My Mythos

         In 2010, fed up with procrastination, I wrote, or rather completed, a book.

         The book actually started years earlier with my three children, two girls and one boy.  We would do bedtime reading sessions, voicing the entirety of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. As we read the end of the last page of the last book, the cover was closed, we looked at each other, and there was a deep silence. Three years, a lot of improved reading skills, a lot of fun and joking, and discussions, and then . . . the end.

        

         The stillness was that of loss, of something irreplaceable having passed.

The lingering quiet broke apart with a question from my oldest daughter. “So, where are the heroines?”

         The blunt fact was that there weren’t any.

         I stammered, trying to play the fatherly authority role, and eventually said, “Well, actually there probably were some, more than some. Yes, most assuredly. It’s just that Professor Tolkien never got around to writing about them.”

         True to being a lawyer’s daughter came the follow up question: “Like who?”

         “Well, er . . .”, and here I jumped into deep water feet first, “there was one, one of the most famous. A very famous heroine. But her story was . . . uh . . . lost. In fact, it was . . . hunted down and destroyed . . .” I was feeling inspired now, on the brink of wrapping up this detail. “Which is why Professor Tolkien never wrote about her.”

         The questions didn’t end, of course, and more clues about this: “Lost heroine” emerged. In a month, I’d written down a chapter of a story about this most famous, yet now forgotten figure of Middle Earth. Her name I knew.

         It was Ara.

         And there it rested, the story relegated to a file, for several years. The kids grew up, the last one left the house, and I was alone. Quite by accident, I found the file, and the story in 2010.

         Some pieces of the Lost Tale of Ara were discovered and then revealed in the novel, Mirkwood: A Novel About JRR Tolkien.

         They were, it turns out, but fragments, mere mortal perspective, in a much larger, even cosmic mythos.

         Like her life, and her Lost Tale, the full Account of Ara has grown in the telling. It has embarked on a worthy journey of its own, and in the next blog I will recount some of that journey.

         In the meantime, I would like to hear your account, your aspirations, your questions and your adventures in creating your story. Please let us know so that we can share it with others.