“To a know a dinosaur, you must first know a chicken.” These common farmyard birds, developed from Asian junglefowl around 8,000 years ago, show many of the same characteristics of the prehistoric creatures they are descended from. They strut about on two legs, have plumage, scaled, robust clawed feet, are warm-blooded, and lay eggs, They …
In the AD&D universe one of the most prized treasure items a magic-user character could discover was a book of magic, because it gained access to a range of spells and not just the one or two that the player gained with each level. That’s the way it started out, anyway. Things might have changed. …
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 …
After all the different hobbits on the covers of Russian and Slavic translations, surely there must have been more types in Middle-earth than just the ones in The Shire? After all, it’s a big place with plenty of room. In his other notes, Tolkien stated that Hobbits came into The Shire in the middle of …
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 …
From hobbits my mind has drifted off to orcs. Or orks, uruks, orchs, as known in some of Middle-Earth’s other languages. Tolkien never described the orcs too deeply and when he did, unfortunately, it was with language one would use for non-white humans: broad noses, sallow complexions, slanted eyes. I could go into this more …
One of the mysteries of the Rings trilogy is the appearance of the mumakil ridden by the Easterners. Like many of Tolkien’s creatures they are sparsely described and that description serves to add emotional weight to the story, not provide a mental picture. We can imagine Tolkien had earthly elephants in mind when he wrote …
Russia loves Tolkien. The first officially translated edition of The Hobbit was released there in 1976 and has stayed in print there ever since (note: Tolkien’s works circulated there unofficially for years in samizdat) and not only that, it was Russia that attempted the first live-action movies of both The Hobbit and the The Lord …
Since I’ve been reading The Silmarillion, I thought I’d generate some names of Elven women, or as Tolkien might put it, elf-maids. Elf names all meant something in the languages he created – he was a linguist after all. In the text of the book they are explained to you, and defined again in the …
Since reading The Lost Gospel I became of a mind to create some mythical Biblical peoples. Like, you know, the Sodomites, who famously gave their name to the art of buggery. Everyone who took a bible class, even as a small child, knows that story: evil Sodom and Gomorrah are to be destroyed by God …