Middle Earth

I recently started re-reading The Silmarillion^[1] by Tolkien and was reminded of how the book opens: it is a collection of stories, after all, and one of the first pieces is a long letter written by Tolkien to one of his colleagues. In it he writes describing in informal detail a great deal of in depth background and lore of the world of novels. 

Of course, this is interesting just on its own, particularly if you are fan of the fantasy stories set in Middle Earth. 

But from a creative point of view it is interesting for a whole other reason: the format.

We all struggle with busy lives. The world doesn’t routinely pause for any of us to sit down and just write. Even if you had weeks of time off from a paid job to explore creatively, fitting in words and creative effort needs to be squeezed in around managing your household or cooking meals or shovelling snow. 

As someone put it aptly on social media recently, even just sending a text message these days is a whole spell slot. 

Tolkien may not have had a busy life in the way we think of it, certainly not in the sense of replying to emails and curating a personal brand on social media, but he was a professor and a scholar and pre-digital. 

And I certainly can’t assume or know if he wrote such a letter that sits in the introduction of one of his lesser-famous books for any other purpose than correspondence. Yet, he certainly found an interesting way to multi-task that we still enjoy the results of decades later.