I had a long discussion with my sister about how many miles, exactly, Frodo and Sam traveled from their home in The Shire to the pits of Mt. Doom. Oddly, this information wasn’t readily apparent online, for all the Tolkien websites and maps and graphics out there. After some digging, I came up with this. …
Tolkien’s work is full of evil fortresses, towers, and strongholds. My favorite among them is Angmar. Isn’t that an evocative name! It just oozes evil. Others are Thangorodrim, Minas Morgul, Durthang, and Barad-Dur. Unpleasant-sounding names, all of them. In that vein, here’s some evil place names that would fit very well into Middle-earth, all randomgenned …
One of the First Age tales in The Silmarillion is how Luthien, an elf, falls in love with Beren, who is human, and aids him in his quest to recover the three Silmaril jewels from Morgoth. This part of The Sil has a more fairy tale flavor than the rest of the book, involving overt …
Continuing on with this series. Tolkien says in several places that Hobbits are more akin to Men than either Elves or Dwarves. If so, they share Men’s mortality in that they do not go to Valinor after death, but somewhere else (even though Frodo and Sam did.) However, their lifespans are longer than that of …
Today comes one the crueler parts of Tolkien March/April — mocking Smaug! Of The Hobbit fame. He’s been depicted many times over the years, and in my judgement most of the artwork has been appropriate for the story and, in many cases, superlative. But many renditions fall short in depicting the giant reptile’s majesty and …
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien HarperCollins, 2001 (Originally published 1977) Though a longtime fantasy and Tolkien fan I held off on reading The Silmarillion for many years. It seemed too dry, too complicated. But after I’d tackled the more recently published The Fall of Númenor I wanted more of …
I thought I was finished with this series, but there’s just too much good material, and a few book covers I overlooked. So let’s proceed. First of all, it occurred to me I never included pictures of non-Russian hobbits to serve as comparisons. So here’s the first ever, drawn by Tolkien. And isn’t it amazing …
Valinor was where the gods, or Valar, of Middle-Earth dwelt; it lay far over the western sea. In the age of The Silmarillion, there were comings and goings to it all the time (by the standards of elves that is) but by the LOTR, it was only a legend to mortals. This illustration by Michael …
As I mentioned in Part 1, Tolkien described orcs in racially stereotyped terms, in fact, he even admitted to it: ” squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” The above illustration by Tim Kirk, then a fan artist, adheres …
The Tolkien revival has grown up with the internet. When the Jackson trilogy began in 2001, memes, forums, message boards, and myspace were new and fresh, enabling fans to find each other and begin to create… humor, that is. The following is a sampling from those 25 years. You’d need to be born before 1980 …