[Lalwendë]

I completely understood exactly what Tolkien meant by a Northern Air last week. I was sat by the side of Whitby harbour in the late afternoon, at the back of our cottage reading an Icelandic Saga. A sea fret was rolling in with the tide (a weird kind of mist you only get on the Yorkshire coast - I got sunburn during the fog...) and as the quayside disappeared and reappeared in and out of the murk, and the fog signal sounded, all you could hear all of a sudden was waves slapping slowly on the sand, and muffled noises of voices. I was expecting a Viking ship to appear at any moment, stealing in under the fret.

The language in the Icelandic sagas mirrors the strange way Tolkien writes, exploring characters not through 'interior monologue' but through their actions and speech. They also give characters evocative names which describe what they are like - as does Tolkien - much of his 'meaning; can be found in tracing what those names and words mean. Compare this with other fantasy, even with Lewis, where we get these insights into what the character is supposed to be thinking - it's often quite boring and we just want to get back to the action. Which is what Icelandic sagas do - you are guaranteed action in every paragraph.

Maybe those were perfect conditions for reading such work, but I felt myself going right back in time, being transported to a period in time where the danger of having your head chopped off by a marauder sneaking out of the mist was ever present; and that's one of the places where Tolkien finds the 'peril' he writes about.