Quoted By:
The Lord Of The Rings by Jorge Luis Borges
I owe the discovery of Middle Earth to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
In Middle-Earth, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Shire occupied the entirety of the Shire, and the map of Middle-Earth, the entirety of Middle-Earth.
The following Generations saw that the vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all of Middle-Earth there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Bilbo had come to dinner at my hobbit-hole that evening, and we had lost all track of time in a vast debate over composing a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book's readers—a very few—might divine the horrifying or banal truth.
Down at that far end of the hallway, the mirror hovered, shadowing us. We discovered that there is something monstrous about mirrors. That was when Bilbo remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Angmar: Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. I asked him where he'd come across that memorable epigram, and he told me it was recorded in The Lord Of The Rings, in its article on Angmar.
I confess I nodded a bit uncomfortably; I surmised that the undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch or Witch-King were a fiction that Bilbo had invented on the spur of the moment, out of modesty, in order to justify a fine-sounding epigram.
We read the article with some care. The passage that Bilbo had recalled was perhaps the only one that might raise a reader's eyebrow; the rest seemed quite plausible. Of the fourteen names that figured in the section on geography, we recognized only three (Khazad-dûm, Arnor, Erebor).
The pronouncement was entirely true with respect to Middle-Earth, entirely false with respect to Earth. Their language and those things derived from their language—religion, literature, metaphysics—presuppose idealism. For the people of Earth, the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts —the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial.
There are no nouns in the conjectural Elvish of Earth, from which its "present-day" languages and dialects derive: there are impersonal verbs, modified by poly-syllabic suffixes (or prefixes) functioning as adverbs. For example, there is no noun that corresponds to our word "Ring," but there is a verb which in Elvish would be "to Ring-enate" or "to enRing." "The Ring rose above the lava" is "Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.," or, as CS Lewis succinctly translates: Upward, behind the onLava-ening it Ring-enated.
