The pastor turned to look at his beloved church. It was a small building with white-painted corrugated sides and a red-painted corrugated roof, standing in the lee of a rock-strewn ridge. The church was about eighty years old, but the gravestones around it were gnarled weather-beaten grey stone. Like everywhere in Iceland, the structures were new, but the places were old.
The pastor had just come back from ministering to one of his flock, an eighty-year-old farmer’s wife who was terminally ill with cancer. For all his forbidding presence the pastor was good with his congregation. Some of his colleagues in the Church of Iceland might have a better understanding of God, but the pastor understood the devil, and in a land that lay under constant threat of
earthquake, volcano or storm, where trolls and ghosts roamed the countryside, and where dark winters suffocated isolated communities in their cold grip, an understanding of the devil was important.
Every one of the congregation of Hruni was aware of the awful fate of their predecessors who had danced with Satan and been swallowed up into the ground for their sins.
Martin Luther had understood the devil. Jón Thorkelsson Vídalín, from whose seventeenth-century sermons the pastor borrowed heavily, understood him. Indeed, at the farmer’s wife’s request, the pastor had used a blessing from the old pre-1982 liturgy to ward off evil spirits from her house. It had worked. Colour had returned to the old lady’s cheeks and she had asked for some food, the first time she had done that for a week.
The pastor had an air of authority in spiritual matters that gave people confidence. It also made them afraid.
In years gone by, he used to perform an effective double act with his old friend Dr Ásgrímur, who had understood how important it was to give his patients the will to heal themselves. But the doctor had been dead nearly seventeen years. His replacement, a young woman who drove over from another village fifteen kilometres away, put all her faith in medicine and did her best to keep the pastor away from her patients.
He missed Ásgrímur. The doctor had been the second-best chess player in the area, after the pastor himself, and the second most widely read. The pastor needed the stimulation of a fellow intellectual, especially during the long winter evenings. He didn’t miss his wife, who had walked out on him a few years after Ásgrímur’s death, unable to understand or sympathize with her husband’s increasing eccentricity.
Thoughts of Ásgrímur reminded the pastor of the news he had read the previous day about the professor who had been found murdered in Lake Thingvellir. He frowned and turned towards his house.
To work. The pastor was writing a major study of the medieval scholar Saemundur the Learned. He had already filled twenty-three
exercise books with longhand writing: he had at least another twenty to go.
He wondered whether his own reputation would ever match that of Saemundur’s, that a future pastor of Hruni would write about
him
. It seemed absurd. But perhaps one day he would be called upon to do something that the whole world would notice.
One day.
Á
rni was having trouble locating Elvish speakers in Iceland, especially on a Saturday.
The couple of professors at the university he called were dismissive of his request. Tolkien was not a subject of serious study, and the only person who had any interest in the British author had been Agnar himself, but his colleagues doubted that he spoke any Elvish. So Magnus suggested that Árni dive into the Internet and see what he came up with.
Magnus himself decided to make use of the Internet to try to track down Isildur. Isildur was clearly the senior partner in the relationship with Steve Jubb and probably the one putting up the money. If Steve Jubb wouldn’t tell them anything about the deal he was discussing with Agnar, maybe Isildur would. If they could find him.
The more Magnus thought about it, the less likely it seemed to him that Isildur would be a friend of Jubb’s from Yorkshire. That kind of nickname was more common in the online world than the physical one.
But before he got to work, there was an e-mail waiting for him, forwarded by Agent Hendricks, who fortunately seemed to be working on a Saturday.
It was from Colby.
Magnus took a deep breath and opened it.
Magnus
The answer must be no. I can tell you don’t really mean it, so don’t pretend you do.
Don’t bother sending me any more e-mails, I won’t reply to them.
C.
Magnus felt a rush of anger. She was right, of course, he didn’t really want to marry her, and there was no chance that he would be able to persuade her that he did. But he
was
worried about her safety. He typed rapidly.
Hi Colby
,
I am very worried about you. I need to get you to safety. Now. If you don’t want to come with me then I will try to arrange something else. So please get in touch with me, or if not me, with the FBI, or with Deputy Superintendent Williams at Schroeder Plaza. If you do contact him, speak to him directly and only him.
Please do this one thing for me
,
Love
Magnus
It probably wouldn’t work, but it was worth a try.
Magnus spent the rest of the afternoon in the murky waters of the Internet, feeling his way around forums and chat rooms. There were an awful lot of
Lord of the Rings
fans out there. They seemed to split into the amateurs and the obsessives. The amateurs were mostly thirteen-year-old boys who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought the Balrogs were really cool. Or they were thirteen-year-old girls who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought that Orlando Bloom was really hot.
These brief posts were outweighed by mighty articles from the obsessives, who wrote thousands of words on obscure aspects of Middle Earth, Tolkien’s invented world. There were disputes about whether those Balrogs had real wings or metaphysical ones, or
about why there were no young ents, or about exactly who or what was Tom Bombadil.
Magnus hadn’t read
The Lord of the Rings
since he was thirteen himself, and he had only a vague recollection of all these characters. But it wasn’t just the obscurity of the arguments that surprised him, it was the passion and occasionally vitriol that accompanied them. To a great many people all over the world,
The Lord of the Rings
was clearly very, very important.
After two hours he found a posting from a man named Isildur. An obsessive. It consisted of several paragraphs commenting on a long academic article by someone called John Minshall on the nature of the power of the One Ring in
The Lord of the Rings
.
There are a number of rings of power in Tolkien’s book, all made by elves, except for the greatest of them, the One Ring to rule them all, which was made by Sauron, the Dark Lord. Long before the events of the book took place a desperate battle was fought between the evil Sauron and an alliance of men and elves; a battle which was won by the alliance. The ring was cut off the Dark Lord’s hand by a man named Isildur. But afterwards, on his march home, the victorious Isildur and his men were waylaid by orcs. As Isildur tried to escape he jumped into a river, where the ring slipped off his finger and was lost. Soon afterwards the orcs caught him and he was shot through with arrows.
The ring lay at the bottom of the river for centuries until it was discovered by a hobbit-like creature named Déagol who was fishing there with his friend Sméagol. Sméagol was overwhelmed with desire for the beautiful glittering ring, and when his friend refused to give it to him, he strangled him and put the ring on his own finger. Over time Sméagol was consumed by it, becoming a slithering, obsessive creature called Gollum, until eventually, centuries later, the ring was taken from him by Bilbo Baggins, the hero of Tolkien’s first book,
The Hobbit.
The ring has all kinds of powers. The keeper of the ring does not grow old, but eventually he becomes weary and fades away. If the holder wears the ring, he becomes invisible to normal mortals.
Over time, the ring exerts a power over its keeper, causing him to lie, cheat or even kill to maintain possession of it. Wearing it becomes an addiction. But most importantly, Sauron, the Dark Lord, is searching for the ring. When he finds it he will gain total domination of Middle Earth. The only way the Ring can be destroyed is if it is taken to Mount Doom, a volcano in the centre of Mordor, Sauron’s own country, and thrown into the ‘Crack of Doom’. This becomes the quest for Bilbo’s nephew, a hobbit named Frodo.
Minshall argued that the powers of the ring showed that Tolkien had been inspired by Wagner’s
Ring Cycle
of operas, in which the gods compete to take control of the Ring and dominate the world.
This idea seriously upset the present-day Isildur.
He quoted Tolkien himself who denied that there was a connection, claiming that ‘both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases’. Then Isildur launched on a long discourse quoting from the
Saga of the Volsungs
and the
Prose Edda
, both written in Iceland in the thirteenth century. He claimed that Tolkien had read the
Volsung Saga
when he was still a schoolboy and that it had inspired him for the rest of his life.
Both these sources describe how three gods, Odin, Hoenir and the trickster god Loki, were travelling when they came upon a waterfall where a dwarf named Andvari was fishing in the shape of a pike. Loki caught him, and stole some gold from him. Andvari tried to keep back a magic ring, but Loki spotted it, and threatened to send the dwarf to Hel, who was Loki’s daughter, the goddess of death, unless he gave the ring to Loki. Andvari laid a curse on the ring and disappeared into a rock. During the rest of the saga the ring passes from person to person, creating mayhem wherever it goes. Isildur seemed to believe that both J.R.R. Tolkien and Richard Wagner had read the
Saga of the Volsungs
, which explained the similarity between the two stories.
There followed a series of ever more heated postings back and forth, until a third commentator appeared calling Tolkien a liar
and a plagiarist. This seemed to unite Minshall and Isildur in defence of their hero, and the subject was laid to rest there.
Magnus strongly suspected that this was the same Isildur who was Steve Jubb’s partner: both of them shared an interest in the
Volsung Saga
. Fortunately the web page included a link to the e-mail address of the people posting the commentaries. Isildur’s address indicated an Internet Service Provider from the US. The question was, how could Magnus find out who he was?
There was a small chance that sending him an e-mail asking him to help the Reykjavík police with a murder inquiry would elicit a response. There was a much greater chance that it would tip Isildur off that the police were on to him, and he would go quiet.
The previous year Magnus had been involved in the investigation of the rape and murder of a woman in the middle-class suburb of Brookline. She had received anonymous e-mails from a stalker. With the help of a young technician named Johnny Yeoh in Computer Forensics, Magnus had tracked down the IP address of the computer from which the e-mails had been sent, despite all kinds of ploys the sender had used to disguise it. It turned out he was the woman’s next-door neighbour. He was now serving life in Cedar Junction.
Magnus had Isildur’s e-mail address. All he needed to do was provoke an e-mail response from him, which would include a ‘header’ divulging the IP address of Isildur’s computer.
He thought for a minute and then tapped something out.
Hi Isildur
,
I found your comment about the Saga of the Volsungs very interesting. Where can I get a copy?
Matt Johnson
A simple, if slightly dumb question which would take Isildur only a few seconds to respond to, with luck not enough time to worry about the e-mail address from which it was sent. Worth a try.
The problem with e-mail correspondence was that you never knew how long a reply would take to arrive. It could be a minute, an hour, a day or a month. While he was waiting, Magnus checked how Árni was doing. He had made some progress: he had found a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New South Wales who claimed to be an expert on Tolkien’s invented languages, of which there were supposed to be fourteen. Like Magnus, he had sent an e-mail inquiry and was waiting for a response.
Árni had also found traces of an Isildur. There was someone using that nickname who seemed to be trying to build an online translation service into and out of Quenya, which was one of Tolkien’s most detailed Elvish languages. Whether it was the same Isildur or some other
Lord of the Rings
obsessive using that name, they could not be certain.
Magnus went back to his own computer. He was in luck. There was a brief e-mail from Isildur.
Hi Matt
You should be able to get a copy from Amazon. There is a good Penguin Classics edition. It’s well worth reading. Enjoy.