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Talking Tolkien: Ten Things I Think I Think

Talking Tolkien: Ten Things I Think I Think

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It’s time to wrap up Talking Tolkien. And I thought a Tolkien-themed version of Ten Things I Think I Think would be a fun way to do it. So away we go…

READ THE LEGEND OF SIGURD & GUDRUN

I read this last year, and I intend to write an essay on it, but just haven’t fit it in yet. This is a good book. And you can really see the influence it had on Tolkien. It’s as depressing as a Jim Thompson novel, but still well worth reading. I highly recommend it for fans of The Silmarillion.

After finishing this, I tried to read The Story of Kullervo, but it didn’t really work for me. It’s not by Christopher Tolkien, and the way it was laid out, and read, felt different from Sigurd, Gawain, etc. I plan on powering through it, as it was also influential on Tolkien. But I’m not recommending that one, yet. Definitely check out Sigurd.

I WANT A ‘TALES OF MIDDLE EARTH’

I’m not a fan of how the rights holder of Robert E. Howard’s works is handling new fiction. At all. Not just the barren output – but the whole approach (which has been mostly talk so far).

I’d love to see a collection of short stories based on Tolkien elements. Ideally done by people qualified to write in Tolkien’s style (folks who wrote like Dennis L. McKiernan, Andre Norton, Peter S. Beagle, Terry Brooks – not just big-names to put on the cover).

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Only the Beginning: The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Only the Beginning: The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

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St. Martin’s Press – 1st , 1983

IN A DISTANT AND SECONDHAND SET OF DIMENSIONS, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part…

See…

Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.

In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.

Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests,  garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.

Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.

So begins The Colour of Magic (1983), the first volume of the eventually forty-one-book-long Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I was lent this book (along with another Pratchett book, Strata (1981), which I’ve still never read — or returned, possibly) back in 1985 when it first hit US shores. He said it was funny and it was.

I hadn’t laughed much during earlier run-ins with fantasy and sci-fi comedies, save for Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Too often, puns were what passed for wit and the satire was shallow. Returning to Colour for the first time in many years, I’m impressed with how sharp Pratchett’s eye was when it came to picking his genre targets and just how good his prose was. His writing would become more complex, deeper, and much darker over the decades, but already, it’s witty and effervescent. In an age of such po-faced seriousness, we could use more of it.

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No Story is Without Value

No Story is Without Value

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Image from Image by Peace,love,happiness from Pixabay

Good… whatever time of day or night you are reading this!

They say those who do not read live but one life. Those who read live thousands.

Reading is one of life’s few, small pleasures. It can also be incredibly frustrating, particularly if you want to share your excitement for any particular tale with the world.

It seems that I am once again seeing discourse floating around the interwebs about books and genres and weird superiority rankings. It’s tired and tiresome, and I can’t believe we are having this discussion again. Really internet? Really?!

Luckily, this time around, it’s nowhere near as vitriolic as the argument has been previously (that I’ve seen thus far), but it seems there there are some really pretentious knobs out there eager to try and elevate themselves by disparaging what others enjoy reading. I just don’t understand that mentality at all.

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Talking Tolkien: The Lay of the Nauglamir

Talking Tolkien: The Lay of the Nauglamir

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Today in Talking Tolkien, it’s a long-term project I work on every so often. The story of the Nauglamir (The Necklace of the Dwarves) may well be my favorite story in all of The Legendarium. It was the subject of my very first Tolkien essay.

Last year, I read The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. I really liked that book. I also read part of The Story of Kullervo, though the layout and non-Tolkien commentary didn’t work nearly as well for me (it was not a Christopher Tolkien effort). Tolkien was an expert in this area. The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit came from the old Noridc legends.

If your knowledge of Norse mythology comes from Bulfinch’s – or Marvel comic books – you’re going to find these are VERY different. But I liked reading the old sagas (and no wonder The Silmarillion is so depressing – those old Nordic sagas make Platoon look like a light-hearted romp).

And the Sigurd book got me a bit inspired.

I sketched out the entire history of the Silmaril which was fashioned into Nauglamir, and began creating an epic poem about it (NOT an ‘Epithon,’ for you Nero Wolfe fans out there…). I’m not into metering, so it doesn’t qualify for some definition of verse or form. But it still reads like a poem to me.

It’s 90 lines so far, with a lot more to go. The scope of the Nauglamir Silmaril is truly amazing, and fraught with tragedy. I’ll add more the next time I go into Tolkien mode. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this (except for a Solar Pons poem I wrote, summarizing “The Unique Dickensians”).

I can put together a haiku on the fly:

Source of joy and woe
Light of Yavanna shining
Pride of the Noldor

This, however, is well outside of my writing zone. But it’s fun.

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A Genealogical Look at Parke Godwin

A Genealogical Look at Parke Godwin

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Parke Godwin
Parke Godwin

Recently, we marked the tenth anniversary of the death of author Parke Godwin. As it happens, I started looking into Godwin’s background and it led me down a rabbit hole that goes back 333 years, to the birth of his great-great-great-great-great grandfather. It turns out Godwin came from a rather illustrious family that included state assemblymen, generals, editors, hoteliers, and industrialists, some of whom were associated with significant American figures including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

Before we look at his ancestors, let’s take a quick look at Parke Godwin. Godwin won the World Fantasy Award in 1982 for his novella “The Fire When It Comes,” which also earned him his only Hugo and Nebula Award nominations. He would later earn a World Fantasy Award nomination for a collection of the same title. His novel Firelord, a retelling of the Arthurian legend, was nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the short-lived coveted Balrog Award, losing to Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer and Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Wounded Land.

I imagine many people discovered Godwin’s writing with the publication of his satirical duology Waiting for the Galactic and The Snake Oil Wars, both of which were reprinted by the Science Fiction Book Club. He also wrote a two volume Robin Hood sequence, novels tackling Beowulf, St Patrick, and Harold of England.

But I promised a look at his ancestors, so we set the WABAC machine for 1720, when a thirty-year-old carpenter named Abraham Godwin arrived in New York from Hereford, England. Godwin worked as a carpenter for the Dey Company, where his son would also work before setting out from New York. Abraham died in 1770 in Totowa, New Jersey.

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Talking Tolkien: Philosophical Themes in the Silmarillion – by Joe Bonadonna

Talking Tolkien: Philosophical Themes in the Silmarillion – by Joe Bonadonna

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We kicked off Talking Tolkien with Joe Bonadonna, and he’s back! After looking at religious themes in The Lord of the Rings the first time around, it’s philosophical ones in The Silmarillion. Joe does the heavy lifting – I’m just a pretty face. As with his first essay, he wades into pretty deep waters. Joe has guested for my ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ Pulp series, and I’m thrilled he wanted to Talk Tolkien. He even recruited two of our contributors. Read on, and thanks, Joe!

First, I want to reiterate that I am most definitely not an expert on Tolkien’s writings and his history of Middle-earth. Naturally, I’ve read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, as well as Smith of Wooton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham, and The Children of Hurin. But I haven’t read anything else Tolkien wrote. Thus, I’ll only be scratching the surface here.

My sources used in research, from which I quoted passages, are: Ruth S. Noel’s The Mythology of Middle-Earth, Robert Foster’s The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth, Paul H. Kocher’s Master of Middle-Earth, William Ready’s Understanding Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter’s Tolkien: The Complete Biography, and the Tolkien Gateway website, as well as The Hobbit, the appendices in The Return of the King, and The Silmarillion itself. Please note: although the titles of Kocher’s, Noel’s and Foster’s books use a capital E for “earth,” I will use Middle-earth as Tolkien himself did. All that being said, I just wanted to clear the air so you good folks who are reading this will know that I am by far no scholar or expert on all things Tolkien. I’m just here to share an old college essay with you.

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The Complicated Morality of Joel Miller

The Complicated Morality of Joel Miller

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Hello! I’m back with more The Last of Us stuff because I’m not quite done with it all. I want to talk about how the first game (and the first season) ended, and the maelstrom of morality debates that followed the incredible, tortured conclusion.

What follows will include spoilers, so if you haven’t played the game or watched the series, you might want to go ahead and do that and then come back to this.

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Talking Tolkien: On The Tolkien Reader – by Rich Horton

Talking Tolkien: On The Tolkien Reader – by Rich Horton

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It’s another of my Black Gate cohorts this week for Talking Tolkien. Rich is one of the science fiction cornerstones at the Black Gate World Headquarters, but he’s been a Tolkien fan since the seventies. He’s gonna talk about a book I never added to my shelves. Before the explosion of books like The History of Middle Earth Series, and Children of  Hurin, and his Beowulf, there weren’t a lot of ‘other’ Tolkien books out there besides the main five.

But even before The Silmarillion finally saw print, there was The Tolkien Reader. 

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The Tolkien Reader was first published in 1966 by Ballantine Books in the US; in response to the greatly expanding popularity of The Lord of the Rings, driven by the paperback editions from Ballantine (and the pirated edition from Ace.) This was an attempt to bring a varied sampling of his work to readers hungry for more. I read it myself in the early ’70s, after I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. As an introduction it reprints a piece Peter Beagle did for Holiday (perhaps at the instigation of Alfred Bester?) called “Tolkien’s Magic Ring”, which primarily discusses the Middle-Earth books.

It’s a good and varied collection throughout, and really does the job of showing a different side to Tolkien (though not THAT different!) from that seen in The Lord of the Rings. I’ll be looking at each of the sections separately, and slightly out of order, in that I think the best part by far is Tree and Leaf, which comes second in the book.

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Talking Tolkien: Does Size Matter? The Rankin-Bass Hobbit by Thomas Parker

Talking Tolkien: Does Size Matter? The Rankin-Bass Hobbit by Thomas Parker

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Fellow Black Gater Thomas Parker and I share quite a few interests – but within those interests we tend to vary wildly. I enjoy chatting with him. I conned him into writing a…I mean, he graciously agreed to do a Horace McCoy piece for A (Black) Gat in the Hand, and I’ve been after him to shore up my Black Gate views by doing a guest piece for me. And man, do I LOVE this one on the Rankin-Bass classic, The Hobbit. It was worth the past four years of badgering him.  Read on!

Let me begin with a statement that is impossible to prove but that almost no one would dispute: J.R.R Tolkien’s 1937 children’s fantasy The Hobbit is one of the most beloved books in the world, and because it serves (according to the cover of my old Ballantine paperback) as the “enchanting prelude to the Lord of the Rings” it is also one of the most influential books of the last century, all of which means that those who would presume to adapt the story for other media would be wise to tread warily.

Over the decades, there have been stage adaptations (including an operatic one), graphic novels, and many audio renderings. But when it comes to film adaptations, there are really only two versions to choose from, and they couldn’t be more different in scale, emphasis, and execution.

Most recently we have the triple-decker expansion offered by Peter Jackson — The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), three movies that together have a running time of almost eight hours and that were made with all the technical sophistication and immense resources that Mordor… er, a major Hollywood studio can offer. The trilogy had combined budgets of six hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and during their initial theatrical releases the films netted approximately three billion dollars (to say nothing of profits from home video and merchandising). As the Dark Lords of the boardroom can tell you, each zero in those immense grosses is a veritable Ring of Power in itself.

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