David Day > Quotes

“The castle, and all it represents, will always be with us. Once it was born, once the stone was made living, the repository of power made real, the idea could never be unmade. Even if all the castles of all the world were destroyed, in the minds of men they would be built anew; the wizard called imagination would raise high walls and towers out of ruins.”
― David Day, Castles

“Both [Satan and Melkor/Morgoth] are loud in their defiance, claiming that they would "rather rule in hell than serve in heaven". One might have admired these rebel angels if one believed their defiance was in the name of liberty- however, both lied. Their rebellions were only provoked by envy and the usurpers' wishes to take the perceived tyrants' place. Never were two more natural tyrants than Morgoth and Satan.”
― David Day

“In the end, it is not the power of the mind nor the strengths of the body but the instincts of the human heart that save the world. It is the simple human capacity for mercy that finally allows evil to be overthrown.”
― David Day, Ring Legends of Tolkien (7)

“Much as people might like to stress their attachment to particular territories, all societies have originally come from somewhere else to live in the lands they presently occupy. Moreover, the future will see some of them move elsewhere, in whole or in part, or be transformed over time by the immigration of other peoples into their midst. People can reconcile themselves to these often beneficial changes by recognizing that no society has ever had the exclusive possession of their land for all time and by acknowledging that the world is not only the ancestral land of us all but will remain as the wider homeland of everyone.”
― David Day

“Many critics have seen Tolkien's writings as a response to the trauma of the First World War, even going so far as to see The Lord of the Rings as a "war novel", rather than as pure high fantasy. Tolkien himself admitted there were connections with the First World War, but denied vehemently there were any to the second: Sauron is not Hitler; the One Ring is not the atomic bomb. There is a middle ground: The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, along with many other of his writings, was to large degree a therapeutic process in which he faced up to and attempted to purge the trauma inflicted on him and his peers at the Somme.... Who knows, then, what Tolkien might have made of the War of the Last Alliance had he written its tale in full? There are hints of the grandeur and terror it might have achieved: The Somme-like Battle of Dagorlad with the ill-considered charge of the Galadhrim and the swamp of dead bodies left behind in the Dead Marshes; the grueling seven-year siege and the climactic, gruesome duel on the slopes of Mount Doom. What we do have, however, is an intriguing, almost medieval-style chronicle of its main events and manoeuvres - more than enough, then, to feed our imaginations.”
― David Day, Illustrated World of Tolkien: The Second Age

“Once again there shall be great music: this shall be mightier than the first. It shall be unflawed, filled with wisdom and sadness, and beautiful beyond compare”
― David Day

“In the initial stages, when contact between the two peoples might be limited to scouting out the possibilities of invasion, or trading with them for their furs or other produce, there is less need or cause to demean the inhabitants as savages or to regard them as beasts. However, the descriptions are radically different once dispossession becomes the aim or when the natives violently resist the intrusion of explorers.”
― David Day