The Rings of Powers Season Three press release is out now. I’d like to comment on just one passage from it.
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This post is just a place that organizes the articles I’ve written about Amazon’s The Rings of Power TV show—praises, criticisms, surprises, gripes, wonder, and the many comments that fall between.
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Did you know? If you owned a particular book that came out in 2003 (23 years ago!), you would read that Wizards of the Coast proposed that you could potentially ride a gelatinous cube in your game. No one at the time, that I can recall, protested that WotC had therefore sanitized or spoiled Gary Gygax’s original vision for the gelatinous cube. If you can imagine that.
Ohh, right: This is a post specifically about Dungeons & Dragons and lore adjustments. It might not make much sense to anyone else outside the hobby.
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I learned that one of my favorite musicians passed away a couple of days ago: Máire Brennan of Clannad. Not very big news in the States, I’m afraid, but it’s a big loss for anyone with an appreciation for traditional Irish/Celtic music.
Her name is often Anglicized as Moya—which I guess was to help the rest of the world pronounce it properly—and I got to meet her in 1998 when she was promoting her album Perfect Time. She had a brief performance and a CD signing at Borders Books & Music at the World Trade Center store, where I was working at the time.
A strange voice calling ‘Journey’s at an end… -
Here’s another installment about some of the things I learned about Tolkien and The Silmarillion by writing a book about it. This one is about how the vast spans of time in The Silmarillion are easy to overlook (and lead to assumptions), and about how no group in Tolkien’s legendarium is truly homogeneous.
read about things “uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome” -
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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Foreshadowed and Foresung 