This is the blog post version of the talk I gave at the New York Tolkien Conference last summer (2025). It also revisits a few of the things I said in my Mythmoot talk from a few years before. But all in all, it’s about the writing of The Silmarillion Primer, a book which I promise is about to drop soon. Since it’s a bit long, I’ve made this just part 1. This one’s about the characters in The Silmarillion.
Read the doom that is written-
This might be hard to articulate, but I’m going to give it a try. It’s not complicated in itself, just complicated to convey, maybe.
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After my relative disappointment with Del Toro’s Frankenstein*, I established in my mind—and in a post on the subject—a new expectation, a new rule, that I absolutely know Hollywood would never follow because cash is king and brand recognition is everything. Even so, this would be my rule (and I’ll be disappointed every time the world doesn’t conform to it):
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In the real world, what we in the Tolkien fandom call the primary world, Orcs are not a race. They’re a mindset, an ideology, the basest outlook of humanity. Tolkien certainly thought so.
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With Frankenstein fresh on the brain and in a lot of online media discourse, this seems like as good a time as any to float my pet theory about the monster. The recent Guillermo del Toro film (which I wrote about here) takes the popular approach on this matter.
But I don’t think Mary Shelley intended it this way. So what’s my theory?
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I am a big Frankenstein fan. The novel foremost, but also its legacy. A few years back, I went to the Morgan Library here in NYC and got to see an exhibit there all about Frankenstein, marking its 200th-year anniversary.
I’m invested in its ideas, and where it came from, and how it ties into other legends and folklore, like the Golem of Prague or Talos of Greek mythology. And ultimately, these stories tie back into what makes us human, and what mysteries drive us. So I care about how the concept of the created man plays out in each new incarnation.
Like Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein.
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Although J.R.R. Tolkien famously disliked allegory, he admitted there is always applicability to be found. Anyone who reads his work with any bit of care or critical thinking can find a thousand applications to the troubles of our real world—what he called the primary world. Here is just one I recently across again.
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The short version: I hopped into the NoName Storyteller Podcast for a couple of episodes. The first episode is “From Dice to Darkwood” and the second is “Unlocking Middle-earth.” Available pretty much anywhere, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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There is now a project page for The Silmarillion Primer on the Signum Press website. Right here, in fact: https://press.signumuniversity.org/2025/07/01/the-silmarillion-primer/ Thank you to Shawn, Alan, and Tom for your quotes! They do me great honor, and I am increased by your good will.
In due time, I hope only a few months from now, there’ll be an entry for the Primer in the Signum Store, too.
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This posts blends Dungeons & Dragons, religion, and today’s political climate—that last one being a topic I would like to generally avoid here. But this one eats away at me so I just need to work through it “out loud,” as it were.
So, a long, long time ago while working in a career far, far away, I did a bit of freelance writing for Wizards of the Coast. At one moment in time, I got to cowrite (with my good friend Ken Hart) a D&D article titled “Faith & Heresy” (in Dragon issue #387 from 2011). It was essentially roleplaying advice for players or DMs and it proposed the idea that not all clerics, even those serving the same god, have to be the same, or even believe all the same things.
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Foreshadowed and Foresung 