If you, gentle reader, ever visited the
Lampwrights' Street, you may have
passed a grey, crumbling building with a stone portal leading into a
little courtyard where two mallorns grow, one on each side of a little
fountain whose water spurts out of the mouth of a marble Orc. This house once
belonged to an ancient dynasty of lampwrights reaching back in time to
Númenor itself; but their bloom withered and their roots failed, and all
that is left now is the house and the fountain, and the graven stone images
of two Elven warriors flanking the portal seem to be weeping tears of
fragmented stone.
Some years ago, I rented the house from an old woman called Ioreth and
settled in with my pet Balrog, Rover, as my only company. The days I
spent reading ancient documents by the fountain while Rover dozed at my
feet or chased butterflies; at night I roamed the streets of Minas
Tirith, pondering matters of the past or philosophical questions such as
"Do Dwarves and Elves love each other?" or "Why is it
that Eagles refuse to fly into Mordor?" But I never wondered
whether Balrogs have wings, because I only had to look at my faithful
Rover to see that this was not so. When the winter grew cold and the
paving stones seemed to crack at the mere sensation of the minimal
warmth in my footsoles, I made a roaring fire in the ancient fireplace
of the drawing-room, roasted apples over it and sang lays of Beleriand
while Rover beat the time with his tail. Ah, happy times! Felicitous
memories! Alas! Well does he who always remembers the lines:
"But at my back I always hear
Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near."
The happiness I thought was eternal turned transitory - my laurel faded - King Elessar ascended the throne and
filled the city of my dreams with loud, brash, vulgar people who would rather tear down and rebuild,
expand and proliferate than quietly retreat from the enervation of humdrum everyday existence in a swoon of contemplation of oh! those hallowed days of yore
that were the privilege of our ancestors; and the dignified, drooping
stillness of the city was broken by constantly active,
clamorous, working
people, many of them of a doubtful racial description, many, indeed, not
human at all but Dwarves or some kind of upstart Elves who had settled in
Ithilien, disturbing its dishevelled dryadic loveliness and romantic decay. No longer could I roam the
streets at will, for fear of being jostled by
rude workmen or uninformed newcomers from Langstrand, or Minhiriath, or even
from the barbarous North; and my quiet home street, where long the only
sound was the occasional, muted tinkle as someone cast a lamp for a funeral
party, was as devastated in its character as the rest. Every house on the
street but mine filled up with people, all possessing huge broods of
children who ran barefoot on the ancient cobbles and shouted and shattered
my serenity with laughter and squeals.
Let the rich deride, the proud disclaim, but rather would I have seen the
final ruin of this lovely city - seen its walls fall to dust in a slow,
dying cadenza - than its progression into a febrile, proletarian, noisy vitality
that seems to ever swell, reaching outwards to encompass ever more people
and entice additional numbers to settle here and disturb its ancient
tranquility, to impugn its cultural integrity! Indeed, it seemed to me that
not only the Elven warriors by my portal, but also the Orc of marble in my garden now wept at the degradation of our silent, proud city. The crown of my
humiliation was that the street outside my house - my
house, which was once the haunt of proud Dúnedain craftsmen! - was made a
halting-place for the horse-drawn contraptions instituted for the lazy, for
the impatient or for elderly people with infirm legs who should have stayed
at home in solemn retreat. Night and day, I heard them rattle to a stop
outside my home; and I would caress Rover's grizzled nose and weep as the
raucous voice of the ticket-collector announced: "Marble Orc! Marble Orc!"
Öjevind Lång
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