#my notes are mostly quotes and incoherent commentary

[catguangcorner]

ALSO IM CONTINUING MY LC REWATCH BUT IM TAKING NOTES AND ITS SO FUN (it takes me over half an hour to watch an episode cos i keep pausing and rewinding. but im having fun :D) i feel like im catching a lot more

[garden-ghoul]

“I want to go HoME”

“no actually that’s not possible. I’m truckin away on my last final but I’m so weary. this is my ‘break’: analyzing tolkien’s dumb noodle notes.”

The first thing I found while trying to skip the entire third book was some of CS Lewis’ commentary on the lay of leithian. I can’t actually tell which it is? It sounds basically like Chris’ commentary except kind of incoherent and with really bad spelling. Maybe it’s some kind of fancy words I don’t know. What is “Geste”? Anyway it looks like he actually edited the lay and helped rewrite parts of it! That’s pretty cool. It was also being commented on by people named Peabody and Pumpernickel, so I guess, like, all Tolkien’s friends were actually brownies.

At one point he edited a perfectly nice passage into

But wildly Beren gazed around.  Emptied the tall trees stood. The ground Lay empty. A lonely moon looked grey Upon the untrodden forest may.

Which doesn’t scan and is difficult both to say and comprehend. He wanted to get rid of “the conceit with the moon.” Tolkien wrote on top of Lewis’ comment: “Not so!! The moon was dizzy and twisted because of the tears in Beren’s eyes.” I think it’s great imagery, Mr Rolkien. I also find his double exclamation points endearing because I use enough exclamation points for 8 people (haha).

The next book after this is ‘The Shaping of Middle Earth.’ I’m mostly interested in the first Silmarillion map and whatever the Ambarkanta is, but it also looks like Tolkien was... translating the silm into Old English?? I got to check that out.

I ended up landing halfway through a story about a kid named Alboin who I THINK is learning Beleriandic (is that an actual language people spoke in Beleriand,) and Eressean (???) in his dreams? Sometimes he dreams poems about elves in Old English. He’s also trying to learn Every Other Language. Methinks it’s just Tolkien.

It was curious how often the remembered snatches harped on the theme of a 'straight road'. What was atalante? It seemed to mean ruin or downfall, but also to be a name.

Nevertheless, I’m gay for this kind of thing.

Alboin has a son, who also starts having The Dreams. One of the many Elendils says that they should come to Numenor, because Alboin dreams only in words and his son dreams only in images. Very poetic and cute. So they go to Numenor (it’s really unclear how) and we get a lot of fun little politics stuff from the era when Sauron was living there. Alboin’s son, who is now named Herendil, is super afraid that someone will hear his dad talking shit about Sauron and they’ll both go to the dungeons. And there’s this sweet bit,

Atarinya tye-melane, my father, I love thee: the words sounded strange, but sweet: they smote Elendil's heart. 'A yonya inye tye-mela: and I too, my son, I love thee,' he said, feeling each syllable strange but vivid as he spoke it.

I think someone quoted this in a fanfiction I read. Nerd.

There’s some very intriguing stuff in the notes for further unwritten chapters. One just says “English story of the man who got onto the Straight Road.” WHAT IS THE STRAIGHT ROAD.

... when I googled it, the very first result was the Tolkien Gateway. Google, stop arranging my marriages. I want to date around a little. Anyway the Straight Road is a road that only existed after Arda was made round; it is truly straight, and tangent to the planet’s surface at one point, we can only assume. Uh... it goes to Aman, though? You have to sail it. This is confusing. The Straight Road also appears in an unrelated short story called Smith of Wootton Major, and leads to the land of Faery.

Also I guess I completely missed both the things I was looking for in this book because the pages of the pdf don’t match up with the actual book pages. Oh well I guess it was fate. The Ambarkanta, despite its awesome name, turns out to be something I don’t care about. Nice!