A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs

[Silky Gooseness]

You can of course email to the plaza email if you wish!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

News of the footnote (as yet unwritten, let alone unvanished) reaches the intended reader!

[Silky Gooseness]

Oh no - it must be the plaza email gremlins again. I have not received anything but will ask the other admins if they can locate anything in the depths of the email. Sorry!!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

No worries. I blame myself for suggesting the cursed road of the admin plaza email. In any case, it was all foretold in the story; here is a neutral extract from the final chapter (neutral meaning, in this case, I don't see that it leaves me open to legal action; well, at least not from yourself):

With the small talk out of the way – clearly not this creature's forte – she came to the point. 'I've just come from Discord HQ. Turns out we've made a bit of a mess with the plaza emails. lol. Lail did not know what they were and has been using them to feather her nest.' An embarrassed cough. 'But from what we could piece together from the wreckage, it seems that quite a few concerned suspicious activity in the vicinity of this high chamber. Have you by any chance noticed anything unusual of late?'

I shook my head.

The Goose looked around the balcony with a slightly dubious air, fixed me with a hard stare, and finally gave a polite smile. 'Well, if you do see anything do please let us know. The admin email should be working now.'

[Silky Gooseness]

I quite enjoy your version, but the technical explanation is that we use a forwarding service to direct plaza emails to our personal emails - as the system does not like three separate people logging in from various different IP addresses around the world and has a tendency to bounce us out. Unfortunately this forwarding system isn’t infallible so we are back to manually checking the original email for a bit until we can resolve. Thank you for your patience!! Emails should be picked up now - the manual way.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hi @Drifa, my friend helped me tweek the TOC and layout on the version of the Guide on my website - see what you think.

@Arnyn, may I humbly request that you move this thread to the Shire? And please put 'Undertowers' on the thread title.

The Guide to Stairs was composed in Undertowers in the 4th Age, and its natural home is in Undertowers. Also, while I was happy with the Guide situated on this forum of the plaza, that is no longer the case when the forum becomes a place to discuss traditional academic work, like @Ephtariat's doctoral dissertation. While this dissertation seems to have some merits, and the discussion is not without interest, the whole point of the Guide is to escape this academic literary tradition.

Thank you!

[Ephtariat]

@Hill I'm sorry if I upset you, but I can't stand readings of Tolkien in a cynical light, not even when said cynicism is softened by the idea that elegy somehow comforts. I think that Tolkien's precious precisely because he is entirely devoid of cynicism, which of course does not mean he's naive or miraculously immune to the sorrows of life, but he always looks beyond them to an unquenchable hope.

[Arnyn]

@Hill We're going to keep your request pending while the poll plays out and then move/not move it according to the results. Sorry!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Guide to Stairs - Saturday Sequel

Last May I travelled out of Undertowers and emerged into the online world of Tolkien fandom. In my pocket was a manuscript copy of the first turn of the first staircase of the Hobbit's Guide to Stairs, my mission was to introduce the Guide to the world. First port of call was the Silmarillion Writers Guild, who told me that they did not do Hobbits. So I turned to Facebook, and the first posts of the Guide garnered many likes and even the odd inane comment. And then I thought of the plaza...

Having mistaken @Drifa's reply to my initial inquiry for official admin blessing, the Guide to Stairs entered the Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza. The Guide became one thread among many. At the heart of Tolkien's celebrated essay 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' is an idea of fusion - cultural fusion. Sounds wonderful, but try living it! The good folk of the plaza may have aspired to read a Lore post with the same mindlessness ubiquitous on Fb, but their thumbs could not locate a like button, and if they attempted a vapid tone in their comments, their actual words betrayed keen and penetrating vision. The spirit of the plaza entered the Guide to Stairs!

Let me tell you, as author/translator of the Guide, the whole experience was most uncomfortable. I was discombobulated. Flustered, even. The problem was that the Guide was intended as a social media shaggy-dog story that could be carried on forever. I had not thought that it had an end. But it did, as was innocently pointed out to me - an end in the topmost chamber of the Watchtower of Cirith Ungol high on the mountain border of Mordor, and of all the places in the world that I did not wish to go, that was top of my personal list. While the plaza folk clambered over the shell of the Guide as I was revealing it on this thread, I myself could see the yolk inside slipping out of a hole on the other side of the egg.

Evidently, further research was required. So like Goldilocks I did my porridge - weary weeks imprisoned in the high chamber of a tower, only my jailor for conversation, a Dwarf with a sense of humour. I learned for myself what some plaza folk already know deep down in their dark hearts - I learned what it means to live in prison in a high chamber!

All this while, this Guide has languished. Having reached the Barrow from the Burrow and completing the first turn of the Hobbit staircase, I let it be, resolved to return to it only once I had clear in mind the end of the Guide, the concluding post.

It will likely be a long time before the Guide starts up again and the second staircase is attempted, and longer still before it reaches its great conclusion. But just for you - the plaza folks whose minds have now been woven into the Guide - I give you the hidden final chapter.



Any resemblance between this map and a Fangorn riddle about 'down' the answer of which was 'the Shire' is 100 per cent, totally, completely intentional. I have already tried to communicate this same geographical point to you all - but it was an abject failure. So with this second attempt I have smuggled the ultimate post of the Guide into the latest post in my SWG series 'Seeing Stones'. The post is titled Crossroads and, so there can be no confusion on the matter, I have titled the relevant section 'By Phial and Invocation: A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs'.

Thank you all of you for all your comments. Even those about polls are useful, albeit ultimately obscure. Some absolutely blew my mind and revealed to me why, despite everything, I love the plaza.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was composed in part in a prisoner of war camp during WWI. Published in English in 1922, the Tractatus consists of 7 propositions, all but the last elucidated in numbered sub-propositions. Wittgenstein traces the border between sense and nonsense, which is the limit of language. Here is how the book begins:

1. The world is everything that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

And the Tractatus concludes:

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The catch is that the propositions between 1 and 7, the steps by which this conclusion has been reached, have been revealed to fall beyond the limits of language - strictly speaking, the argument of the book is nonsense that cannot be said.

I have long felt that Tolkien's essay 'On Fairy-story' is a related inquiry into the limits of language, only Tolkien discovered a way to proceed on arriving at the border of sense (into fantasy by the working of metaphor). In any case, Wittgenstein's image of throwing away the ladder after climbing it captures the procedure of a Hobbit who carefully reads the instructions set out in A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs.

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)