But I speak this night of Poets' Corners where Geoffrey Chaucer was buried in 1400, originally due to his work as a royal clerk rather than his poetry, yet now over 100 poets and writers are rest and/or have memorials here. Here lie literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens, John Dryden, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Hardy. Others such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and T.S. Eliot are buried elsewhere yet have designated memorials here. And now, in what I think is a perfect example of the phrases "better late than never" and "about time!", J.R.R. Tolkien, the Founder of Modern Fantasy, is being so honored.
The Dean of Westminster, The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle said: “I am delighted both that there will be a memorial to J.R.R. Tolkien in the Abbey and that the memorial will be a thing of beauty. The Hobbit was read to me when I was a boy; when I was a little older, I read The Lord of the Rings, and then I read it again. We will remember here a master storyteller, a scholar, a man with a Christian imagination and a writer who helped some of us understand that a commitment to life and virtue might be costly and courageous.”
Artist Stephen Broadbent said: “It has been a delight and honour to firstly imagine and then develop a memorial for Westminster Abbey that commemorates Tolkien’s literary enterprise and creative imagination. The artwork will present to the viewer the sense of peering into another world: a ‘Forest of Stories’, with Tolkien’s remarkable ‘Tree of Tales’ accepted into the heart of it. Then through this magical forest there is an evocative glimpse to a land beyond.”
Why is William Shakespeare not buried in the Abbey? Well, his grave is a different tale and shows his dramatic flare to the hilt. Like Tolkien he rests alongside his wife, Anne Hathaway. Unlike Tolkien, Shakespeare's grave bears no name: only a famous warning he reportedly wrote himself. For in 17th-century England graveyards and burial spaces filled up quickly, with older remains frequently dug up and relocated to charnel houses to make room for new burials, to say nothing of grave robbers. So he wrote a curse which translated into modern English reads:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
It must have worked, because his bones remain undisturbed to this day. Nobody minds risking Mummy Curses and whatnot giving how many Pharaohs and other ancient Egyptian tombs have been excavated for museums around the world. But Shakespeare's Curse, reportedly written himself for placement upon his tomb? I would not risk it.
