in his ability to make sorrow a sort of painful joy, and joy a sort of glorious sorrow!
no subject
Date: 2013-03-10 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-10 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-10 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-10 11:20 pm (UTC)And this is why I love Lúthien.
Your whole essay is beautiful.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-10 11:36 pm (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2013-03-11 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-11 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-11 06:33 am (UTC)