A Sense of History: Straight Road
The next in a series of articles about ships passing to and from the West, Simon uses "The Fall of Númenor" to attempt to arrive at Tolkien's reading of the exordium to "Beowulf."
From the Captain’s log:
27 August 18_. 6 PM. Latitude: _ degrees _ minutes. Longitude: _ degrees _ minutes.
Today we cast our nets to a greater depth than we ever had ever before. I had been hoping for new kinds of sea life, but instead what we brought up with the kelp was a strange pot. Apparently, it had been broken once and mended. The cracks were filled in with a substance that looks like gold. Otherwise, it looks completely intact, astonishingly so. The first mate, who reads a lot, says that they mend pottery in Japan this way. For all I know of pottery, this one could be Japanese, but, if so, how did it get here?