The Rings of Powers Season Three press release is out now. I’d like to comment on just one passage from it.
(more…)Tag: tolkien
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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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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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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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Continuing the theme of talking about the good things in life . . .
This is just a short post mostly to redirect folks to this awesome and insightful new article in the “Overlooked No Mere” series in The New York Times—which I’d never heard about before. It doesn’t appear behind a paywall, either. I guess that makes sense, since it’s an obituary series. Anyway, it’s this one:
Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien’s Middle-earth
And here’s my quick followup opinion.
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Go not to me for true film criticism, for I will say both “It was great!” and “It wasn’t that great” about almost anything. Almost.
But! It’s 2024, and I got to take my family to see a Lord of the Rings film in December just as it premiered. That felt . . . good, and a tiny bit nostalgic. I still have more enthusiasm in me than disappointment, and as always, more Tolkien is better than less Tolkien. Even poorly made Tolkien adaptations (which this wasn’t) is an excuse to talk about Tolkien . . .
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I aim to talk more about the good things in life here.
Today I’m going to talk just a little bit about artists Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, though I don’t honestly know much about them—that is, beyond this wonderful interview the hosts of The Prancing Pony Podcast had with Greg Hildebrandt a few years ago. Mostly I’d just like to share some of MY favorite paintings from their vast body of work. Tim passed away in 2006 and his brother, Greg, sadly passed away one month ago.
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The finale of season 2 The Rings of Power, quite surprisingly, didn’t terribly disappoint me. I enjoyed it more than I thought it would, and some plot threads ended . . . not as cringey as I expected. But let’s get to it.
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Foreshadowed and Foresung 