Thursday, 29 December 2022

Being a Romantic - and the Notion Club Papers

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[Jeremy]: Sometimes I have a queer feeling that, if one could go back, one would find not myth dissolving into history, but rather the rever...
Monday, 12 December 2022

Reflections on CS Lewis after reading Planet Narnia, by Michael Ward

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I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in primary school - perhaps after watching a dramatized version on television; then The Silver...
1 comment:

Understanding Owen Barfield, despite Owen Barfield's comments!

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One of the difficulties about understanding Owen Barfield, is that he did not really understand himself!  I mean that Barfield did not reall...
Thursday, 20 October 2022

Links to my reviews of Amazon Prime Rings of Power

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The recent Amazon Prime series Rings of Power is advertised as an adaptation of Tolkien; but that is not true.  RoP has nothing to do with...
2 comments:
Tuesday, 11 October 2022

Tolkien's Elves and Men both need to trust in The One/ Eru Illuvatar/ God

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In Tolkien's legendarium, Men and Elves are the same 'species', but the fate of their spirits are very different .  Men die and ...
1 comment:
Monday, 12 September 2022

The three ages of Tolkien in my life

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Looking back over the past fifty years I have been reading Tolkien; I can perceive that my attitude to the books (especially The Lord of the...
Wednesday, 10 August 2022

Did Radagast the Brown fail in his mission?

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The Wizards/ Istari were incarnated Maia (angelic spirits) who were sent to Middle Earth in about the thousandth year of the Third Age to re...
2 comments:
Friday, 5 August 2022

What did the Ents look like? Tree-ish Men (but Not Man-like trees)

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  I have never seen an accurate picture of an Ent; i.e. a picture that conforms to Tolkien's descriptions in the text of Lord of the Rin...
Wednesday, 13 July 2022

Why did Tolkien come out of the Great War without suffering pessimistic disillusion?

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It is characteristic of those intellectuals and officers who wrote about the Great War of 1914-18, that they experienced a permanent disillu...
Sunday, 26 June 2022

Review of The Great Tales Never End: Essays in memory of Christopher Tolkien (2022)

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The great tales never end: Essays in memory of Christopher Tolkien . Edited by Richard Ovenden & Catherine McIlwaine. Bodleian Library P...
1 comment:
Tuesday, 7 June 2022

Legolas and Gimli were - ultimately - wrong about Men

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There is a brief yet marvelous conversation in The Lord of the Rings , when Legolas and Gimli walk together through Minas Tirith and talk of...
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Thursday, 14 April 2022

The Colin Duriez biography of JRR Tolkien

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Colin Duriez. JRR Tolkien: the making of a legend . 2012. pp 248. ISBN-10: 9780745955148; ISBN-13: 978-0745955148  Because I have been read...

The Place of the Lion audiobook; my favourite of Charles's Williams's novels now available in a reading by David Pickering

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The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams is one of my favourite novels, which I have read multiple times over a span of some thirty-five ye...
1 comment:
Wednesday, 16 March 2022

Review of the Andy Serkis narrated audiobooks of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

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Surprisingly perhaps, the recent Andy Serkis narrations of The Hobbit unabridged and the Lord of the Rings (plus Appendix A, and the introdu...
5 comments:
Tuesday, 22 February 2022

Frodo's and Sam's coma after the one ring has been destroyed: Another of Tolkien's nods - but why?

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In the chronology of The Lord of the Rings - Appendix B - there is a strangely long period between the destruction of the One Ring and the ...
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What happened to Elladan and Elrohir? Were they a source of elvish inheritance in later Men?

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Elladan and Elrohir were the identical-looking twin sons of Elrond; older brothers of Arwen. The brothers spent most of their lives as war...
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Where did Frodo and Bilbo go after leaving the Grey Havens - Lonely Island or Blessed Realm?

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For many years after reading The Lord of the Rings, I did not understand that the Undying Lands were two-fold - the original land occupied b...
5 comments:
Wednesday, 16 February 2022

Why is Tolkien's subcreated and fictional mythology (for most people) more powerful than traditional myths?

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In what follows I will try to describe what was new and distinctive about Tolkien's writing - the X-factor that makes Tolkien's myth...
1 comment:
Saturday, 5 February 2022

Another Tolkien-Birmingham connection: Ramer's meteorite identified as the boulder in Cannon Hill Park, Edgbaston (from the Notion Club Papers)

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  From The Notion Club Papers - by JRR Tolkien :  [Ramer speaking:] "There is a very large meteorite in a park, Gunthorpe Park in Matfi...
7 comments: