Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Ned’s choice of topic: Terry Brooks’s debut novel The Sword of Shannara. Released in 1977 after the author had been working on it for almost a decade, The Sword of Shannara became a massive publishing success for its then-new imprint Del Rey Books, helping to establish the viability of fantasy literature as a steady and profitable part of the book business as a whole, as well as starting Brooks’s continuing writing career with a bang. At the same time, more than a few voices said in response to that success and the book itself that it was pretty clearly using The ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Jared’s choice of topic: Beowulf. The famed Old English poem, the longest extant poetic work in general preserved in that language, almost accidentally survived over the years until it became more widely recognized in the 1700s, including surviving a fire. It has since become a cornerstone of studies of English literature, telling the story of a heroic Geat warrior who defeats two monstrous presences on a visit to an afflicted Danish kingdom, and who in later years as an aging king slays a dragon at the cost of his life and, it is strongly implied, his kingdom’s ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Oriana’s choice of topic: Silicon Valley’s misinterpretation and fetishization of Tolkien. Tolkien of course lived in a time where computers were mostly huge rooms containing one machine or two that he doubtless considered little more than another example of why the industrial age didn’t suit his mindset on many fronts. But in the half-century since his death the PC era up through smartphones and TikTok have made the industry one of the biggest and most influential in the world – which is the problem. The issues discussed are hardly limited to them but two of its ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Ned’s choice of topic: The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Following the publication of his official biography of Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter worked with Christopher Tolkien to edit and present a selection of Tolkien’s letters across the decades, originally appearing in 1981. Containing both a large swathe of personal detail about his life as an aspiring academic and young father, then an established professor and finally an increasingly popular author, it also presented a large amount of background information on Middle-earth via his exchanges with publishers, write ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss their collective choice of topic: Peter Jackson’s version of The Return of the King. It’s been twenty years since the conclusion of Jackson’s three-film effort to adapt the entire Lord of the Rings was released, and it was easily the biggest profile release of the series, coming in with massive interest and attention, setting a variety of box office records in the process along with gaining widespread critical acclaim. It all resulted in a series of worldwide film awards and honors culminating with a famed clean sweep of Oscar wins including best picture, resultin ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Oriana’s choice of topic: the Noldor. Also termed the Deep-elves and, in early versions of the legendarium, the Gnomes – thankfully changed given unavoidable associations – they were one of the three ethnicities of the Eldar in general, the first Children of Iluvatar. As compared to the serene Vanyar and the many generally lower-key societies of the Teleri, the Noldor were the ones most driven by the desire to create and to learn about the world in general, though these tendencies, exacerbated by Melkor in his Valinorean captivity and the internal family strife of ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Ned’s choice of topic: The Notion Club Papers. Written in 1945 during a creative pause in completing the final third of The Lord of the Rings, The Notion Club Papers found Tolkien on familiar ground, creating a set of purported notes from regular club meetings among a group of Oxford professors much like himself and his fellow members of the famed Inklings. While not advancing beyond a couple of drafts and far from complete, the papers tell first of a professor who, due to a discussion on how spacecraft would work in science fiction, avers he has himself been able ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Jared’s choice of topic: The Lost Road. In 1937, Tolkien agreed to C.S. Lewis’s suggestion to try to write the kind of stories they enjoyed but didn’t see good examples of to their liking. Lewis’s efforts turned into what has been termed the Space Trilogy, starting with Out Of The Silent Planet. Tolkien’s goal was a time travel story called The Lost Road, but outside of a few chapters and some potential outlines, it never got any further, with the success of The Hobbit and his resulting focus of attention being The Lord Of The Rings stopping any further developmen ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Oriana’s choice of topic: land. By default the Middle-earth legendarium is about a place that never was, however rooted in the actual planet we live on, and the range of details from sweeping mountains and vast continents to small roads and fields evident throughout the cycle of stories is a key part of what has made Tolkien’s work so vivid and loved. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are specifically about journeys as the key plotline, where characters move into spaces that they’d only heard about dimly or not at all as they seek to fulfill their aims. Th ..read more

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Ned’s choice of topic: The Fall of Númenor. Published in fall of 2022, The Fall of Númenor is the most recent posthumously published collection of Middle-earth writings, acting as an overall guide to the Second Age of Middle-earth, with its key defining moments in Tolkien’s legendarium being the fall of the titular kingdom of the Dúnedain and the subsequent Last Alliance’s temporary defeat of Sauron. Given that most of the material the book draws on comes from a wide variety of other posthumous Tolkien publications, it can serve as a guide and introduction for tho ..read more