Taking Readings II by Himring

Reading the Silmarillion on Remembrance Sunday

This is essentially meta, I guess, although lightly fictionalized.

Tolkien meets Wilfred Owen on 11 November 2018 in the mind of a reader.

Written for the easy prompt set of the B-Movie Challenge.

Well, history has more horrors than any B-movie...

She took up the book. Its dark purple covers, bearing emblems of flowers and stars, issued the familiar invitation.  So often she had found escape here, an ambiguous comfort, a measure of courage to return and stand her ground, however precariously.

But it was the 11 November 2018 at eleven o’clock. And the world had changed, had changed again, as it had one hundred years ago. She opened the pages and fell right in.

Only this time, rather than finding easy foothold among elves, even in the path of dragons, she fell straight through to where, as under a green sea, through misty panes and thickened light, one was seen drowning—yelling out and stumbling, guttering, floundering—as in the smothering dreams so many shared then and have shared since.

How to confront this? War has not ceased, and war will come again.

She held on to the book.

Courage still may be found in unlikely places. Catch at a star and name it Hope, in hope.

Chapter End Notes

The description of a man dying in a gas attack in World War I is in Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est.