A book that influenced m life - the #evernighties

A book that influence my life

It maybe unoriginal, but the book that influenced my life most is The Lord of the Rings.

I can’t even begin to tell how deeply ingrained Middle-Earth is in my life.

It’s not just that I love to draw pale blond elves with luminous eyes, and that I love swirly floral designs, and that I often say things like “Fool of a Took!”, or “What about second breakfast?”.

No, in fact I think that some of the most life-changing decisions I ever took had a distinctly Baggins-like cast to them.

At a crisis time of my life, I decided that much the best thing to do was to drop everything, including any pretence to respectability, and go on a grand walking adventure. In our case it was not so much a case of there and back again. We never meant to go back. We meant to tramp around Europe until we found a place where we could build a “hut in the woods”. Our own Shire, in other words.

We did find it. And there we decided to build a house with grass roof…

Much as I admire the tall Elves of Tolkien’s legends, I am very obviously a hobbit. Not only I am hobbit-sized, but I am also a gardener, and a tolerably rustic creature. I love good simple food, preferably grown in my own garden, or foraged in the nearby countryside. I don't have much use for kings and queens and complicated machinery (all of which can be described as orkeries, in my opinion). I love mushrooms, stout ponies, and "good tilled earth". I don't like upstairs, and I prefer to avoid being seen by the Tall People on my country walks.

 

But, like Bilbo, I have a reverence and need for higher tales and poetry in my life. So much of my art has to do with Middle-Earth, I would not even know where to start... embroideries, and paintings, and drawings, and maps, even woodwork and strange one-off projects... I have mixed Tolkien's world into my crafting since I was a child.

Gildor Inglorion - Pencil drawing

© Katherine Wvern 2018

Many find Tolkien’s stories antiquated, not so much for the (intentionally) high and archaic tone of them, but because of their “simple”, black and white moral tone, preferring a more cynical, more modern take on politics (a la George Martin, say).

I disagree on this assessment of Tolkien’s moral as simplistic. And in fact I always felt that his acknowledgment of some villains’ struggles (think of Gollum, Denethor, Boromir, and to a certain extent even Saruman or Wormtongue) and some heroes’ shortcomings (Frodo would never have destroyed the Ring, and even Treebeard was swayed by Saruman’s words, and let him loose, giving him a chance devastate the Shire, and not all hobbits shone for courage and loyalty, and Fëanor, the most gifted of all elves, made such a cock of things that we are still collecting the pieces to this day!) left a very strong impression on me as a child, and was perhaps the greatest ethical lesson I ever absorbed. It taught me to always try to see the other side of things (something that is sadly out of fashion lately) while still acknowledging that there are some absolutes of good and evil that it would be good to treat less cynically. 

Fëanor - Pencil drawing

© Katherine Wvern 2018

And Tolkien was, profoundly, an ecologist, perhaps before the word was even invented. That too he imprinted early on on me. 

While many accuse the Fantasy genre of “escapism” (an accusation that Tolkien himself refuted beautifully) there are lessons to be taken from good fantasy, especially at a time when our “real world” is becoming increasingly and dangerously unlivable.

 Lothlorien Brooch - stumpwork embroidery 2012