A nice, happy parallel between favourite books

[regshoe]

I finished a long re-read of Flight of the Heron last week and have been happily upset about the ending ever since. Anyway, reading the last chapter again reminded me of this association, which first occurred to me a while ago and which pleases me even though it breaks my heart:

As he was lifted, Keith came back from a moment’s dream of a shore with long green rollers roaring loudly under a blood-red sunset, to pain and difficult breath and Ewen’s arms.

—from The Flight of the Heron, part 5, chapter 5

...the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

—from The Lord of the Rings, book 6, chapter 9

(Actually, the imagery is kind of opposite, isn't it—sunrise vs. sunset, the image displacing the 'real' world vs. being displaced by it. And of course this is the last we get of Keith's POV, although it comes back at the end in Ewen's thought as that place 'where an enemy never entered and from whence a friend never went away').

Also, it strikes me that some of the lyrics of 'Into the West' from the LotR films (which isn't terribly appropriate in its original context, being clearly about death—despite the above comparison, sailing into the West wasn't supposed to be a literal or metaphorical death) really fit the scene on Morar sands awfully well... 'white shores are calling/You and I will meet again/And you'll be here in my arms, just sleeping...'—oh, but 'across the sea, a pale moon rises/The ships have come to carry you home' is a bit cruel in this context, isn't it?

Comments

[regshoe]

Related to this, I've finally got round to looking up the source of Broster's quote here: it's from one of the sermons of Jeremy Taylor, on page 354 (/392 of the scan) here. The passage is describing the joys of the saints in heaven. Interestingly, Jeremy Taylor is mentioned in part 1 of Flight of the Heron—Aunt Margaret offers to lend Keith a book of his sermons on the Sunday when Keith doesn't attend Morning Prayer at Ardroy. Definitely a neat thematic Thing going on there...

[theseatheseatheopensea]

That reference was so good! The passage may be about heaven, but we can just choose to see it as a fix-it AU: "joys without sorrows", and all that! <3

[regshoe]

Well, the epigraph to part 5 suggests that Ewen and Keith will meet again in heaven (and Ewen certainly expects they will <3), but I must admit I still prefer an earthly fix-it AU :D

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Aww nooo, this is heartbreaking but also beautiful and perfect--we now must have a Middle Earth AU or something, to cheer us all up!

And I approve of your re-read!! I'd actually been considering one too, because clearly I can't get enough of all that suffering...

[regshoe]

we now must have a Middle Earth AU or something, to cheer us all up!

Sounds great! Heh, I've amused myself by comparing Ewen to Maedhros—tall, handsome red-haired rebels, with brothers who are less level-headed than they are and powerful cousins for whom they care a great deal... They're not very similar in personality or fate, perhaps :P

And you should totally re-read the book—always a good time for more crying over these beautiful characters...

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Ohh, a very interesting parallel! And yes, I think I will re-read this Horrible Book once I'm done with my current one...

[starshipfox]

A Middle Earth AU would be amazing! Maybe a Gondor / Rohan parallel, which wouldn't quite work with the animosity but would work with the nobility and soldiering, or maybe one is a human and one is an elf!

[regshoe]

I suppose historically the best analogy for England in this period would be Númenor... and, hey, they did have a lot of wrangling over which party gets to control the throne—perhaps the Jacobites are the Elendili? So many possibilities...

[hyarrowen]

England is totally Numenor, tall ships and all! Square-riggers, undoubtedly.

[regshoe]

:D

[luzula]

I find it hard to map FotH onto this, because in Tolkien one side of the throne conflict in Númenor is Evil and allied with Sauron, and the other is Good. Whereas in FotH both sides have both good and bad aspects...at least, one would have to deal with the good/evil issue in doing a Tolkien AU! Of course, one could do a more general fantasy AU instead.

[regshoe]

True! (although I think Tolkien's Good/Evil conflicts are often not as straightforward as they look, including this one)—and there's also the awkward detail that the wrong side wins, of course :P

I think there's a lot of potential in fantasy AUs, given the way Broster's writing, basically mundane as it is, so strongly suggests the supernatural—you'd just have to make things a bit more explicit...

[hyarrowen]

When I was in the area, I really felt that the Road to the Isles, along which Keith would have marched to Morar, is just like Beleriand - and the area around Strontian, with its light, ferny woodland cover, is just like Doriath. I would not have been surprised to see a group of Sindar riding through those woods. The beach at Morar is very pearly too - shell sand, rather than quartzite, so we're talking Bay of Eldamar here.

I do sometimes wonder whether DKB and Tolkien met and talked at Oxford (she was a well-established novelist while he was a young lecturer, after all.) Must be something in the water there. The place certainly produces very fine landscape writers as well as fantasists.

As for Bishop Jeremy Taylor, it hadn't even occurred to me to look that quote up! That's really interesting. DKB doesn't miss a trick.

*hands you a box of tissues*

[regshoe]

The beach at Morar is very pearly too - shell sand, rather than quartzite, so we're talking Bay of Eldamar here.

Aww, it all sounds so beautiful—a real-life Bay of Eldamar...! Tolkien is so good at landscape description—I have such vivid images of all those places, and it would be very lovely to visit anywhere that looks like them :)

I do sometimes wonder whether DKB and Tolkien met and talked at Oxford (she was a well-established novelist while he was a young lecturer, after all.)

Quite possibly! I don't know how much modern historical fiction Tolkien read—18th/19th century French Royalists don't really seem like his sort of thing—but very interesting to think they might have met and perhaps influenced each other.

Broster certainly does like a literary allusion—I've been making notes on her references, which provide plenty of opportunity for nerdy tracking down of details :D

*hands you a box of tissues*

Thank you!