The Evolution of Smaug
by ArchedCory
I am sure many of you are familiar with the explanation Tolkien wrote in a letter to the ‘Observer’ in January 1938: Continue reading “The evolution of Tolkien’s Smaug”
Category: Green Books
`Only once before have I seen them from afar in waking life, but I know them and their names, for under them lies Khazad-dûm, the Dwarrowdelf, that is now called the Black Pit, Moria in the Elvish tongue. Yonder stands Barazinbar, the Redhorn, cruel Caradhras; and beyond him are Silvertine and Cloudyhead: Celebdil the White, and Fanuidhol the Grey, that we call Zirak-zigil and Bundushathûr.
Gimli, The Lord of the Rings.
This lovely feature guides us through the alpine regions of Switzerland that proved so inspirational to Tolkien when he travelled there in 1911. Continue reading “The Alps that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing”
Another interesting thought-piece that I stumbled on in my Middle-earth wanderings across the internet. In this article, Tolkien scholar Michael Martinez tackles the eternally vexing question of textual fidelity and why he feels that the divergences between novel and film are beneficial. Continue reading “Why The Hobbit movie’s divergences are beneficial”
We know that The Necromancer has a big role to play in The Desolation of Smaug. But just how big will it be? Will Dol Guldur be a relatively minor affair involving only Gandalf and his fellow wizards? Or will other key actors of The Hobbit be somehow drawn into the struggle in the south of Mirkwood?
In this feature, Ringer Captain Salt assembles what we know already form various actor blog posts, video logs and magazine articles and tries to tie it all together. Continue reading “Analysing the role of The Necromancer in The Hobbit”
In this piece on his blog Midgardsmal, linguist David Salo writes about how he derived various Orkish dialects used in the Lord of the Rings films from his own extrapolations of Black Speech, and
about his thoughts on the approach Sauron might have taken in putting together Black Speech itself.
Continue reading “David Salo on Black Speech, orc dialects and the mind of Sauron”
Yours truly has been ever-so-slowly getting through the newest Tolkien book The Fall of Arthur for the last month-and-a-half with a hope of at some point stringing together a few poor words on the subject.
I’ve also been reading other what others have had to say in the media. This piece, by Tolkien scholar John Garth, is a good place to start if you’re interested.
Early in The Fall of Arthur, long awaited by fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and now edited for publication by his son Christopher, an army rides to Mirkwood where they see in a storm above it, Ringwraith-like:
wan horsemen wild in windy clouds
grey and monstrous grimly riding
shadow-helmed to war, shapes disastrous.
But this isn’t Middle-earth: it is Europe on the brink of the Dark Ages, and the army is led by Arthur and Gawain. Mirkwood is simply the old name for Germany’s eastern forests, which Tolkien borrowed for the children’s story he was writing in the same period in the early 1930s, The Hobbit.
Tolkien was a writer of endless stories. And as with most of them, The Fall of Arthur is literally endless: unfinished. It’s been lying among his vast legacy of papers, almost unknown but for a paragraph in Humphrey Carpenter’s 1976 biography and a single reference in Tolkien’s published letters. Publication follows that of the more difficult The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in 2009, which Christopher Tolkien probably elected to publish first because it was complete. Like Sigurd and Gudrún, The Fall of Arthur is in alliterative verse, a mode last fashionable in the 14th century.