Tolkien and Tea

 

I am making jasmine green tea again. I say "again" because I am hooked. It brings back fond memories from early adulthood, jasmine green tea does. For some reason I used to drink it all the time. I cannot pinpoint a reason why I got so hooked on the slightly floral delicately scented green tea, but I did. This was even before I first went to England. Thanks to my recent trip to St. Augustine, I am hooked again. I rekindled our friendship at a coffee shop called The Kookaburra, where I tried their jasmine green tea with oat milk and coconut. It was delicious. And it made me remember how much I used to drink jasmine green tea. Well, now I am making little pots of it left and right, adding a little oat milk this time, and sitting down with Tolkien.

It is a rare treat now to have any new release from Tolkien, yet somehow he still continues to produce books. After passing away in 1973, his son Christopher was left with editing and releasing all his Middle-earth writings and has done an amazing job with organizing and putting together his father's papers from his legendarium, which was not in any organized state. With Christopher's passing in 2020, the Tolkien estate is leaving the hands of his son to another set of capable hands, who Christopher trusted and had been sending documents to all along. Carl Hostetter had been receiving notes and papers from Christopher since 1997, and this book is the result. It's a collection of the nature of Middle-earth, by which he means the physical world, land, flora, fauna, and also the metaphysical qualities of the world and those who lived in it. 

Did you know Tolkien was kind of a numbers nerd? He seemed to enjoy putting numbers to his works. He calculated the age differences and year differences between the elves and men. He built vast histories with numbers. He ran into chronology issues in the stories and had to adjust his timing when things took place from the beginning of creation. He created these elaborate charts calculating the offspring of the elves from their awakening. There are pages and pages of his calculations of each generation of elves: how many were born, how many were in the population, etc. He was basically creating excel spreadsheets by hand, back in 1959. While the calculations are fairly simple, it's still impressive, because it's so expansive and detailed. Those are words that would describe Tolkien rather well, I think: expansive and detailed.

The thing I love about new Tolkien books that are released is how I get to learn more about him that I never knew. Such as the youth and lifespan of elves. I chuckled in one section where Tolkien wrote about how the elves consume mushrooms, then noted at the end it says that in the margin a rough pencil note by Tolkien says "Delete all this about funguses, too like Hobbits." I get to read his scribbles that have never been seen in publication before. It's a glimpse into the past, and into his mind, how he worked, how he built the history of Middle-earth, and I am continuously amazed again and again.