CONCLUSION
In May 1937 Houghton Mifflin wanted to add four more colour illustrations to their projected publication of Hobbit suggesting an American artist but expressing: “It occurred to us, however, that it would be better if all the illustrations were from your hand” (C&G 1.195). If we accept Gandalf is Tolkien and Tolkien is deceptive, riddling, enjoys the game, and holds the key to either unlock or lock, to reveal or hide, then we can view the moment in July 1937 when he decided to not wait for a response from Houghton Mifflin on this issue, and go ahead and create the Rivendell painting with its hidden imagery, very much in this light: as a game with his readership and his publishers Allen and Unwin and Houghton and Mifflin. And there are more hidden images in Rivendell, for e.g., in fig. 1.8 left, Thorin 
appears on the far left of the same cliff as Gandalf. Separating them we can see a large crack, and the face of the Great Goblin.
In ASV Tolkien calls for a “New Art” and “New Game” (6) and tells us the little man has a “secret grammar” (7). He told Resnick it was a game to which he held the key. Tolkien leaves us many hints in this game of “hide-and-seek”. In OFS written in 1939, two years after creating the Rivendell image he speaks of regaining a clear vision, clear sight—seeing things in a new way which we had previously appropriated in our minds and thought we knew.
“Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them” (67).
The implications and applicability of these words to what I’ve hopefully revealed here are obvious. Tolkien is hinting to his new-found audience from the publication of Hobbit because he hides imagery everywhere,—his is a symbolic landscape. He speaks of faces repeatedly. Given Tolkien’s hidden faces here in the cliff faces and his well known propensity for puns, we can infer “cliff faces” as “faces as cliffs”. We also see “shape”. “Shape” relates to “face”. Regards Tolkien’s Quenyan word “kendele“, “the face”: “Tolkien apparently derived this form on the etymological model of Lat. faciës ‘face’, which originally meant ‘form, shape’ […] Eng. face is itself derived from this Latin word” (VT 49.21). Tolkien continues in OFS:
“Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue” (68).
We are invited to relate this difference between the superficial view of reality and the deeper one, via the notion “all that glitters is not gold” (“All That Glitters Is Not Gold” [AtGinG]). The reversal of the words “Coffee-room” from a “new angle” becomes a reversal of that aphorism in his own “all that is gold does not glitter” (AtGinG). In other words we can relate my points about Tolkien’s use of mirrors, to the cover of Ishness which has the mirror images just like Chesterton’s window, on the front and back covers as mirror images. Tolkien produced images of Rivendell looking east and west. (Pictures 6). In Rivendell Elrond reveals the dwarf runes only by looking at them from the “opposite” angle, “a new angle”, “viewed from the inside through a glass door”. We recollect that Rivendell was described as “a scene of action but of reflection” and we recall Tolkien said Hobbit was “much closer in every way” to “Looking-glass”. If the Dwarves are the Jewish people it is worth considering A.E.Waite’s[15] words:
“the Secret Doctrine is rather the sense below the sense which is found in the literal word— as if one story were written on the obverse side of the parchment and another on the reverse side” (A.E Waite. The Holy Kabbalah 11).
In Carroll’s Looking Glass Alice looks at the White King’s book in which the Jabberwocky poem (anagram) is written in mirror writing: “She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. “Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again” (TtLG 1.14). Note, this is Chapter one, “Looking-Glass House” in which we might see a reflection of the Last Homely House.
The Kabbalah was part of the Jewish Secret Tradition which was first introduced to the Gentiles in the fifteenth century to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. This contributed, along with Platonism, to Christian Mysticism, a doctrine of which Catholics were the most influenced. The Sefirot “Tree of Life” also consists of a lattice. Significantly Tolkien made remarks in his two essays on language on the “mystic value of letters”[16] (ASV 70), and “Abracadabra”[17] (ASV 101). Mysticism also appears in his “mystic word[s]” (BoLT 216) and “mystic name of silver [and] gold” (BoLT 255). The “Looking-glass book” hints at the front and back covers of Ishness which bear the mirror images of his monogram. Monogram gives: ““two or more letters intertwined”“. I believe his monogram represents the material structures of his World.
Tolkien believes his “secret grammar” improves on Chesterton’s. I suggest the “glass door” is the “X” figure in Undertenishness, Eeriness, Before, Lowdham’s “butterfly theory” and the cracked mirror in the foreword of the NCP (SD 148-149). Recall the quarrel and how the sparks form Aulë’s hammer create the seven butterflies. Butterflies represent stars and the Sun and Moon quarrel over a star in I Vene Kemen. “Loss” and “Recovery” are the discords and unity in the Music. The two “X” butterflies escaping Smaug in his Death of Smaug represents the freeing of the things “locked in our hoard” by “Recovery”, the “‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story” (Letters 142, #89) on the other side of the door in Before and Afterwards. “Trite” is from the same Proto Indo European root as “return”, “threshold”, and “turn”. Clearly “recovery” relates to Before and Afterwards and There and Back Again. The Hall at Bag End (Pictures 20) produced for Hobbit has mirrors on the east and west walls and a chess board floor suggesting Carroll’s Looking-Glass. The mirrors equate to the two faces of Ambarkanta Map IV. Tolkien’s art for the dust-jacket of Hobbit or There and Back Again exhibits mirror symmetry, “there” and “back”. (A&I 151). Eeriness carries his monogram which has two “R”s in mirror symmetry. The “dark London day” becomes the “dark sayings” and a dark “looking-glass”. “Recover” is from ““Old French recovrer “come back, return”“. Tolkien hints at the opposite: to “cover”, “conceal”. This equates the physical journey, There and Back Again, the turn through the Door, to the uncovering, the disclosure of the imagery. Day is “dagaz“, “lifetime”. The dark (London) day of the dark of Before becomes inverted with freshness of vision: Afterwards, the “afterlife”.
The glass door is at the centre of the chi, “X” (in Eeriness and Before), which is the root of the word “chiasmus”. “Chiasmus” is: “from Greek χίασμα, “crossing”, from the Greek χιάζω, chiázō, “to shape like the letter Χ”), is a “reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words”.” (“Chiasmus”). In literature chiastic structure or “cross structure” (“X”) is often referred to as “ring structure”. Ancient Greek and Roman literature, Shakespeare, etc, all have chiasmi. The Bible has hundreds. The author has discovered many chiastic structures in Tolkien’s works including the Music of the Ainur. In Tolkien’s grammar it is a “flawed” (“cracked”) mirror. Princess Mee (Tales 196-199) is a good illustration,—a poem about a woman and her mirror image. In the final verse we have symmetry in “pearls in hair”, “kirtle fair”, “slippers frail”, “Of fishes’ mail”. This is repeated in reverse order. In addition, we can see the chiastic structure in the repeated formal arrangement of poem’s lines on the page. “A” surrounds the indented lines “B” as ABBA. This is the syntax used to visually represent chiastic ring structures in analysis. It also appears in the last four lines of the Ring verse. Given the World Soul consists of two rings, we can view these two rings A and B as the firey letters on the inside and outside of the One Ring, the Inner and Outer mountains[18] in Smith, the two rings of trees in Cerin Amroth, and the two concentric rings on the right curtain in Wickedness,— the “iron ring of the familiar [and] the adamantine ring of belief” (Smith 144). Because it involves a turn (c.f. Afterwards), we might refine our understanding of it to be antimetabole (“from Greek antimetabolē, from anti “opposite” (see anti-) + metabolē “turning about”“). The poetical form of the sonnet (“Italian sonetto, literally “little song”“) famously contains the “turn”, in which the “problem” is presented in eight lines followed by a turn leading to the solution of six lines.
The publication of Hobbit allowed Tolkien to cross the threshold from his “private lang” to making a living from his art publicly. The crowned “little man”, the hidden craftsman has grown, had climbed to the top of the birch, philology, “Lang”, to become, not King under the Mountain but the “ruler of the mountain, […] a good mystery” (TRtMe Appendix B.400-401). The mountain after all “Is taller than trees, Up, up it goes, And yet never grows” (Hobbit 5.67). According to Waterfield the word demiurge “literally means ‘craftsman'” (T&C ix). Tolkien is the crowned little man, the hidden craftsman who “looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice”. Speaking of the little man, faces, dark-sayings, and seeing things through mirrors, let’s end, or rather begin with Corinthians 13:12:
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (THB, 1co.13).
[15] Inkling, Charles Williams knew A.E.Waite.
[16] Fimi and Higgins assert: “The story of sound symbolism goes back to theological and mystical writings of ancient and medieval times […] among which Plato’s dialogue Cratylus […] is still considered as one of the foundation texts” (ASV l-li).
[17] “A word-form that was believed by the Romans, Gnostics and Medieval practitioners of the occult to have magic powers when it was inscribed as a triangle on an amulet” (ASV 115). Fimi and Higgins cite Greek or Semitic origins.
[18] We must leave the explanation of why the Faery Queen, the birch, (B), the outer “sovereign” ring of the World Soul is found in the Inner Mountains, the inner ring, for another essay. This is joined by other reversals of the scheme, for e.g. that of “Mr. Day” and “Mrs. Knight” in Mr. Bliss (an obvious reference to Day and Night) and the female “Lit'” and male “Lang'” in his poem Lit’ and Lang’ (J.R.R. Tolkien, E.V. Gordon & others 25). Suffice to say that it involves an inversion created by the discords of Melkor and cyclical alternation of roles between left and right hands which is hinted at in the third theme of the Music, the creation of the third substance. Every time we pass through the Door, handedness is reversed because it is the plane of a mirror. This scheme comprises the basis of Tolkien’s use of the “Sovereignty goddess” and related “Loathly Lady” motif, which is alluded to in the “loathly mire” created by the discords (BoLT 155) and Shelob’s description as a “loathly shape” (LotR 4.IX.725). “Láthspell” also relates to this,—the “untwisting of the birch”. This untwisting of the “kvan-riki” is a reversal back to the original Music “with no flaws” before the discords,— the “Rekindling of the Magic Sun” (BoLT III.65). This inversion and entanglement is hinted at in the figures of the Witch-king and Éowyn whose fates are “entangled”. Éowyn is a woman who takes on a man’s identity and name in “Dernhelm”. Conversely, a “witch” is a female sorcerer, a pythoness, but the Ring-wraith is a king. The etymology of “witch” tells us: “The glossary translates Latin necromantia (“demonum invocatio”) with galdre, wiccecræft. The Anglo-Saxon poem called “Men’s Crafts” (also “The Gifts of Men”) has wiccræft, which appears to be the same word, and by its context means “skill with horses.” In a c. 1250 translation of “Exodus,” witches is used of the Egyptian midwives who save the newborn sons of the Hebrews: “Ðe wicches hidden hem for-ðan, Biforen pharaun nolden he ben.”” Not coincidentally the Witch-king is a product of necromancy and Éowyn means “Horse-joy” or “lover of horses” in Old English. Tolkien translated Exodus. Tolkien’s Númenórean culture had Ancient Egyptian influences. Apropos the Egyptian midwives, the Witch-king says to Éowyn on their encounter: “Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation” (LotR V.6.841). “Bear”: “Old English beran “to carry, bring; bring forth, give birth to“.
