phoenixrisesoncemore:I was fortunate enough to make it to the Maker of Middle-earth exhibit at the M
phoenixrisesoncemore:I was fortunate enough to make it to the Maker of Middle-earth exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York back in March. Having never seen anything of Tolkien’s in person, and considering what a big part of my life Tolkien has been for the past umpteen years, it was practically a religious experience, a pilgrimage from the Midwest to the big city.The exhibit was full of gems (Luthien’s device was a treasure to see in person) but this was the piece that I went back to several times: an early title page from The Lord of the Rings. This seems a simple thing, right? Two lines on a page. Big deal.But something about it encapsulated for me that moment when “The Sequel to The Hobbit” became “The Sequel to The Silmarillion.” This was, to me, the moment it left the realms of children’s fiction and became a mediation on death, hope, domination, and mercy–a story written against the backdrop of a world gone mad for the second time.This was the last piece I looked at before we left, the last piece I cried over, struggling not to look too absurd or too much like a struggling cocaine addict as I realized I had forgotten to bring in any tissues, the first piece I remembered the next day, and the next, and the next, and the next…(This image of the title page was shared by Catherine McIlwaine, the Tolkien Archivist at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. The AMA where this was shared can be accessed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9hqsou/hi_im_catherine_mcilwaine_the_tolkien_archivist/. This entire AMA is a nice read as you get some lovely stories about the Bodleian exhibit which, in addition to generally being larger than that shown in New York, included some of Tolkien’s more personal items, such as some of his pipes that still smelled of his tobacco!) -- source link