you can't take the sky from me

Did some early arcade games cause people to suffer hallucinations, memory loss, and short-term personality changes? Yes, they did – because many folks who played them were experiencing close range exposure to bright, rapidly flashing lights for the first time in their lives, and – at the time – public awareness of photosensitive epilepsy was practically nonexistent. Most who had it were undiagnosed, and its symptoms often weren’t recognised when they arose – and if you have no idea what photosensitive epilepsy is, those symptoms might look a lot like alien mind control!

Were early video arcades frequented by serious-looking men in dark suits? Again, yes they were – because they were suspected of being money-laundering fronts for illegal gambling rings, and thus were routinely placed under federal surveillance. And those suspicions weren’t unfounded – it later transpired that many early video arcades were, in fact, money-laundering fronts for illegal gambling rings.

Did arcade cabinets with strange titles and indecipherable gameplay quietly pop up in out-of-the-way places, then vanish shortly thereafter, never to be seen again? Absolutely – because a thriving black market in off-brand bootlegs arose almost immediately. Quality control was nonexistent, so many such cabinets had operational lifespans measured in weeks, and you’d most often see them in arcades with poor locations simply because they were cheap.

Nextdoor is a forge, and I am very close with the blacksmith that works there. Every morning I bring him a freshly baked loaf of bread. As I hand it to him our hands touch briefly. His hands are rough, yet they're so careful and gentle with everything he touches. I secretly want him to be that gentle with me.

One day, he walks into my bakery, he's still sweaty from the intense heat of the forge. In his hands is a small dagger in it's sheath. He hands it to me and tells me it's to protect myself if needed.

I take the dagger out of it's sheath. It's beautifully made. There are intricate designs engraved into the metal. It's so much more complicated than anything else yeah blacksmith has ever made. It must've been so time consuming to make.

I look up at him and with just one look I understand why he's giving it to me. With one look we both understand that we love each other. He leans in and kisses me. It's so soft and sweet, and gentle.

He comes by every day to get a loaf of bread and kiss me. We keep our relationship a secret. And everyone wonders why neither of us have found wives. But we know exactly why. And we're completely content with being secret lovers.

As I read back through my Tolkien library (and add to it, elongating my “to read” list perilously, leaving me like Sisyphus) I keep running across little anecdotes about Christopher, and they stand out now, in the wake of his death, with an importance I didn’t really grasp before.

He of course was almost solely responsible for piecing together, editing, and posthumously publishing the majority of his father’s now-available works and was one of the earliest readers of and enjoyers of the Legendarium prior to publication. But he also took a direct role in some aspects of the crafting of The Lord of the Rings for publication, particularly regarding map-making, and even the invention of some of the locations and place names in the northern parts of the Shire.

Here’s a bit from Hammond and Scull’s The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion: 30 year old Christopher pulling an all nighter to get the Gondor map redrawn from his father’s draft so it could appear in the Return of the King.