dovegreyreader scribbles

On This Day.... Dorothy L. Sayers

On this day in 1893, Dorothy L. Sayers was born in Oxford, the only child of an Anglican vicar Henry and his wife Helen. I have chosen this picture of her in her younger days. There is an element of latent mischief in that face, almost ready to laugh; pictures of Dorothy in her later years reveal a sterner, more severe and matronly countenance.

By all accounts intelligent, precocious and much-loved and indulged by the various adults that surrounded her, Dorothy was heading for the Godolphin School in Salisbury and thence to Somerville College in Oxford, becoming one of the first women to receive a degree. A contemporary there of Vera Brittain and all a cue for me to dust off my copy Dangerous by Degrees by Susan Leonardi.

I'm sure some of you will know this book, an account of women at Oxford between 1912 and 1922 and six Somerville novelists, Dorothy L. Sayers and Vera Brittain as well as Murial Jaeger, Doreen Wallace, Margaret Kennedy and Winifred Holtby. I have only read Dorothy and Vera, have almost meant to read Winifred, have both Doreen and Margaret on the shelf and had never heard of Muriel. I have also been dipping into the biography Dorothy L. Sayers - Her Life and Soul by Barbara Reynolds.

All lives are fascinating but Dorothy's the more so for the fact that she bore an illegitimate son in 1924 whose existence was kept a well-guarded secret from the public until twenty years after her death. Fearing that the discovery would heap shame on her parents, Dorothy hid herself away, taking eight weeks leave of absence from her job with an advertising agency to give birth to John Anthony, who she then proceeded to breast feed for several weeks before appointing a distant relative as a guardian and handing him over; adoption was illegal until 1926 ( I didn't know that) and swearing the guardian to secrecy, a vow that Ivy Shrimpton appears to have kept faithfully, loving John Anthony as her own.

I had just one Dorothy L. Sayers novel on the Have Read list and that was Gaudy Night some years ago, at which point I did the usual and acquired a shelf full thinking how much I had enjoyed it and I must read more, and never quite got around to it, so this week I have been deep into campanology and The Nine Tailors.

It's all a tangled mass of sallies and clappers and Grand Sire Triples, and bodies in the wrong place, and poor old Peter Wimsey who finds himself stranded in the snow on New Year's Eve just as the village of Fenchurch St Paul is in crisis. A man down on the bell ringing team, and with fifteen thousand, eight hundred and forty celebratory Kent Treble Bob Majors to be rung for the next nine hours before morning. Obviously no one needs any sleep in Fenchurch St Paul, and as luck would have it Sir Peter is an accomplished campanologist, along with all his other competencies, and is ready (sort of) and able to slot into the team. 

'Nothing would please me more than to ring bells all day and all night. I am not tired at all. I really don't need rest. I would far rather ring bells...'

There may be trouble ahead.

I haven't finished it yet but I am loving it all which is more than can be said for Q.D.Leavis who clearly had the knives out for Dorothy's fiction in general...

'... but no novelist with such a parasitic, stale adulterated way of feeling and living could ever amount to anything. And Miss Sayers' fiction,when it isn't mere detective-story of an unimpressive kind, is exactly that : stale, second-hand, hollow...it is only the emanation of a 'social' mind wanting to raise a snigger...'

Goodness me Queenie, that's bulldog-chewing-a-wasp writing if ever I saw it.

But reading The Nine Tailors was all enough to have me first in the queue and jumping up and down (in my mind)  with excitement when we saw this at the summer fair in Buckland Monachorum last Saturday...

Chances to go up church towers are rare but there was the church dressed overall, not a cloud in the sky and trips up to the roof . More about our belfry experience to come, and how we squeezed up the ninety something steps and decided how very thin people must have been in them days and how on earth did they build this in 1490 ...

Buckland Monachorum village history reveals it was not just Fenchurch St Paul that was awake all night listening with copious joy to the music of the bells...

'Church bell ringers have always practised their art and skill with enthusiasm, but records reveal that in 1815, their fervour overcame their judgement and good sense. It seems that although forbidden to have the key to the belfry door by Mark Tucker, Clerk and Schoolmaster, they managed to enter the church late one evening and rang throughout the night. Understandably the village was not pleased, and for their "mutinous and riotous behaviour" they were dismissed. 

That music as Dorothy L. Sayers writes it..

'Tin tan din dan bim bam bom bo - tan tin din dan bam bim bo bam - tan tin dan din bam bim bo bom - tan dan tin bam din bo bim bom...'

Are you keeping up...have you got your bell competently up and set up at the backstroke and have you adjusted your tuckings, and are you ready for the hunting up, the hunting down, making the thirds and fourths and laying the blows behind before working down to lead the dance again. I do hope so. I think I am almost starting to understand it, and if I tell the musical amongst you that the notes for the Buckland Monachorum bells (smallest to largest) are as follows...

 E - D# - C# - B - A - G# - F# - E

Well look, you could almost sing it or replicate a Kent Treble Bob Major on the piano couldn't you.

But meanwhile Happy Birthday Dorothy... any fans out there?? 

Any bell-ringers who understand it all??

 

 

 

On This Day... Edward Bawden

Two posts today because we have a birthday to remember.

Born on this day in 1903, it is time to wish Edward Bawden a very happy birthday, and how much I am enjoying reading for and writing these ' On This Day...'series of blog posts. It feels so much more optimistic somehow to celebrate a day of birth rather than to mourn a day of death.

I am not sure that coffee table books always make the best of reading for me. Usually too heavy to hold for any length of time, and if I do pick one up my butterfly eye flits over pictures hither and yon, flicking back and forth with no semblance of sense or chronology and often to the detriment of the text.

In fact to be very honest I had really ordered a copy of Edward Bawden and His Circle by Malcolm Yorke for the pictures. I have a growing collection of Eric Ravilious-related books but nothing on Edward Bawden, and that was a balance to be redressed given their close friendship and artistic collaboration. At 271 pages the book is certainly hefty and is generous with illustrations, but it is also blessed with a genuinely interesting biography of Edward Bawden's life.

I had been unaware that Edward Bawden, like Eric Ravilious, had done service as a war artist, enduring hellish conditions as he trekked around and recorded the war zones of Africa, before sailing for home from Cape Town on board the Laconia. Edward Bawden was not to know that on the second day of that voyage, Eric Ravilious, 'the closest and dearest friend he was ever to have' was killed in Iceland, lost at sea. Edward himself was almost lost at sea too and reading the account, some of it in his own words, it becomes clear that Edward Bawden was one very cool, calm customer under pressure.

The Laconia, a liner converted into a troop carrier and sailing without an escort, was hit by German torpedoes, holed below the water line and quickly sank. Up to ninety people, including Edward Bawden, were drifting in each lifeboat for five days before rescue, and with some very peckish sharks nuzzling at their side. The rescue was unfortunately effected by the 'wrong ' side, thus imprisonment in an Italian internment camp beckoned. but true to his remit Edward Bawden continued to draw what he saw. When news of the death of Eric Ravilious reached him his letter to Tirzah Ravilious, Eric's widow, offers a rare glimpse into the heart of man who by all accounts didn't wear his emotions on his sleeve very often...

'I simply can't tell you - or anyone else, or even myself what it is, or how much it is I miss by losing Eric - I find myself in tears at the moment ...'

Incidentally if you missed last week's series of Persephone Posts on Tirzah Ravilious you can catch up with them here. It became equally apparent to me, on reading Edward Bawden and His Circle, that in Charlotte Epton (married to Edward Bawden in 1932 and bringing with her the wedding gift of Brick House, in Great Bardfield) there was another example of a talented and long-suffering wife. Charlotte, it would seem uncomplainingly, subsumed her own skills in painting and pottery-making to the needs of a demanding and often self-centred husband, and one capable of being 'cruelly dismissive' of her talents.

Trained in graphic design and with a strong sense of  order and organisation it is clear that Edward Bawden had a different emotional approach to that of an 'artist.' His pictures are the product of close study and drawn with a sense of 'detached regard' which seems like a perfect fit for a post-war world of austerity and rationing and economy. Indeed, on returning from the war Edward felt forgotten by everyone bar the income tax as he immersed himself in commissions and life back with his family in Great Bardfield.

By all accounts something of a law unto himself, disciplined in the extreme with regard to his work, a shrewd professional and one who didn't suffer fools, Edward Bawden was capable of being both intimidating, tactless, unkind and rude to some, whilst showing others a generous and supportive degree of sympathy. I fully understood Malcolm Yorke's tactful assertion that he was not an 'easy man to be around' .

But, setting personality aside, I had been quietly unware too of how much of Edward Bawden's work has become iconic, taken for granted by me for sure, little knowing that he was the creator of that wonderful mural in Blackwell's book shop in Oxford...

or the Heartsease crockery for Wedgwood..

or the poster for that loveliest of films The Titfield Thunderbolt..

And the times when I have bought books at a P.B.F.A. Book Fair (Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association)  brought the book home and discarded the yellow paper bag with the nice print of the cat on the front, little knowing that I was unwittingly disposing of an Edward Bawden linocut circa 1983.

As I turned each page of this beautiful book, each successive picture became my favourite until I reached P167 and saw this... 

A watercolour study for a free-standing screen painted for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and depicting 'The British Character and Tradition' as shown in rural life, and the closer I looked the more I saw. The whole thing would have measured 36 by 45 feet with each panel cleverly concealing a series of 'visual puns'...can you see the ploughed furrows becoming the corrugated tin roof on the next panel (if you click on the picture a slightly larger version should pop up) As Malcolm Yorke suggests it is a 'triumph of design ingenuity' and what a tragedy that in the post-exhibition demolition the screen was dismantled and somehow lost.

There is so much more to this book I hardly feel I can do it or Edward Bawden justice in a single post, but hopefully this from David Gentleman's introduction will help..

Bawden was an artist of a high order. Yet he never became a national treasure or icon, a household word...Looking afresh now...at the whole sweeping output of his long and productive life, two things are most striking. The first is his intense individuality, doggedly independent of the reverently or credulously accepted artistic fashions of the time. The second is the intelligence and independence of mind that enabled him to leave behind, and to communicate to a still-growing following, a substantial, vivid, coherent and honset record of his whole life's experience - of time not only well, but intelligibly spent.'

What better tribute can there be to an artist whose work seems to me to be timeless; as much of this moment as of that one, more relevant today than ever, and long may it and Edward Bawden's memory live on.

 

 

 

On This Day ~ Edward Thomas

It is our old friend Edward Thomas's birthday today..



and some pictures of his beloved South Downs taken by Fran, who did the memorial walk there as part of our Team Edward Thomas project a while back...

and one of my favourite poems to mark the day.

 

For These

An acre of land between the shore and the hills,
Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,
The lovely visible earth and sky and sea
Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:

A house that shall love me as I love it,
Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit:

A garden I need never go beyond,
Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:
A spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond:

For these I ask not, but, neither too late
Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
And also that something may be sent
To be contented with, I ask of Fate. 

Edward Thomas

On This Day ~ Irène Némirovsky

I don't often post about a book on a Sunday having decided long ago that weekend posts are for playtime, and book thoughts are for weekdays. But now that I am no longer working, and since my weeks are no longer defined by that divide, and given that I hardly seem to know which day of the week it is anyway, and as many people visit here on a Sunday as do on a Monday...well, who needs rules and routine.

Besides which today is an On This Day... event which I have really been looking forward to, so Happy Birthday to Irene Nemirovksy.

Despite all this lovely time I have I still rarely read a book in a single day, but at 160 pages there is always the possibility, and when that book is The Misunderstanding by Irène Némirovsky I defy anyone to put it down unfinished and sleep.

I find I still need to psyche myself up to read anything by Irene but I am pleased to have written about several of her books all tagged here including Jezebel, Le Bal, Suite Francaise,and The Courilof Affair, 

I keep all books by and about her on a shelf of their own, The Irène Shelf sits near the Edith Shelf (Wharton) not far from the Margaret Shelf (Atwood) and in close proximity to the Joseph (Roth) and Max (Sebald) shelves. I frequently pick up a book I haven't read, think I will read it and then find myself overcome by an inexpressible wave of sadness and put it back for another day. So much sorrowful baggage to contemplate when I consider the circumstances of her life and death in a concentration camp, and her children carrying that 'baggage' to safety in the shape of that beautiful portmanteau with their mother's writing inside...and surely no case can have been a more awkward shape for a child to hold.

Needless to say I haven't been able to read the biograpy either, but dipping into it I discover that one of the last books that Irène  was reading before she was 'taken' was Katherine Mansfield's Journal, and the biographer's quote this extract...who knows, perhaps Irène did read this...

'Just when one thinks: "Now I've touched the bottom of the sea - now I can't go down any lower", one sinks deeper still. And so on for ever.'

Anyway I decided to woman up and picked up The Misunderstanding, the most recent of Sandra Smith's English translations of Irène Némirovsky's novels to come into print. La Malentendu the first of Irene's novels, written in 1924 and published in 1926.

That alone was enough to make me think.

1924...

Born in 1903 Irène  would have been twenty-one. George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Bing Crosby (bet they don't often make it into the same sentence) would have been twenty-one too. I looked it up in order to try and get some context, to know of Irène's contemporaries, people who may have been alive in my lifetime.

Then I wondered quite how a reasonably privileged twenty-one year old, living in France having fled the Russian revolution of 1918, might convey a perspective of the Great War. Would she even have a view on a world that has been torn apart and is discovering a new social and emotional order, a new license to love with gaping chasms between rich and poor, those fatally damaged by the war and those who seem to have remained untouched by it.

Then another obstacle loomed.

There is something about reading, in hindsight, the words of a naive, joyful twenty-one year old, revelling in her burgeoning talent as a wordsmith, full of anticipation for the the future as she explores what words and fiction can accomplish, and on the brink of what was surely to be a brillaint writing career.

We know what happens and it makes me feel indescribably sad.

Gosh I really do put myself through the wringer with Irène, but, having talked myself round, the moment I started to read The Misunderstanding I was spellbound and somehow all those factors that I had thought would be obstacles suddenly became catalysts.

Yves Harteloup, a veteran of the trenches, is making a living for himself in Paris after the war. He is from good stock but like many his family fortune has been lost during the conflict and he must accept a lower station in life. Office work and impecunious living do not come naturally for Yves who consistently lives beyond his means; somehow the nice things in life are still a fundamental requirement for his survival. If Yves thinks day to day life on his own is expensive then things are about to take a turn for the wallet-emptying when he meets Denise. 

The fortunes of war are vastly different for Family Jaissant. Jacques' engineering invention has made him a wealthy man and with his wife Denise and their child Francette, life really couldn't be better....until they meet Yves on the beach that is. 

Instantly smitten with each other Denise and Yves embark on a holiday affair which they propose to keep going on their return to Paris, and they do, though Yves' day job and lack of wealth are a major hindrance, but for the war they would have shared that common ground of leisured wealth.

Slowly and insidiously an imbalance creeps in, and with too much time on her hands Denise becomes increasingly obsessive and gradually Yves realises he has taken on one very emotionally high-maintenance lover. Lust and forbidden desire may now be acceptable and de rigueur in this post war climate but it turns to a muddled mix of  'pity, tenderness and scorn' for Yves, a burden of entrapment for both, and it is Denise's very helpful mother who suggests a course of action for her that...well you just know it's going to end in tears. 

But the brilliance of Irène Némirovsky's writing glistens on every single page (and gratitude must be owed to translator Sandra Smith for this too) and to read this book alone is to be assured of Irène's future as a successful author. A powerful sense of place acts like background scenery for the ebbs and flows of the love affair... hot, sensuous and languid on the beach (which always but always reminds of Grand Isle and Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening). Then steamy and claustrophobically airless back in Paris as Denise's neediness starts to suffocate Yves, becoming scorched, stormy and oppressive, with the leaves 'curling up and cracking' as Denise's plan goes hopelessly awry. 

Oddly my sympathies rested firmly and entirely with Yves rather than Denise and I am not sure they should have done given the circumstances and the pitiful suffering she endured...

'Her entire life now consisted of waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for his visit, waiting for their rendezvous ... Ah! Love meant such horrible suffering.'

... but a little voice in me, which got steadily stronger, was urging Yves to jump ship at the earliest opportunity. I may need to read it again, and with more of a sympathetic understanding towards the plight of women, but it is not something  Irène insists upon.

Nothing disappointed about The Misunderstanding, even down to the title which, as Sandra Smith points out, is open to multiple interpretations. What a blessing it is indeed to have Irène Némirovsky's legacy alive and well on the bookshelves.

Keep an eye out for this one, I have yet to read a book by Irène Némirovsky  that hasn't repaid every single second I have spent reading it. 

There must be legions of Irène Némirovsky fans out there...please do declare yourselves now and your favourite of her books.

And if you haven't read any don't be daunted, declare yourselves too, and perhaps we can offer you some ideas about which of  Irène's books to read first. Given my early failure with Suite Francaise that might not be my first suggestion.

(and please note, no time or expense spared in getting this è and this é in place, it doesn't come naturally to Typepad.)

 

 

 

On This Day... Roger Deakin

The late Roger Deakin, who died far too young in 2006, would have been seventy today, and in his honour we are going to talk hedging, a subject of which Roger would most certainly have approved and on which he most certainly has something to say.

A small group of writers of Roger Deakin's ilk, with their keen eye and astute observations of so much that I hitherto seem scarcely to have noticed, let alone understood more deeply, are proving more influential to my reading than I could ever have imagined. I would place Roger's book Wildwood, which I have finally finished after a six month very slow meander through it, near the top of the list. These books are opening my eyes to what is in front of them and when I read the chapter entitled A New-laid Hedge in Wildwood recently it all chimed... I know of what he speaks...

'I know of nothing more saddening than a machine-flailed hedge. It speaks of the disdain of nature and a craft that still dominates our agriculture. Even after years of benign neglect, plashed hedges stand as monuments to the best traditions of good husbandry.'

We do love the hedgerows along our lane with a passion, to the point of feeling a little possessive and protective of them, ours is the only house you come to as you drive along that first mile and you will only pass one more by the time you reach the little row of cottages at the other end.

That makes it all ours really doesn't it.

I can't pretend to know much about hedge-laying, or how-to, though I discover there is a National Hedgelaying Society devoted to the preservation of the craft. It's all about keeping the stock in the fields, providing shelter for them and supporting the healthy growth of the hedge, which if left untended will eventually revert to a row of trees.

I do know a little more now thanks to Roger...

'I began at the left-hand end, working along the hedge to my right and laying the cut trees and hazel stems to my left. I cut through each stem as close as possible to the ground with a diagonal stroke of the billhook that severed the stem almost right through, but left the bark and enough connective tissue to allow the sap to flow. Once cut in this way, the stems or trees are called pleachers....'

 

And we screeched the car to a halt driving home from town last week at the sight of this newly laid hedge, a rare sight indeed.

This is winter work to be done when the architecture of the hedge is most clearly visible; labour for a waning moon when the tide of the sap is low apparently. And who knew that there were differing styles of hedge-laying across the country. Sadly our hedges are now the victims of the regular massacre that Roger speaks of. Expediency and a different form of land stewardship and conservation being the main aim, whilst time and labour spent making hedges look nice and traditional would hardly be a priority on a busy farm nowadays. We stay indoors whilst it is being done or risk losing an eye as the branches become lethal shrapnel, jettisoned in all directions, and when we walk out afterwards the lane is a carpet of razor sharp splinters, death to bicycle tyres and the hedge itself a mess of sharp, jagged ends.

All a far cry from the swish of the billhook.

But there has been progress and the cutting is regulated to avoid crucial phases in the life of the hedge, which is resilient and somehow seems to recover quickly, and once done and repaired it has to be said the lane look very neat and tidy from afar. This is how it is looking at the moment, and perhaps thanks in some part to some meticulous hedge-laying many moons ago.

Imagine then, if you will, our horror when the council turned up to do their once a decade resurfacing of 'our' lane a few years ago, and started the project with a massacre of the hedges at the beginning of June when they were looking like this...

...just as the birds were nesting, and the wild flowers were approaching their full glory and would then set seed for the next year ...well we nearly cried, and in the name of all that is Roger Deakin we did our level best.

It was all about having access for the tarmacing machine apparently, and though we made many desperate phone calls to the county highways department, the RSPB and the environment agency... you name it we tried, it was all to no avail.

I suspect Roger would have gone and camped on the steps of the council offices or something.

In fact it was more than a massacre because the contractors were brought in from outside, so not the farmer who usually does the work and does at least understand the nuances of the growth. We watched in despair as the hedge was flailed back to the soil and the foundation stones in places, and started to disintegrate before our eyes; the birds disappeared for the remainder of the summer and we can still see the spots where the hedge has never properly recovered. This being us we did keep on...and on...and on... out of principle and until the council reluctantly sent a solitary worker in for about an hour to rebuild the parts that were collapsing.

But as we walk in the winter, when the skeletons of the hedgerows along our lane and around the fields are laid bare, and seeing through to the bones of the hedge, it is if we are granted a little window onto a visible social history, and easy to spot where the hedge-layers of old may have been at work.

'Very old laid hedges can be works of the hedgers art: a kind of tree jazz, improvised down the generations..' says Roger, and I would most definitely agree. I almost want to sit at this one and play a tune..

 ...and spot the stock peering through at us...

So there you have it, a quick Monday morning session on hedge-laying... bet you weren't expecting that, and here's remembering the inimitable one and only Roger Deakin on his seventieth ...and with much gratitude for my eyes now wide open. 

Any more Roger Deakin fans out there??

 

On This Day... J.R.R. Tolkien

I have all sorts of reading and writing plans to share on here for 2013 which I feel very enthused about, not least an "On This Day..." feature which will spotlight literary birthdays through the year.

I will be choosing authors I would want to send a card to were they alive, just to say thank you and have a lovely day (the inclusion criteria is that they they have to be dead, so I don't actually have to) and as I sat up the other night looking the birthdays up and pencilling them into my lovely new Faber diary, I realised this would be a great way to remind myself of authors I admire, whilst also creating the opportunity to wheel on a few that I haven't read but you will most certainly have done, and can thus recommend starters for ten. And it goes without saying that the posts will be my usual wandering off where the subject takes me.

Appropriately today belongs to J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel) born on this day in 1892 in South Africa, and I say appropriately because yesterday we spent Offspringette's Christmas gift to the family, a trip to see The Hobbit (we all thought it was brilliant) and to then eat about 5000 calories each in the American Diner next door to the cinema. The Tinker is a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings, having read and listened to the book more times than he can remember, and we have seen all the films together as soon as they have been released. 

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has filled in the gaping chasms in my Tolkien knowledge, and this might be another useful spin-off from these posts...you all know how I hate not knowing everything. I had definitely not been paying attention to Tolkein. and knew very little beyond the house in Oxford, so was interested to read of his time in the trenches of WWI. 

Incidentally, can you all access the DNB?? 

I hope that you can if you want to. I use my library ticket number to do so and love wandering around in there.

I am a failed reader of LOTR having read Book One three times, and each time failed to make the leap into Book Two, but I have read The Hobbit so I am up to speed on the Shire and eleventyfirst birthdays and things and quoting from the Oxford DNB makes me want to try the books again... 

In this Tolkien invented an entirely new mythological race of ‘hobbits’ who, like their representative Bilbo Baggins, are solid, respectable, anachronistically English, and, as appears when Bilbo is sent off by the wizard Gandalf to help recover the lost treasure of the dwarves from the dragon Smaug, capable of unsuspected resource. The Hobbit began as an amusement for the Tolkien children, and reached print rather unexpectedly, a typescript of it having been shown to Stanley Unwin by a former pupil of Tolkien's. Once published, however, it was an equally unexpected success. Unwin pressed Tolkien for a sequel.

Perhaps I'll listen to it rather than read now that I really do have my iPod Touch/ audio book/ knit/ listen set up sorted.

The Kayaker did the LOTR trail while he was in New Zealand on behalf of the rest of us, and it occurs to me that this must be like a very grand and slightly more spectacular equivalent of everyone coming to the UK to do the Downton trail or the Herriot trail, so we have all travelled vicariously with him to Mount Doom, in reality Mount Ngauruhoe I think.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” 

“Home is behind, the world ahead,
and there are many paths to tread
through shadows to the edge of night,
until the stars are all alight.” 

So many happy returns of the day and thank you to J.R.R.Tolkien.

The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.” 

J.R.R.Tolkien ~ The Lord of the Rings

Any Tolkien fans out there??    

Any Tolkien loathers??