Tolkien (and other loves of my life)
Category: Tolkien
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The Twelve Days of Sauron
The Lord of Gifts sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake. The Twelve Days of Sauron. Like the Twelve Days of Christmas, but with fewer birds and more deception and torture. This is a compiled version of a series of tweets I posted in 2022 in the lead up to the premiere…
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Why Eru Didn’t Trip Gollum: Con-Creation in The Lord of the Rings
Here’s a question: in the climactic moment of The Lord of the Rings, who was responsible for the Ring’s destruction? Was it Frodo? Gollum? Maybe Sam? Alternatively, was it Eru? Is there a sense in which we could say it was Sauron, or even the Ring, itself? There’s a reading …
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They Shaped and Wrought, and Light They Caught
This blog post is an expanded version of a piece posted on Tumblr in April of 2022. Fans and scholars can always debate (and have!) in what manner or to what degree The Hobbit, in those years before The Lord of the Rings was written, really engaged with or belonged to the wider mythology of…
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Perspective and Humility Or The Overview Effect and Its Inverse
An earlier version of this essay was written and posted on Tumblr in response to Some excellent thoughts by warrioreowynofrohan. The Ainur are the only beings (that we know of) inside Eä during the Ages recorded in the Legendarium who have also seen Eä from the “outside.” From the Timeless Halls, the Ainur first experienced…
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Tolkien the Horror Writer
Earlier this year, as I was trolling The Lord of the Rings for a paper I was writing, I came across this moment in “The Taming of Smeagol.” It reminded me of how deeply frightening I found the novel, and what a capable horror writer Tolkien would have made. It’s a subtle type of horror,…
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The Feast of the Annunciation at 35,000 Feet
Panic attack disorder really messes with you. It stops you from doing the things you really want to do. It prevents you from enjoying life. And because—intellectually—you know the fear it generates is irrational, it not only steals life from you, but leaves you feeling guilty for letting it. “If only I could have been…
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In Her Honor
Elementary school spoiled fiction for me early on. In the thousand different children’s books I was fed about young boys roughing it on the frontier with their hound dogs and their shotguns (the result, perhaps, of growing up in a “pioneer” state) there was nothing I could relate to. I was a fast reader, a…
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Eucatastrope and Teleology
I am trying to determine if Tolkien would say the “Joy beyond the walls of the world” that he associates with the experience of eucatastrophe requires a metaphysical or teleological dimension. Obviously, if Tolkien views the Christian Incarnation and Resurrection as the most potent Primary World examples of eucatastrophe, it seems to me that he…
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Valier Evolution
One of the things I find most interesting In the development of the Legendarium: Varda and Nienna grow in importance and potency over time, and seem to pass certain aspects of Marian imagery back and forth between each other from version to version. The growth aspect is true of several of the Valier, and my…
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Whom Morgoth Made
Speculations on my favorite baddie: part 1 Some say also that Morgoth at whiles secretly as a cloud that cannot be seen or felt, and yet is, and the poison is, creeps back surmounting the Walls and visiteth the world; but others say that this is the black shadow of Thû [Sauron], whom Morgoth made,…
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Reckoning Nothing of Wizardry or War
Within The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had a particular love for the paragraph in The Return of the King when the horns of the Rohirrim sound, announcing what may be the second most famous eucatastrophic moment in the story. My favorite line, however, has always been the paragraph that precedes it—cock crow: “And in that very moment,…
