BRAIDING SWEETGRASS by Robin Wall Kimmerer, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"The fear is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light."

Linda Newbery has published widely for young readers and was a Costa category prizewinner for her young adult novel Set in Stone. Her second novel for adults, The One True Thing, will be one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing this month.

This remarkable book had been mentioned to me so many times that it was about time I read it. First I listened to the audio version, read by Robin Wall Kimmerer herself, then had to buy a copy to keep. Combining poetic observation, botanical knowledge, folklore and social history, it compelled me to note down something from almost every page. It'll be difficult to do justice to this much-admired, wide-ranging exploration of our relationship to the natural world, but I'll have a go.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a tribe of the Anishinaabe people of Canada and the northern United States. She's a professor of biology as well as founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to bring together science and indigenous wisdom to raise awareness, protect ecosystems and create true sustainability. References to 'sustainable food' and 'nature restoration' are everywhere now - but what do those terms truly mean? Can we live and feed ourselves in sustainable ways without fundamentally shifting our perception of nature and our place in it? 

The term 'ecological services', often heard in political discussions of growth and the economy, supposes that the natural world exists purely to support humanity. Indigenous wisdom holds the different view that humans are part of nature, no more important than other species or than trees, rivers or mountains. This fundamental difference, Wall Kimmerer suggests, is apparent in creation stories: the Genesis account of the expulsion from Eden is based on concepts of ownership, rights, permission and exclusion, whereas the Anishinaabe Skymother myth which begins her book emphasises co-operation, acceptance and natural generation - and, of course, femaleness.

Her explorations of language highlight differences in perception. Alarmed to realise how few fluent Potawatomi speakers are left in the world, and how much will be lost if the language dies out - its culture, myths, beliefs, traditions and practices - she sets out to learn. At first, she's exasperated by the lack of precision in nouns; rather than a noun equivalent for 'bay', for instance, the Potawatami word means 'to be a bay'. Then the realisation comes to her that this is part of the animacy of Potawatami language and world vision, with the profound difference that a tree is not objectified by the observer but seen as something with its own life, its being. Felling a tree that's seen as an animate being requires more thought and justification than if it's just an object for human use or disposal.

Central to the indigenous way of life is the 'honorable harvest'. This means taking only what's given and what's needed; being grateful; giving something in return ('reciprocity' is a term that appears often in this book); being responsible about what you take and using all of it, for example when an animal is killed for meat. 'I believe that the principles of the Honorable Harvest have great resonance in an era when over-consumption threatens every dimension of our well-being. But it can be too easy to shift the burden of responsibility to the coal company or the land developers. What about me, the one who buys what they sell, who is complicit in the dishonorable harvest?' Acknowledging her privilege in living in the country, growing her own fruit and vegetables, buying from neighbours or swapping with them, she takes herself to a shopping mall, far from her 'comfort zone' where, looking at many of the plastic items on sale, she feels no sense of their living origins and is overwhelmed by the power of the market economy. The idea of taking only what you need gets lost when 'our needs get so tangled with our wants.'

'If we are fully awake,' she writes, 'a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own' - (a question that surely can't occur to most consumers of animal flesh). She describes the return of salmon to inland waters to breed and the indigenous ritual of celebration, allowing four days' worth of salmon to swim upstream unhindered before catching any to eat. That way, there will always be fish: 'you never take the first, and you never take the last' is another core principle of the 'honorable harvest'. The bones of eaten fish are placed back in the river, enriching the water with minerals and demonstrating respect and gratitude. This watching and waiting for the year's marker-point is a far cry from the abysmal treatment of farmed salmon, denied their migratory instincts and kept in crowded pens. 

The book is a series of essays, several focusing on particular plant species and what they have to teach us: black ash, red cedars and especially sweetgrass. Why sweetgrass? Because it holds a special place indigenous lore: 'Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth. Accordingly, it is honoured as one of the sacred plants of my people.' It is used to weave baskets and, along with the other three, tobacco, sage and cedar, it provides health and medicinal benefits. Learning from plants is crucial in chapters describing Wall Kimmerer's interactions with students, including camping trips. One student is dismayed to learn that they'll pitch camp miles from medical help or the nearest Walmart: "I mean, what if you need something?" Days in the wild reveal that everything the group needs can be provided by plants: food, building materials, shelter, comfort, kindling for their fires.

A chapter near the end focuses on Windigo, the legendary monster of the Anishinaabe people: a huge, fearsome figure, a terrorising cannibal. The more it eats, the more ravenous it becomes. The metaphor is all too clear. In Donald Trump's second term as President, Windigo is louder, brasher and more wasteful of the natural world than ever before. What chance does indigenous wisdom have of standing up to the brute forces of ignorance and greed? 

'The fear is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable ... we have unleashed a monster.'

Can traditional wisdom save us, or have we already gone too far down the road of exploitation and neglect?

Braiding Sweetgrass is published by Penguin.

More reviews of nature writing:

Sarn Helen, by Tom Bullough, reviewed by Alison Layland

Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour, reviewed by Tina Jackson

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

The Invention of Nature: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wulf, reviewed by Linda Newbery

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks, reviewed by Laura Parker

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

Walden by Henry David Thoreau, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Independent Bookshop feature No.15. Alexis Thompson of The Woodstock Bookshop: THE GAELIC GARDEN OF THE DEAD by MacGillivray

 

"This will haunt you, if allowed to do so ..."

Alexis Thompson is a writer and bookseller based in Oxford. He has led poetry walks in London on the Modernists for the International Times and New River Press, curated and read in London and Edinburgh and was writer-in-residence with The Parlour Collective. He recently completed an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford and has had fiction and poetry published in MONK and the New River Press. In 2020 he was the editor of Blackwell's Poetry #1. He is currently finishing a debut novel, titled A Pit of Clay.

As of 2022 he is manager of The Woodstock Bookshop, noted for its yearly poetry festival under its previous owner Rachel Phipps. The Woodstock Poetry Festival is set to return in November 2023 for the first time since 2019.

'I open with a mouth of burning coal', writes poet MacGillivray in this astonishing third collection. Here we have the Gaelic alphabet of trees which, for those of you who don't know, assigns all the letters of the Highland alphabet to specific trees and this gives Book I of The Gaelic Garden of the Dead its unique structure.

But The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is a trilogy; Books II and III deal with a sigil sequence and sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots, consecutively (a discussion of the sonnets was featured on BBC Radio 3 The Verb: listen here) and the whole collection unfolds in your hands like an arboreal haunting; a lament to the loss of an ancient language - particularly relevant now, as Scottish Gaelic is predicted to become extinct by 2031 - and the beleaguered fate of a great queen. Although this sounds far-stretching, in MacGillivray's hands, the interwoven historical with the poetic potency of the book is both striking and what a reader might seek out as tonic from the observational, minimalism of most mainstream contemporary poetry.

'Love’s eyes are colourless:/ a motive for moving through underworlds' asserts MacGillivray, summoning Jean Cocteau, T.S. Eliot and deeply embedded folkloric Scottish roots: there are psalms for lightning; salt, snow and sleep coronachs (the third part of a funeral lament); and references to old Gaelic customs: 'Walking to the heartland of the Gaelic alphabet/ where spirit multitudes sleep rough/ among the bales of slaughtered wheat,' I drank my lover’s blood', a reference to the Gaelic tradition of drinking a little of the blood of a loved one who has been killed in battle. Here we have not only an arboreal meditation on the nature of these trees (ranging from Ailm 'A' for pine, to Quert for 'Q' which is apple - here described under the 'School of the Moon': a traditional name for the teaching of cattle rustling, done at night.)

As with her other collections, the experience is not only of potent poetics but is educative, while never feeling didactic. In reading the book, one feels enhanced as if by secret or lost knowledge into this Gaelic otherworld. Book II, A Crisis of Dream, operates as a visual gateway of pattern-poem sigils between Book I and Book III.

The reader is then confronted by In My End is My Beginning, a line better known from Eliot’s Four Quartets, having been borrowed from Mary Stuart. Book III presents a 'descent' of thirty five sonnets - one for each step Mary descended on her way to execution, which are then 'chewed up' (here a nod to the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) for the fifteen minutes Mary's mouth was said to have moved, after her decapitation. The result is deeply moving: the sonnets were composed in situ in many of the sites Mary lived in and at Fotheringhay, on the anniversary morning of her execution. Replete with rich imagery summoned from Mary's own poetry (we learn she was a part of Ronsard's poetic circle 'The Pleiades'), MacGillivray's response and elaboration to Mary’s death and writing evidently comes from a place of deep research and profound sympathy for Mary’s plight, not merely as a historical figure, but as a human being:

I dreamed of a sawdust chandelier
whose crystals were drops of driftwood dredged
from all the world’s shipwrecks: god’s figurehead,
and it swung, as I dreamt, ever closer to my fear,
softly releasing sweet incense into the clear,
black night air, as that great barge carries the dead,
but instead of my death, it passaged my dread
and the water it ploughed comprised of one tear.

This formal descent of sonnets is then wildly torn up: 'my bled out, love flushed, young, wild skeleton!' for the counterpart to The Descent; The Blade and in both sequences, Mary emerges as an impassioned poet which reflects something of her true personality.

This is an ambitious and electric collection - a far cry from the usual - and will haunt you, if allowed to do so.

For fans of Barry McSweeney, William Burroughs and Sorley Maclean.

The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is published by Bloodaxe Books.  

Guest review by Graeme Fife: A TELLING OF STONES by Neil Rackham

"Fireside lure ... the heady smell of peat, the slight shifts on the chair by the hearth, the storyteller’s enhanced view through the refining aperture of the stone..."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

A legend told on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides talks of a storm and a shipwreck – no rarity in those gale-lashed waters – and a princess drowned in a pool below Baile na Cille on the island’s windswept west coast. A princess by her clothes but, strung round her neck, a seeing stone, destined one day to come into the possession of the Brahan Seer.

The story triggered a devouring curiosity in Rackham, who was drawn to the island through lifelong friendship with Catriona Nicholson, in whose cottage near Baile na Cille, where ‘a peat-brown river frets at the edge of the sea’, much of the book was written.

A seeing stone has one or more natural holes piercing it. A small aperture focuses the vision to close definition of distant objects – think the pinhole in a camera obscura – so it’s not surprising that these stones acquired a certain mystique. Not only could an early sailor use one as a sort of proto-telescope, but those with that other sight, the power of divination and prophesy, might associate their powers of foretelling with privileged touch and use of the stone. For, as Rackham tells us, where ‘all stones hold a remembrance of the past, Seeing Stones, or stones of vision, hold memories within them of things yet to come’. This reference to the fluidity of memory – proleptic and analeptic - is central. We dwell in the continuum of memory, whose eddies and currents tug our imagination through the enchantments, the bewitchments, of both light and shadow. The Latin for story, fabula, gives us fabulous, remember, and Rackham’s narrative is charged with the interweave of time and the magic of the stones, the constants of the sea, its everlasting presence and the unpredictability of its moods, of storm-knots and calms, of the troublesome gift of the sight…

The legends grew and the seeing stones acquired a potent force in the island’s saga which extends far across the flint-backed ocean to the other islands and the old kingdoms of Norway and Iceland. The introduction to this fascinating delve into the lore and the Hebridean spinning of magic and metamorphosis – young women into creatures of the briny flood - tells us ‘princes, pedlars, crofters, selkies and the Lewis Chessmen all encounter the awesome power of the Seeing Stone. Even the Blue Men of the Minch who drag folk and ships to a watery death cannot defeat it’.

You know about selkies…? Find them here.

The Brahan Seer, the Lewis Chessmen, The Blue Men of the Minch, that treacherous northern Charybdis, the choppy maw ready to engulf any unwary vessel and its crew…ah, but it’s tempting to reel off the stories recounted in this most absorbing, fascinating book, but this is a review, not the Reader's Digest version.

I begin with the scope and range of its telling. Rackham is a good companion. He tells the stories in an unaffected style, allowing the seduction of their fireside lure to entice without any need to embellish. The heady smell of the peat, the slight shifts on the chair by the hearth, the storyteller’s enhanced view through the refining aperture of the stone. As all good stories begin, there is that moment when the story-teller says, or gestures, behold…The tale of the Seeing Stone leads us into a fine mesh of myth and the importance of myth, for there is no tale without some hinterland of mortal disquiet or rapture, tragedy or wonderment. How else do we make sense of the perplexing riddles of our life but in the fabric of story? Stranger than fiction? You betcha.

Laced through the rich lore which accompanies the stories per se, here, too, are animadversions ‘on the nature of: Foretelling with Stones…Second Sight…Celtic Knots… Ravens…the Penalties of Foretelling…’ this last springing from the moving story of Brahan the Seer, himself.

As in other ancient cultures, a dangerous confrontation may be averted by the challenge of riddles – the Blue men of the Minch fling a cryptic rhyme at the Princess aboard the threatened boat. Undeterred she answers and they, knowing they’re beaten, ‘uttered loud curses and, slipping from the bow, disappeared beneath the waves’.

'It has been said of chance,’ Rackham writes, ‘that although it may be too intricate to understand, it is never without its own purpose.’ Wow. And, my word, what a concluding sequence...when 'all was caught in an eternity of stillness'.

My highest praise of this book, illustrated with superb line drawings by Alisdair Wiseman? It took me, last week, to Lewis.

A Telling of Stones is published by Acair

See also: Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown, reviewed by Graeme Fife

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, reviewed by Paula Knight

Moby Dick by Herman Melville, reviewed by Graeme Fife

Photographs by Graeme Fife

Guest review by Andrew Fusek Peters: CORDUROY by Adrian Bell

Andrew Fusek Peters is a poet, author and conservation photographer. His poems have been recordeded for the Poetry Archive. His books include Dip, Wilderland and Upland. See more on his website. 


I am currently re-reading Corduroy after a four-year gap. This time, I am using it as my country meditation before bed – sometimes ploughing through only a few pages before my heart sinks into a peaceful ease. This edition is a Slightly Foxed re-release of a classic nature writing adventure first published in 1930. The author, Adrian Bell (father of Martin) seemed to have two yearnings when young. He wanted to be a writer and, as a Londoner, he also wanted to escape the city ‘flying from the threat of an office life’ to delve deeply into the countryside of his dreams.

As an author and nature writer who left London at eighteen and finally married a Shropshire lass, it could be said I identify slightly! John Clare and to an extent Edward Thomas immersed themselves deeply in hill, field and forest. Theirs is the poetry of the insider looking out, so at one with nature that sometimes it is hard to separate the poet from the landscape. But Adrian Bell brought something different to the table. He was keenly aware from the get-go of his outsider-ness, his difference, his outdoor city boots sniffed at by his host Mr Colville, knowing that London leather will only survive a short while through the farming calendar.

Adrian pleaded with his father that his life ‘should be something in the open air’ - be careful what you pray for. As a paying guest, he began an utterly new life on the Colville farm. Even at that first meal of boiled batter pudding and roast pheasants, when contentment strikes it is tempered by ‘seeing myself in the wide looking-glass of the sideboard’ where he was not ‘large and rosy like the rest’ but ‘pale and thin, sitting like a ghost among them’.

This could have been an inauspicious start. The middle-class Londoner is properly a fish out of water. But Adrian had three great assets on his side – a wonderful thirst to learn alongside the willingness to work to a totally different timetable from the dawdling hours in suburban drawing rooms, and lastly, an attitude of respect for the people that still come to life in these pages. He did not play the outsider as a role, it was simply that the A-Z of farming life needed careful study, to which he applied himself henceforth, and on and off for the rest of his life.

Adrian was changed utterly by his experience. When he returned to town he ‘re-entered a world of nervous significances, where the very furniture was a complex language’. To his former friends, he is an amuse-bouche - or as he put it ‘a character part.’ Yet it is his willingness to embrace difference, to play his part as visitor or urban refugee that warms the text through and through.

‘Children gathered here also, and gazed upon the wonder of the fire, awed into silence as the sparks flew high, and an occasional passer-by paused and warmed his hands, exchanging some item of local news with the blacksmith. For in winter, the forge was a meeting-place second only to the inn, I discovered.

"I suppose these have made a difference to your trade," I said as a motor went by.

"Yes, they don’t need the kind of shoes I make," he replied. "There’s no hackneys kept today, no carriage horses; that’s how we’re hit…"'

This is the role Adrian played best, moving beyond mere nostalgia to a lament of modernisation. The book is full of tales of ancient squires and the last miller who worked the windmill, greasing the gears with tallow candles. By 1920, the world of humans was already in flux. One war over, another to begin, where it was known that many soldiers took Corduroy with them to remind them of the life left behind.

And I too catch glimpses in my second life as a conservation photographer, gradually getting to know some of the farmers and walking their land – being invited in for tea and biccies while we discuss curlews and the rare sightings of the leucistic white kite. Adrian is a good role model in his affection for the land and its people. He is a chronicler of a different age now falling into second hand echoes. My wife’s grandmother, when she was alive, told me how she remembered the coming of electricity to the Forest of Dean at the same time this book was written, when there were still carriages drawn by horse.

I leave Adrian, who went on to write twenty further books on the countryside, with the last word:

‘I had this pleasure of catching in the cloistral gloom of cowshed or stable those gleam-lit attitudes of strength and patience which the old painters turned into religious masterpieces.’

Corduroy is published by Faber.

Guest review by Katherine Langrish: THE THREE ROYAL MONKEYS by Walter de la Mare

"A rich, exotic beauty tinged with pathos and melancholy, relieved by sure touches of comedy."

Katherine Langrish is the author of a number of historical fantasies
including the trilogy West of the Moon, and Dark Angels (HarperCollins).
Her most recent book is Seven Miles of Steel Thistles (The Greystones
Press), a collection of essays on folklore and fairy tales based
on her award-winning blog of the same name.

Author photograph by Jo Cotterill

As far as I'm aware this is Walter de la Mare’s only novel-length book for children. It was first published in 1910 as ‘The Three Mullar-Mulgars’, a title so unhelpfully baffling even by early 20th century standards that by the time I read it in the 1960s it had been rechristened. Even as ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’ I think it’s not particularly well known. Which is a great pity.  As a child I was entranced by it, and I still am.

To explain the impression it made on me, here’s a bit of personal history. I began seriously to write stories when I was ten. I’d just finished all the Seven Chronicles of Narnia and CS Lewis was dead, so I knew there wouldn't be an eighth.  (‘The Last Battle’ was such a betrayal. The end of Narnia?  Nooooooo!  And I wasn’t fooled by all that ‘heaven is Narnia, but better’ stuff, either. There was no better place than Narnia.)

Aged ten therefore, my first 'book' was called ‘Tales of Narnia’: fan-fic before the term was invented.  My second, a full-length effort, was an historical novel which owed at least something to those of Mary Renault whose ‘The Bull From the Sea’ I had discovered in Ross-on-Wye public library. Then, aged 13 or so, I wrote another ‘book’ of short stories which I called ‘Mixed Magic’ (truly mixed: some not bad, some terrible) mainly derived from two more beloved writers, Edith Nesbit and Elizabeth Goudge. When I was 15 or 16 my fourth handwritten manuscript was heavily influenced by early Alan Garner (children encounter mysterious stranger in dripping English woods, pursued by minions of the triple Moon Goddess: standing stones and indifferent golden-faced elves figured largely). But my fifth effort, written in my late teens and early twenties, by which time I was beginning to find my own voice, owed a great deal to the enchantment I found in ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’.  I called my story 'The Magic Forest' and went on to write a sixth full-length ms (also unpublished) before eventually getting myself into print with ‘Troll Fell’.  And I enjoyed every minute of all of it.

The quality in ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’ which I endeavoured to reproduce in my fifth opus was a rich, exotic beauty tinged with pathos and melancholy, relieved by sure touches of comedy.  De la Mare tells the story of three monkey brothers who, upon their mother’s death, discover they are heirs to a great kingdom. This is how it begins.

On the borders of the Forest of Munza-Mulgar lived once an old grey Fruit Monkey of the name of Mutta-Matutta.  She had three sons, the eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela, Ummanodda.  And they called each other for short, Thumb, Thimble and Nod.  The rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had been built 319 Munza years before by a traveller, a Portugall or Portingal, lost in the forest 22,997 leagues from home.

The comic exactitude of this, and the strange names, entranced me. After the ‘Portingal’ dies, a monkey comes to live in the hut. He finds:

... all manner of strange and precious stuff half buried – pots for Subbub; pestles and basins for Manaka-cake, etc; three bags of great beads, clear, blue and emerald; a rusty musket; nine ephelantoes’ tusks; a bag of Margarita stones; and many other thing, besides cloth and spider-silk and dried-up fruits and fishes.  He made his dwelling there and died there.  This Mulgar, Zebbah, was Mutta-Matutta’s great-great-great grandfather.  Dead and gone were all.

But one day a royal traveller arrives, Seelem: ‘own brother to Assasimmon, Prince of the Valley of Tishnar’, accompanied by his servant.  Seelem becomes Mutta-Matutta’s husband. After thirteen years of marriage he leaves her to return to his heritage in the beautiful valleys of Tishnar. Seven years later on her deathbed, she urges her sons to follow their father.

“His country lies beyond and beyond,” she said, “forest and river, forest, swamp and river, the mountains of Arrakkaboa – leagues, leagues away.”  And as she paused, a feeble wind sighed through the open window, stirring the dangling bones of the Portingal, so that with their faint clicking, they too, seemed to echo, “leagues, leagues away.”

The rest of the book follows the brothers’ difficult and magical journey. Nod, the youngest, is ‘a Nizza-Neela, and has magic in him’: he is the possessor of the marvellous Wonder-Stone, which if rubbed when they are in great danger will bring the aid of Tishnar to them.

And who is Tishnar?  There are many mysteries in this book and she is one of them, with a whole chapter at the end dedicated to her.  She is ‘the Beautiful One of the Mountains’; ‘wind and stars, the sea and the endless unknown’.  She it is who instils in the heart a sense of longing; she brings peace and dreams and maybe, in her shadow form, death.

At any rate, the brothers’ journey is precipitated when Nod accidentally sets fire to the hut. In the fairytale tradition of the foolish yet wise younger brother, he makes many mistakes, but he is also the one who saves his brothers from the predicaments in which they find themselves as they trek through the deep moonlit snow of the winter forest – escaping the flesh-eating Minnimuls, tricking the terrifying hunting-cat Immanâla, riding striped Zevveras – the ‘Little Horses of Tishnar’ – finding friends and losing one another, quarrelling and making up.

It’s a deeply serious quest, an epic journey with no hint of tongue in cheek despite the fact that the protagonists are monkeys.  Delicately, de la Mare explores the transience of beauty, the poignancy of loss, the immanence of death: and his characters blaze all the more brightly in their course across this impermanent world. There’s a lovely chapter in which Nod meets and loses his heart to a beautiful Water Midden (water maiden) to whom he entrusts his Wonder-Stone.  Here is the song he overhears her singing ‘in the dark green dusk’ beside a waterfall:

Bubble, Bubble,

Swim to see

Oh, how beautiful

I be,

Fishes, fishes,

Finned and fine,

What’s your gold

Compared with mine?

Why, then, has

Wise Tishnar made

One so lovely,

One so sad?

Lone am I,

And can but make

A little song,

For singing’s sake.

If you haven’t read this book before and you’re looking for something at least as good as ‘The Hobbit’, this is for you.