All good things must come to an end, so does my two-month journey into all things Middle-earth. Like these guys are doing, I’m moving on to other shores. (It’s a still from a little-aired 1993 Finnish TV version of LOTR. I’m guessing, counterclockwise from the fat left, the characters are Boromir, who looks appropriately dopey …
Tag: Tolkien
My First Hobbit.
My first encounter with Tolkien was reading The Hobbit at age 11 or 12. I found it lying around my sister’s house while on a trip there. It was the paperback edition to the left, which was published by Ballantine in the mid-1970s. That’s Tolkien’s own artwork on the cover. For years I thought it …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/30/25: In Praise of Dwarven Women
One of the elements that got fans so excited about The Rings of Power was its focus on Dwarves and their society, including their wives and female children. Aha! We might finally see what bearded Dwarven women looked like! Well, no, they turned out to be facial-hair free. Though in one episode from Season 2, …
Apex Predators of Middle-earth
Though Tolkien described the landscapes of Middle-earth in great detail, he didn’t go much into its animal life, and when he did it was similar to what you’d encounter on a walk in the English countryside. With the addition of various fell creatures, of course. But these were met only if you wandered far and …
A Few Substandard Hobbits
Slavic nations certainly had some unusual Hobbits, but what of the rest of Europe? Let’s see. This underground comix- inspired Bilbo is tied with this one as the most horrible Hobbit depiction of all time. It’s a J’ai Lu publication, which is par for the course. Is he fighting a troll? An aardvark? Who knows. …
Frodo’s Journey
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. …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/16/25: Villain Lairs of Middle-earth
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 …
Beren and Luthien, Egyptian Style
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 …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/9/25: Undiscovered Hobbit Types, Part 2
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 …