It’s funny how often the old iPod throws up a piece of music that connects with something I’ve just heard on a Mythgard lecture. The last time I blogged it is here.
This time, it was class #2 of The Nature of Middle-earth. About 40 minutes in, the discussion turned to senescence in Elves. Basically, aging to them means that the weight of memory “began to be a burden” so heavy that they lose interest in bodily things.
To which the magic of shuffle-mode juxtaposed Graeme Edge’s poem “Departure” from In Search of the Lost Chord: “To have all of these things in our memory’s hoard, and to use them … to help us … to find…” and the reading dissolves into insane laughter. Poor Elf.
But this presents a conundrum. It’s the same issue as noticing how George Harrison’s song “Dream Away” parallels “The Notion Club Papers”. How can it be intertextual when one of the texts hadn’t been published?
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