Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

authenticity of the translation he had read in Agnar’s summer house were dispelled. He had gawped at the old sagas in the Árni Magnússon exhibition, but he had never seen one this close. He couldn’t resist reaching out with his fingertip to touch it.
    ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Ingileif said, a note of pride in her voice.
    ‘Do you know who wrote it?’ Magnus asked.
    ‘We think it was someone called Ísildur Gunnarsson,’ Ingileif said. ‘One of Gaukur’s descendants, of course. We think he lived in the late thirteenth century, right when most of the major sagas were written.’
    ‘But if this was such a great family secret, how did Tolkien ever see it?’ Magnus asked. ‘I mean, the links to the Lord of the Rings are so strong, it can’t just be coincidence. He must have read it.’
    Ingileif hesitated. ‘Wait a minute.’ She returned to the safe, and returned a moment later.
    She placed a small, yellowing envelope on the desk in front of Magnus.
    ‘May I look?’
    Ingileif nodded.
    Magnus carefully pulled out a single sheet of paper, folded once.
    Magnus unfolded it and read:
20 Northmoor Road
Oxford
9 March 1938
My dear Ísildarson
Thank you so much for sending me the copy of Gaukur’s Saga, which I have read with great pleasure. It is almost fifteen years now, but I remember very clearly that meeting of the Viking Club in the college bar at Leeds when you told me something of the saga, although I had no idea that the saga itself would prove to be such a wonderful story. I look back on those evenings fondly – a repertoire of Old Icelandic drinking songs is something that no student of Anglo-Saxon or Middle English should be without!
I am very glad you enjoyed the book I sent you. I have recently begun a second story about Hobbits set in Middle Earth, and I have written the first chapter, entitled ‘A long-expected party’, with which I am very pleased. But I expect that this book will be a much darker work than the first, more grown up, and I have been searching for a means of linking the two stories. I think perhaps you might have given me that link.
Please forgive me if I borrow some of the ideas from your saga. I can promise absolutely that I will continue to respect your family’s wish that the saga itself should remain secret, as it has done for so many hundreds of years. If you do object, please let me know.
I will return the copy of the saga to you next week.
With best wishes ,
Yours sincerely ,
J.R.R. Tolkien
    Magnus’s heart was pounding. The letter would double the value of the saga, treble it. It was an astounding discovery, the key to what had become one of the most pervasive legends of the twentieth century.
    A wealthy Lord of the Rings fan would pay a fortune for the two documents.
    Or kill for them.
    Magnus had read the first two chapters of The Lord of the Rings only the night before. The first was indeed ‘A Long-Expected Party’, which celebrated Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday, a jolly affair full of hobbits and food and fireworks at the end of which Bilbo put on his magic ring and disappeared. In the second, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, the wizard Gandalf returned to lecture Bilbo’s nephew Frodo on the strange and evil powers of the ring, and to give him the task of destroying it in the Crack of Doom.
    It was clear that between the first and the second chapters lay Gaukur’s Saga .
    ‘Can I see?’ said Árni.
    Magnus exhaled – he hadn’t even realized he had been holding his breath. He handed the letter to him.
    ‘You showed this to Agnar?’
    Ingileif nodded. ‘I let him have it for a few days. He wanted anything I could find to authenticate the saga. He was pleased with this. He was convinced it would help us get a better price.’
    ‘I’ll bet he was. So Högni Ísildarson was your grandfather?’
    ‘That’s right. His father, Ísildur, founded a furniture store in Reykjavík at the end of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, many Icelanders travelled abroad to study, and in 1923 Högni went to England, to Leeds University, where he studied Old English under J.R.R. Tolkien.
    ‘Tolkien made a big impression on my grandfather, he inspired him. I remember him telling me about him.’ Ingileif smiled. ‘Tolkien wasn’t really that much older than my grandfather, only in his early thirties, but apparently he had an old-fashioned air about him. As if he lived in a time before industrialization, before big cities and smoke and machine guns. They