Like a memory of dewy mornings ...

I have finally finished re-reading The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien. What a truly magnificent story.

Some of the final terrible chapters, when Frodo and Samwise were trudging onwards to Mount Doom, were so hard to read and I was very relieved to finish them, but you could say I well and truly entered into what was a miserable and seemingly hopeless quest. 

Yet throughout the whole book there are those moments of such beauty and goodness. Once upon a time here I gathered up quotes about Sehnsucht, that piercing and inconsolable longing felt when in the presence of something beautiful or haunting, a reminder of something forgotten and a hope ….

So I loved these descriptions when Aragorn comes to The Houses of Healing and fulfils an old rhyme with an ancient and forgotten herb to heal first Faramir, then Eowyn, then Merry. This is how it is described, and these descriptions just catch my breath with that Sehnsucht, when these badly wounded comrades are restored to life ...

But Aragorn smiled. 'It will serve,' he said. 'The worst is now over. Stay and be comforted!' Then taking two leaves, he laid them on his hands and breathed on them, and then he crushed them, and straightway a living freshness filled the room, as if the air itself awoke and tingled, sparkling with joy. And then he cast the leaves into the bowls of steaming water that were brought to him, and at once all hearts were lightened. For the fragrance that came to each was like a memory of dewy mornings of unshadowed sun in some land of which the fair world in Spring is itself but a fleeting memory. But Aragorn stood up as one refreshed, and his eyes smiled as he held a bowl before Faramir's dreaming face.
...

Then, whether Aragorn had indeed some forgotten power of Westernesse, or whether it was but his words of the Lady Eowyn that wrought on them, as the sweet influence of the herb stole about the chamber it seemed to those who stood by that a keen wind blew through the window, and it bore no scent, but was an air wholly fresh and clean and young, as if it had not before been breathed by any living thing and came new-made from snowy mountains high beneath a dome of stars, or from shores of silver far away washed by seas of foam.
...

Then Aragorn laid his hand on Merry's head, and passing his hand gently through the brown curls, he touched the eyelids, and called him by name. And when the fragrance of athelas stole through the room, like the scent of orchards, and of heather in the sunshine full of bees, suddenly Merry awoke ...