tags: Tolkien
2001
September
- 2001 Sep 1
- Septembers and LotR
Get up, get up—it’s the first of the month…. Memories. From the corner of my mind…. It’s time to read the trilogy again.
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2003
May
- 2003 May 31
- The Road Goes Ever On and On — Revisited
Ah, to return from exile. Does nothing ever last? At least longer than an effervescent moment?
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2006
March
- 2006 Mar 26
- the sin of pride
I was walking through the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the Borders in Glendale when a totally random thought occurred to me. I think what brought it to my mind is the question: what is the cause of evil? I was flipping through random fantasy novels where characters are neatly pigeon-holed into Good or Evil, and clearly in the real world nothing is that obvious.
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2007
February
- 2007 Feb 14
- head in the clouds
I suppose I’m still in a phase of mental regression. For the past five weeks or so, ever since my cousin died and I went on vacation, I’ve found myself trying to recreate my childhood. Playing video games. Obsessing about fantasy worlds. Re-exploring Middle Earth. Even screwing around with emulators, trying to play old-school cRPGs from way-back-when. The Bard’s Tale. The Shard of Spring. Final Fantasy I.
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April
- 2007 Apr 10
- problems with sleep-onset
I stupidly drank some Vietnamese iced coffee about 3 hours ago, and I’m wired and jittery and all over the place. I have to wake up in less than 6 hours to get ready for work.
· Read more… - 2007 Apr 13
- the trap of world building
Despite the fact that I’ve been trapped in a world-building exercise for the past 18 years, I completely agree with M John Harrison’s assessment that world-building is unnecessary in order to tell a good story, and that world-building is the pinnacle of uselessness: you are creating a literal description of a world that doesn’t even exist.
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August
- 2007 Aug 7
- hbo
My sister has hooked me to HBO original serieses (er, yeah, I know that’s not a real word.) She has been obsessed with ”Entourage” which has now grown on me.
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September
- 2007 Sep 11
- doomed
Septembers have also been traditionally the month that I would start re-reading The Lord of the Rings. There is always something poignant about the ending of summer. It reminds me that it’s time to move on, and to fly towards the shadows of the unknown.
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October
- 2007 Oct 7
- fall from grace
I forget what exactly I typed into Google, but somehow I ended up at this archived discussion about the motif of static history in stereotypical fantasy. It’s true, Western Civilization seems to be obsessed with the idea that things were better in the past, and things really suck now. Tolkien called this idea ”The Long Defeat,” specifically referring to the Fall of the Noldor, from a state of Valinorean grace to becoming refugees fleeing Middle-Earth furtively in the night.
· Read more… - 2007 Oct 7
- even the environment pushes back
The Lord of the Rings vis-a-vis the Cold War and the War on Terror
· Read more… - 2007 Oct 8
- visions and revisions
Gary the Tolkien Geek has been reposting blog posts that analyze the text of
· Read more…The Lord of the Rings
, so I haven’t tried to reread the thing itself. (Despite the fact that I’ve read the book multiple times, it’s absurd the things that I’ve managed to miss: for example, the insinuation that Eärendil’s ship Vingelot may be a spaceship or the fact that the place name Nargothrond actually occurs in the text. - 2007 Oct 19
- back. way back.
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- 2007 Oct 28
- on silmarils and arkenstones
Still reading The History of the Hobbit by John D. Rateliff. There have been loony theories around the Internet which ponder whether the Arkenstone from The Hobbit is in fact a Silmaril.
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November
- 2007 Nov 10
- emo elvish poetry
Adding a few new feeds to Google Reader has caused it to dredge up a bunch of old entries, but I find this rather pretty:
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December
- 2007 Dec 19
- six degrees from robin hood to j.r.r. tolkien
Wikipedia has basically become the path of least resistance these days, and if I want to find information on anything, it tends to become my first stop. Which is sometimes unfortunate, because sometimes the primary sources aren't exactly transparent. There are very few well-documented Wikipedia articles, and the ones that are well-documented have way too many references, leaving me with no idea how to stratify the authoritativeness of each reference. I can understand the reluctance to perform this stratification: it's a lot of work, and the tendency is to leave the burden—perhaps quite rightly—on the reader, but failing to do this makes Wikipedia far less useful than it could be.
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2010
June
- 2010 Jun 22
- the time of the elves is over
I was listening to 30 Seconds to Mars "Kings and Queens" before I went to sleep last night, and the first thing that popped into my head was the Exile of the Noldor and the end of the First Age from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion
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2012
July
- 2012 Jul 7
- a single letter difference, and too much free time
I found myself thinking about the last section of The Lord of the Rings (that got cut out of the movies): the "Scouring of the Shire" chapter. And it occurred to me that "scouring" and "scourging" are only one letter apart. And while in common parlance, "scourging" just means whipping, I started thinking about the Scourging of Lordaeron in World of Warcraft, where cultists transform an entire kingdom's populace into ghouls and zombies, and so, what if Saruman was a necromancer, and he basically turned all the hobbits undead….
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December
- 2012 Dec 3
- more things in heaven and earth
I just finished reading Ken Liu's short story "The Waves" this morning about human interstellar travelers who are presented with, progressively, the choice of biological immortality, the choice of machine immortality and the Singularity, and the choice of transforming into pure energy life forms, interspersed with retellings of the creation myths of various cultures.
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2013
April
- 2013 Apr 17
- Middle-Earth vs. Earthsea
Both J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin call their respective fantasy universes Eä/Éa. Coincidence?
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2015
December
- 2015 Dec 30
- Space Taoism
Given the fact that the Dark Side of the Force (as the Sith, the Empire, or the First Order) always build a planet-destroying weapon that has a single point of failure and the Light Side of the Force (as the Jedi Council, the Rebel Alliance, or the Resistance) always manages to destroy it, I've started to see "Star Wars" as a version of the myth of Sisyphus.
· Read more… - 2015 Dec 30
- LotR's Expanded Universe
(Inspired by a post comparing the mythology of Middle Earth with the Star Wars Expanded Universe)
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2016
January
- 2016 Jan 19
- The Illegitimacy of the House of Telcontar
The Toast brings up the fact that Middle Earth is a post-apocalyptic ecocatastrophic feudal dystopia and that Aragorn's ascension to the throne was totally illegitimate.
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