“This is it,” says Dude, and we stop.

It is a beautiful grave, in a beautiful graveyard; low, clear headstone, the mound littered with tiny gifts and bouquets – also letters, some in tengwar, crumbling slowly into the soil.  There is a tall rosebush, taller than the headstone; the flowers, once white, have long withered, and the bush stands stark in the late wash of fall.

I read the inscription.  “That is sweet,” I say.  “That is the sweetest thing ever.”

“I know, right?”

I kneel by the grave and get out my translation materials: my Desolation Row notebook and my pen and the text of the Battle of Brunanburh.  “Do you want to wait at the bench?” I say over my shoulder.  “I might be a while.”

“No,” says Dude.  “This is the grave of Tolkien.  It’s not like I have no vested interest.”

“Okay,” I say, and flip open the Campbell glossary.

Field became dark
with men’s blood, from when sun rose
on morning, glorious star of the heavens,
glad over lands, bright candle of God,
eternal Lord, till that noble creation
sank and settled.  There lay many a warrior
with spears destroyed, northern men
shot over shields, Scotsmen
weary, war-sated.

Sunlight on my pages, blinding from some angles.  It is morning, still early by our standards; at half-past seven this morning I forced myself into a sitting position and climbed out of Lisian’s bed.  Lisian rolled with the fluid immediacy of the space-craving somnolent into the void I left; yesterday she had made a cake and thrown a party and today she was twenty, tired, and with an essay due by four.  I envied her none, although she remained sleeping while Dude and I got lost on Oxford High Street, finally caught a bus at Cornmarket which turned out to be wrong, and wandered for ages through Five Mile Drive till the graveyard bloomed suddenly on our left like a late spring.  A neat pretty graveyard: great stone crosses propped at angles, watering cans of old metal on their sides in the grass, a gaggle of small children in a quiet row.  “They’re so colourful,” murmurs Dude, watching the children as I write. 

The leaves are long, the grass is green.  The hemlock-umbels, tall and fair. I finish the poem’s opening and stand up.  Dude puts her hands together and bows to the gravestone, like in a temple, or Chinese New Year.  “Thank you, Tolkien,” she says quietly, “for making us happy.”

We leave the graveyard as the sun climbs and grows hot, bright candle, and walk out to Banbury Road to catch the right bus back to Lisian’s.  “What do you want for breakfast?” asks Dude, and I say: “Eggs,” and she laughs and says that yes, we’ll find some eggs.

“I never called Edith Luthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire……In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. But the story has gone crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.”

- excerpt from a letter by J. R. R. Tolkien to his son Christopher, written shortly after Edith’s death in 1971.  He was buried with her in Wolvercote Cemetery when he died 21 months later.