the making of things is in my heart

“The making of things is in my heart.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I am (successfully) reading The Silmarillion for the first time this year. I’ve tried a few times in the past and gave up after a chapter or two. This time, I was determined. I started reading on Christmas Eve 2023 and have been reading each chapter, listening to each chapter (narrated by Andy Serkis), and then listening to Cory Olsen’s Silmarillion Seminar podcast about each chapter (highly recommend!). I’m enjoying it so much, that I’m already looking forward to reading it again when I’m finished.

This quote, which I translated into Latin using an online translator, is my favorite quote from the book so far – and may be my favorite quote in general. “The making of things is in my heart.” I think many artists and makers can feel those words in their bones. And when I read it for the first time, I knew it would appear in something that I created. Sure enough, a few months later I started painting a large-scale, medieval-inspired map and I painted the translated quote in the corner of the map. This map, that is now complete - and comes with my to my markets, was something that I didn’t have any intention of making until the day that I started making it. And sometimes in life, those are the best sorts of things. Inspired by a passing notion of “I wish I had a huge old map on fabric to hang in my booth” - but I didn’t, so I created one. And now I’m finding that I’d happily paint maps for the rest of my days.