Rekindling An Old Light

December 19, 1937 must have been a happy day for Tolkien. On that day he sent a letter to his publisher to say,  "I have written the first chapter of a news story about Hobbits--'A long expected party'." Two months later he reports, "The Hobbit sequel is where it was, and I have only the vaguest notions of how to proceed...I found it only too easy to write opening chapters - and for the moment the story is not unfolding." By July of 1838 Tolkien seems to have despaired of further progress: "The sequel to The Hobbit has remained where it stopped. It has lost my favour, and I have no idea what to do with it...I am really very sorry: for my own sake as well as for yours I would like to produce something...I hope inspiration and the mood will return. It is not for lack of wooing that it holds aloof. But my wooing of late had been perforce intermittent. The Muses do not like such half-heartedness." "Half-heartedness" describes well...

"I have done done some touches to my nonsense fairy language - to its improvement. I often long to work at it and don't let myself 'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!" Tolkien's "mad hobby" was at the very core, the foundation of all his wild success in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Without the hours spent (stolen from other more "normal" obligations and responsibilities) he might never have written anything at all, at least anything that endures to the present as popular and well-known.  This gives me faint hope, or justification, for the time I spend on seemingly useless endeavors. I enjoy organizing my digital music, cataloging wild plants, hand-coding HTML and CAD...and posting Tolkien quotes!  Will it all pay? How will it benefit me or others?  I don't know.  Sometimes joy is hard to define or categorize.  Sometimes joy sneaks up on a person.  Quotation from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, # 4, page 8.