Namárië

 

I can’t remember when my wife Clare and I joined ACW. It must have been nearly fifteen years ago. Actually, she was the real member, as she was writing her Mullins Family Saga, while I was merely an author of non-fiction and technical books. But now the three books of the saga are finished and she has gone where all good stories come true. I have blogged here for about seven years, but this will be my last blog. It has been an interesting time. Readers with good memories will recall my premonition in June 2016 of dark times to come. And now we are almost accustomed to living in dark times. But the Light continues to shine.

Strangely, though, a fictional inspiration that came to me rough-hewn before Clare and I met (in 1971) has returned to me, and if I’m spared, I hope to let it develop into something people can read. Let me explain. As a teenager, I desperately wanted to write a fantasy story. I wanted to invent a magical world with a history, poetry, maps, and, most importantly, its own language or languages — like Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I struggled. Much of it was embarrassingly callow. I didn’t have the experience. There were fragments of poetry that were just about OK. And there was one complete legend that I wrote aged 17 which struck me, reading it again aged 71, as not too bad. But the manuscripts were all stored away in a file after I graduated, and I never showed them to Clare.

As my life’s work is all about language, I continued to tinker at language invention on and off, as a sort of mental exercise, the way some people do Sudoku, and it began to come together. Then a few years ago, doing a bit of decluttering, I dug out that old file. It seemed a shame to throw out all those teenage efforts, so I keyed most of the manuscripts and photographed the maps and drawings. Then I found myself revising the legend mentioned above. One thing led to another, and I started writing further legends, all prequels in fact, following suggestions and fragments from those naive teenage documents.

Meanwhile the last couple of years became increasingly tough and crowded. Clare seemed to have lost much of her energy and creativity, so the priority was to get her final novel, Farewell Fifteen, published, and to cope with pressing family matters. The legends became a refuge that I could visit for mental refreshment in between more stressful activities. They gradually grew in number till there were a half dozen of them (and the tale still isn’t finished). When Clare asked what I was doing, tapping away on my iPad, I replied that it was a story and I would reveal all when it was ready. My intention was to read it to her when she had got over the various medical hurdles that lay before her, and her energy had returned. But this was not to be.

The fantasy-writing project has turned out to be like a parenthesis, opening before our life together began and closing after it has ended. Clare used to say often that she didn’t care for fantasy, apart from Tolkien’s, and couldn’t think why people wrote it: so perhaps it is all for the best! 

Namárië! (‘Farewell!’)