Eleventy

Riddle: Where is this bannister?

I am very much looking forward to reading A Secret Vice: Tolkein on Invented Languges, which is J.R.R. Tolkein’s writings edited by Tolkein scholars Dimitra Fimi and Andew Higgins. What likely prompted me to notice it while browsing library shelves* was note on the shire records in the Prologue of The Lord of the Rings. How many fans of the novel adore note on the shire records, I wonder. Certainly I am one of the them. 

There is nothing like a note, nothing in the world.

The only Tolkein I’ve read is The Hobbit — which I liked very much, c. 1976 — and now Part 4 of the Prologue (On the Finding of the Ring), note on the shire records, and the first two pages of The Fellowship of the Ring. 

So, then: from the first page of the first chapter of the first book of The Lord of the Rings: 

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. 

Eleventy! Utterly charming. It’s an English version of what happens in French when you get to soixante-dix or quatre-vingt-dix. 

Fantastic. 

    

Three staircases I have known. The first one used to be painted a bright primary color. 

* I was at the Boulder Public Library while searching for a Persian-English dictionary noted in a letter from a New Yorker reader commenting on a poem by Michael Ondaatje the magazine published in February.