Category: Uncategorized

Amazon’s The Rings of Power series is the Van Helsing of Tolkien adaptations*.

Hear me out! This isn’t a hot take. I’ve thought through the comparison a bit. The 2004 film Van Helsing—starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, and David Wenham—is fun and exciting, has some great visuals and action sequences, loads of brilliant costumes, and worthy music. But as a tribute or adaptation of its literary sources, it’s absurd. If we acknowledge that, and what the film is portraying vs. what it’s not, we can absolutely still enjoy it.

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I don’t yet know all of what I’ll write about on this blog. The topics will probably be random, but will invariably lead to speculative fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, Tolkien, writing, publishing, and maybe snippets of real life. But since this is a public site, I don’t think I’ll be talking about the private lives of family and friends.

Today I’m going to talk about gnomes.

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Welcome . . . to the Halls of Mandos!

Nahhh! Your fëa didn’t leave your hröa. This is just my new, no-frills WordPress website and blog. Just a place I can hang my hat for now. Err, metaphorically speaking. I’ve got an About page, an Articles page, a Books page, and an FAQ, so far.

One thing I would like to bring up here in my first blog entry is my latest writing endeavour: a bit of “popular scholarship” called The Silmarillion Primer. This is the revised and upgraded version of the Primer that first appeared on Tor.com back in 2017. That online series is still there, but I’ve done so much rerwriting and fixing already that it looks like old crayon drawings by comparison (to me, anyway). They’re very colorful, and I’m still proud of them, but I can’t look at it anymore; I’ll only see the mistakes.

This is the near-finished cover art by
illustrator/blacksmith/artist-of-all-trades
David DelaGardelle.

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