Thursday, 23 October 2025

The History of The Hobbit by John D Rateliff (2007) - a review

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John D Rateliff. The History of The Hobbit - Two volumes: Part One: Mr Baggins ; Part 2: Return to Bag End . HarperCollins: London, 2007.  ...
Sunday, 12 October 2025

Many bullets dodged, but he gets it right - in the end! Tolkien's character names

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Reading The History of Middle Earth (edited by Christopher Tolkien) and The History of the Hobbit (edited by John D Rateliff); it becomes ...
4 comments:
Monday, 1 September 2025

Frodo's first usage of the One Ring was frivolously motivated

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Despite possessing it for many years; Frodo Baggins seems never to have put-on the One Ring - until he was staying in The House of Tom Bomba...
2 comments:
Saturday, 16 August 2025

A lesson of Numenor: Mortal life can only be partly enchanted, even in Faery

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The sadness that underlies all the best accounts of the interactions of Men with elves, fairies and the like; is that the enchantment of Fae...
Wednesday, 30 July 2025

Critiquing the "Myth becomes Fact" concept of Christianity, in Lewis and Tolkien

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CS Lewis's conversion, as is pretty well known, had much to do with an idea he got (mostly) from JRR Tolkien that in Christianity Myth b...
Saturday, 26 July 2025

Initiation by participation in imaginative fiction

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When we really participate in the process of reading a work of imaginative fiction, we undergo some of the steps of what is sometimes termed...
Saturday, 19 July 2025

Where does the evil of Melkor come from, in The Silmarillion?

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At the beginning of The Silmarillion (1977) there is the creation story Ainulindale - which describes, in musical terms, how the universe ...
17 comments:
Friday, 27 June 2025

Charles Williams's Time Loop and other temporal paradoxes in Many Dimensions

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I am currently reading Charles Williams's 1931 novel, in which there is a very early discussion of the notion of "temporal paradox...
6 comments:
Saturday, 17 May 2025

What is the best way to subvert Tolkien?

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I make a suggestion over at my BC's Notions blog . 
Sunday, 11 May 2025

Re-reading The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams - the domination of abstraction over the personal

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I have read Charles' Williams's The Place of the Lion  many times over a span of several decades; and almost accidentally found myse...
9 comments:
Wednesday, 7 May 2025

Review of The Major and the Missionary by Diana Pavlac Glyer (2023)

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Diana Pavlac Glyer (edited). The Major and the Missionary: The letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanch Biggs . Rabbit Room Press: Nashvi...
2 comments:
Wednesday, 30 April 2025

Charles Williams Did influence JRR Tolkien's writing - The Place of the Lion and The Notion Club Papers

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For the past fifty years it has been normal to assume that JRR Tolkien disliked (probably because he was jealous of) Charles Williams; and t...
2 comments:
Tuesday, 29 April 2025

Why Tolkien "cordially disliked allegory"?

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Tolkien declared in his introduction to The Lord of the Rings: I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done ...
2 comments:
Friday, 18 April 2025

Four approaches to understanding JRR Tolkien: historical, philological, Roman Catholic, unique genius

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At the time of his death in 1973, not much was published concerning the nature of JRR Tolkien as a man - and a fair bit of what I knew and w...
2 comments:
Sunday, 6 April 2025

The Three Rings magic and High Elven agriculture

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I find myself inclined to speculate on the workings of agriculture among the High Elves of Middle Earth leading up to the time of the War of...
4 comments:
Sunday, 30 March 2025

Frodo is the only "intellectual" among Hobbits

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As I was reading through Lord of the Rings this time; it struck me that Frodo's conversation with Faramir about the history of Men (in T...
2 comments:
Wednesday, 12 March 2025

Instead of a Dark Lord...

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  I nstead of a Dark Lord, you would have A Cat!  Beautiful and terrible as the dawn! T empestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundat...
1 comment:
Saturday, 22 February 2025

Frodo claims the power of The Ring on the slopes of Mount Doom, rather than beside the Cracks of Doom

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It has been insightfully suggested by "Mikke" that the moment when Frodo claimed for himself the power of the One Ring actually h...
12 comments:
Monday, 10 February 2025

The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star - For me, Tolkien's first good poem

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The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star   First version - dated 24 September 1914   JRR Tolkien was 22 years old.  Éarendel sprang up from t...
4 comments:
Tuesday, 28 January 2025

Where now the horse and the rider? For Tolkien, death (and "entropy") is more fundamentally tragic than evil

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" Where now the horse and the rider? " is a poem of the Riders of Rohan, recited by Aragorn in The Two Towers, as he approaches Ed...
2 comments:
Sunday, 26 January 2025

Charles Williams and Magic

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From Charles Williams 's point of view; the most relevant aspect of magical societies (in the Golden Dawn tradition*) was that training ...
8 comments: