Lord Nelson, Stonehenge and Hobbits

This is another post of “opportunity.” I’ve been silent for nearly a month because my wife and I spent the last three weeks in Europe. Travelling is one of those retirement priorities for us, and when I’m being a tourist, I really try to quit being a writer. No laptop to work on the novel. I don’t even journal. If I do, I wind up viewing remarkable sights through the wrong filter. 

While we were in London, we took a side-trip to Stonehenge out in the English countryside, arriving in the late afternoon and staying among the giant stone monoliths through the sunset. It was beautiful, and if one positioned himself just right, so that the nearby highway, fence, benches, and other tourists were not in your view, it was also haunting as dusk came on. 

But, if I had my writer’s filter clipped on the front of my eyeglasses, the power of those big gray rocks would have been knocked out, like sun glare through my polarized shades. Some sights are just too big, too strong, too everthing, to try to do mental wordsmithing while you stare at them.

That one day, only the second of over twenty days of travel, also held two utterly unexpected delights encountered on the way to Stonehenge:

First, at Windsor Castle out in the country, where our tour bus stopped for a couple of hours, we were challenged by our tour guide to find in the museum rooms the French musket ball that killed Admiral Lord Nelson during his great victory at the sea battle at Trafalgar. My wife spotted it, and then nearly got bounced from the castle for taking a flash photo, against all rules, of the wee lead ball, now encased behind glass. The photo is right here.

The musket ball was shot by a French soldier firing from up in the rigging of his ship. He was a good or a lucky marksman, for the ball passed through Nelson’s chest and lodged in a wooden deck plank. The round was carefully removed and saved after the battle, so my wife could snag a picture of it 200 years later.

Second, we also stopped at Oxford, mainly to see the dining hall of Harry Potter fame that is used every day by the students at Christ Church College. On the way through town, the guide pointed out a little hole-in-the-wall pub called The Eagle and Child Tavern and mentioned a couple of its more well-known customers. My friend Wayne and I bee-lined to the bar during the short free time we were allowed before we headed on to Stonehenge.

We quickly bought pints of cool dark ale and slipped into a wooden booth of equally dark wood, and toasted that we were in the same pub where Oxford profs and authors CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien met on Tuesdays, after classes, from 1946 until 1962, to drink their own pints and carry on about their writing. I can get weird thinking about sitting with those two as they burped beer and traded thoughts about their as yet unpublished sagas.

The two great writers and a few others were known as “The Inklings,” back when Narnia and Middle Earth were the “less-traveled” domains of young nerds like Wayne and I used to be, who ate up the wonderfully moral and adventurous fantasy tales. Now, films have taken Lewis’s and Tolkien’s heroes and villains to the masses, alongside a glut of zombie and vampire books and movies.

I find that sort of sad, although Peter Jackson certainly has done Tolkien right, at least through the Trilogy. I’m enjoying The Hobbit films, but Jackson appears to be feeling somewhat confined by the story as Tolkien wrote it, and is getting too loose with his add-ons for my purist tastes. On the other hand, my grown sons, who didn’t discover Middle Earth until they saw the films, call me a cranky old elitist. 

Our trip is now past, and my head is back in the 1860’s where I’m still copy-editing Book 2 and still wrestling with title ideas.

Oh, confession time: I did read Ralph Peters terrific new Civil War historical fiction novel, Hell or Richmond, during the down-times in Italy the last two weeks of the trip. Great book, about a key month of the war in Virginia in May and early June of 1864, that escapes the attention of many novelists and historians.