Anduin the Great

The description of River Anduin with mere words would never satisfy me. But it is all I have, so I shall proceed with it.
Anduin, the longest river of Middle-Earth, its beauty beyond the wildest imagination, its streams bubbling through green meadows, its waters flowing through swampy marshes, and finally coming to rest in the ocean beyond the city of Minas Tirith, is as important to the story of Lord Of The Rings as anything else.
'Anduin' is the Sindarin name for the Great River of Wilderland, as the river was once known. It flowed from its source in the Grey and Misty Mountains to the Mouths of Anduin, commonly known as Ethir Anduin.
Where the Misty Mountains joined hands with the Great Mountains, there flowed two streams that would soon become Anduin the Great. Langwell and Greylin emerged from the mountains, and flowed down in great speed, until their confluence awoke Anduin.
Thence, the Great River flowed parallel to the Misty Mountains in a broad vale and onward to Lothlorien.
Lorien is described as the land of dreams. All that passes outside is of no consequence in the city of Lothlorien, where flows Celebrant, tributary to Anduin the Great.
Past the forest city of elves, the river bids farewell to the company of the mountains and makes its way towards Emyn Muil and Argonath. The river is now wide and its pace is rising steadily. Both the banks are green and beautiful. The images of Lothlorien still linger in one's mind. But approaching on one side is Sauron's ruined kingdom, Mordor, the evil and dark land, where none but the Orcs dare set foot upon.
The Sarn Gebir, a series of ferocious rapids, leads the river into the lake of Nen Hithoel. The river then takes a plunge at the Falls of Rauros, flows path the mouth of the Entwash river.
Ahead lie the White Mountains and the Mountains of Shadow, where good meets evil, and the only thing keeping Minas Tirith - the capital of Gondor, where the men are good and brave - and Minas Morgul, the tower of the evil - apart, is the river Anduin. Past the fighting towers it flows, through the port of Pelargir, and finally it joins the sea at they Bay of Belfalas.
The course of The Great River can indeed teach us a lot. Emerging from our birth, we are fast and flow rapidly through the first part of our life. We see only beautiful meadows and flowers dancing in the breeze. Then we are past the youth of our life. We want to linger in our early days, but we know that we must go on, no matter what. Onward, there comes a point where the two banks on either side of us are warring - good versus evil. Turn the eyes to one side, and you see brave, relentless people fighting for their principles. The other side presents havoc and devastation. And still onward you flow, until the battle is past, and you are only looking forward to come to rest. The memories of the past and the thoughts of the present weigh you down and you move ahead slowly, but steadily.
And then, the sea comes, the end of all rivers, like and unlike you. And there, as all the waters swirl and rise together, everything is at one, and the past does not really matter.

Thestrals

I begin, as most other teens would, with Harry Potter.
The young boy wizard, with his close companions, have ruled my bookish fantasies ever since I graduated out of Enid Blyton. More on her works later, though.
Thestrals... beautiful word, and a beautiful topic to contemplate upon. I know I should probably start at the beginning, from Philosopher's Stone, and work my way towards the end, but the moment I thought of this blog, I knew I wanted this to be my first post.
Thestrals are winged horses with skeletal bodies, reptilian faces, and wide wings that resemble a bat's. They are first introduced in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Harry notices them for the first time, pulling the students' carriages to the lake. The others, however, seem unable to see the thestrals, and Luna Lovegood, a Ravenclaw girl, explains to Harry that only those who have seen death can see the thestrals. They are gentle creatures (usually), and the Hogwarts herds are especially mild, reacting to soft words and caresses.  What really held them in my memory was the fact that though they were associated with death, they are portrayed to be quite gentle animals, and loyal.
I initially wondered why Harry could not see the thestrals on the way back from Hogwarts in the Goblet of Fire, or even before, since he had witnessed his mother's death when he was only a year old. But then I found that a person can see the thestrals only when he has come to terms with the death they have witnessed. On the return trip from Hogwarts, Harry was still numb about Cedric's death. He could just not relate to it.
But later, he understood that when a war was going on, people would die, and he had to face it and keep going anyway. I'm sure many people, including yours truly, did not let Cedric's death affect them much. Sure, it startled everyone to reality, made it certain that Voldemort was back. But we were just glad that Harry had gotten out of there alive, and was fine, for then.
But from Harry's point of view, or even any other Hogwarts student's, it must have been jolting. Until then, Voldemort had been something of a distant concept, appearing only in people's memories and dreams. Then suddenly he turns up at some graveyard or the other, and murders a student in cold blood just because he was unlucky enough to turn up there with Harry.
If not for Cedric's death, the incident would have sounded ridiculous to anyone not knowing the full story. And as it was, we saw how Harry's own friends turned against him the next year. Even Dean and Seamus, fellow Gryffindors, refused to believe him.
So it was no wonder that Cedric's death brought back a rush of memories to Harry... that graveyard... almost dying at the hands of Voldemort... seeing his parents during the Priori Incantatem.
And so, Harry could not bring himself to even think about Cedric, much less accept that his death was not Harry's fault, for a whole summer.

Whims In An Icebox

I stumbled upon this name in one of the more wandering parts of my mind, and it just sounded right to me. Most of my thoughts are random, but each one is sure to lead to another, and thus form a long chain.

I have always preferred expressing my thoughts in the written form, not so I can erase and rewrite - in fact, I just write things down as they come into my head - but because it helps open my mind up.
This blog is meant to array my thoughts together, compress them into an icebox, you can say, and thus the title of the blog. And I mean not just any thoughts, but my reflections on the books I have read and inferred lasting impressions from.
In a way, my constant childhood companions have been books. Not that I don't have any friends, in fact, I think I have more than my fair share of them. But whenever I wanted a distraction, books were ready at hand. I have always been able to lose myself in a different world easily. For a short while, all my problems would seem distant, as though echoes from a distant past. I would be transported into a new world, where everything was different, and novel.

I have, from a very young age, found the urge in me to write like all the great authors in the world, to hold the entire world captive in my imaginations, and to decide what happens to each character of my story. But every writer makes a start somewhere small. This is my attempt to begin writing earnestly, and on the same time, put down in words my many thoughts on the many books of this planet.