Letter From Middle Earth

Eric is a cheerful man of about sixty. He works as a tour guide on a large farm in northeastern New Zealand. But it’s not the farm that’s the tourist attraction, nor the 11,000 sheep that live on it. The attraction sits in a corner of one particular paddock that was rented by New Line Cinema. It is the remains of the Hobbiton set.

Standing on top of Bag End, looking out across Bagshot Row towards the Party Tree, Eric recalls a group of professors from Oxford who visited the site recently. One of them remarked that Tolkien must have lived in New Zealand in a previous life; after all, the scene that stretches out before us is uncannily like the Shire that Tolkien described in the Lord of the Rings.

Eric is tickled by the fancies of Tolkien fans.

But a scant 5 hours earlier, in a different corner of the country, I had had the same thought as that Oxford Don who so amused Eric…

At Waitomo, about 200Km to the west, there is a small cave system. The caves are limestone, with stalactites and stalagmites that catch the light of an electric torch with such delicate grace that I can only try to imagine what they would look like in the flicker of a flame. And in the deeper recesses of the cave there is a colony of glow-worms.

We saw them from below as we glided in a boat along an underground river. Above our heads there was an immense black ceiling embroidered with a thousands of glittering lights. In the dark and silence under that cavernous ceiling it was easy to lose sense of distance and scale. I could easily imagine that what I was seeing was a rich star-field stretching across miles of sky. Or that I was seeing the Glittering Caves of Aglarond, which Gimli so excitedly explored in The Two Towers, the second part of Tolkien’s trilogy.

The night before I really had seen the most incredible star-field. We’d gone a few kilometers out of the town, to a spot where there was no light at all. It was a clear night, in a place hundreds of miles from any kind of smog or smoke. And up above there was a tapestry of stars so bright and so vivid that they looked painted onto a screen. That sounds like a strange comparison, but the truth is that that night sky was so rich and gluttonously dense with stars that it was beautiful to the point of being unnatural.

Across a broad swath of sky there was a band of powdery whiteness that I imagine must have been the Milky Way. It certainly was milky! It looked like someone had sprayed milk powder across a black canvas stretched out on a frame miles overhead. It gave me a thrill just to know that for the first time ever I was looking at a night sky I had never seen before, a totally new set of stars and constellations; for the first time I was looking up at the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere.

But although I was seeing this sky for the first time, I could still recognize it as the one that Tolkien had described so often. I’m not a complete fanboy, so I did not try to find all the same stars and constellations as the ones in the book. Nevertheless it was a sky that appeared so eerily close to the ground that it was not impossible to imagine Earendil gliding across it in his ship, a Silmaril shining on his brow to be seen on here on Middle-Earth.

Down here on Middle-Earth where men wander, and perhaps Hobbits do too.