Adventure 6: Leaf by Niggle, J.R.R Tolkien (Not a review, but an adventure of finding the book)

Week 2 of February was a haze of meeting family and friends in Chennai. There is something about home, about getting yourself reacquainted with old roads, the places frequented, the musical cacaphony that was the rush of traffic, the roadside quarrels, the smells of the coast and the local food, the familiar pattern your feet move to avoid obstacles in the road, that gives you a bittersweet ache for everything vintage. My rendezvous with these long cherished memories almost threatened to take me away from the challenge for the week. Almost. A stroke of luck allowed me to use a cheat book to complete the week’s reading.

Leaf by Niggle is a really short story, spanning 43 pages. Short as it was, half the adventure I had with this book were in the circumstances which led me to stumble upon this rare piece of literature. Before I explain further, a note about two things.

• I am a HUGE Tolkien fan. A four letter word probably doesn’t do justice to the excitement and joy I experience everytime I read a Tolkien piece. Growing up having read LOTR, I take assiduously to collecting and reading anything to do with the books or the author. I have collected almost every book by J.R.R Tolkien, and have read them at least twice
• As much as online libraries have increased readership and accessibility to almost every book available, I am still a bit old fashioned when it comes to buying them for personal storage. I still prefer to get them from book stores, where I can be treated to the smell of new pages and wooden shelves, before buying them. Having grown up with a habit of having to save up stringently to buy books at neighboring libraries in my childhood, purchasing books from bookstores has almost become a ritual now.

Fast forward to the present day, where I was searching my favorite bookstore in India for a collection of books by local authors, after a long day and a heavy dinner. Leaf by Niggle literally fell out of the shelf of the local authors section (Wonder when Tolkien came to India!). My astonishment at seeing the name of J.R.R Tolkien on the first page of something this tiny was only paralleled by my excitement at having found one of the rarest books I had been searching for in every bookstore I went to. Two hours later, I had finished reading and re-reading the book, and was reading the afterword by Tom Shippey (which was as long as the entire story).

I would not go so far as to review a book of 43 pages, other than to say that it’s an enjoyable little story of a person who loves helping others. It’s a fun adventure you’d definitely not want to miss, and not least because of the reputation which precedes the author. This has got nothing to do with the Lord of the Rings franchise, but since when has that stopped Tolkien geeks before. The synopsis says that the author took a day to write it in the second world war era. your admiration for his story-telling skills only grows when you appreciate that he took less than 24 hours to pen a deep and remarkable adventure.

This book is for Tolkien nerds strictly, but that is not to say others may not find this a fun welcome distraction from the mundane!