Lane End

The rebus shows TV playwright CARLA LANE and the album The Doors, track 11 of which is the infamous song The END [REB4].

The 2001 Hunt revolved around the �inklings�: JR Tolkien, CS Lewis and his circle. The introductory paragraph includes the line �The telephone bell was ringing wildly�, the first line of War in Heaven by Charles Williams, who was one of the inklings [LE1]. The bookshop owner is not meant to be a portrait of the setter of the 2001 Hunt by the way...

The book-page is from Bored of the Rings, a parody of Tolkien�s epic by the Harvard Lampoon, which manages to reduce the whole thing to 160 pages without omitting anything of note [LE2]. Some letters in the extract are highlighted in grey and bold in order to spell HOUND OF HEAVEN, a religious poem by the opium-addled Victorian, Francis Thompson, which was apparently an influence on Tolkien. It is the sort of work that gives poetry a bad name, containing as it does words like casement, margent, skiey, wist, azured, lucent-weeping, sea-snortings, bereaven, blossomy twist, overplussed, amaranthine, purpureal, and dravest. What we are looking for here, though, is the line �The long SAVANNAHS of the blue.� [LE3]

The first letters of the articles in the shop window can be read as www.narnia.com, the site for the movie based on CS Lewis� Narnia books � which should be in cinemas during this Hunt. [LE4]

The shop-sign is in a font based on Tolkien�s Tengwar language. This is not the font used in the 2001 and 1999 Hunts, but a somewhat simpler one, as can be seen by turning it into a mirror image, in which case it becomes.

Who this is can be seen by looking on http://www.narnia.com and many other places � it is Prince RILIAN, who has gone missing at the start of The Silver Chair [LE5]. 

The puzzle is a standard word-search type, in this case being based on Lord of the Rings. A similar puzzle was used in the 2001 Hunt. All the given words can be found, as well as the missing one (reading north east from just south and west of the centre), NAZGUL, who are the �black riders� that make several appearances in the book and the films [LE6].

Passwords and Directions

(a) RILIAN to get to Marlow
(b) SAVANNAHS to get to Radnage
(c) NAZGUL to get to Skirmett.