#professor tolkien

[sobeautifullyobsessed]

Oh dear, I just made myself a little 😟❤️‍🩹

I've been watchingThe Return of the King, and it finally occurred to me just why Tolkien numbered the Hobbits in the Fellowship at four. He was saving his own friends; the three who went to WW I with him, but never returned home. Oh my heart!

Not only that, but JRR is Frodo. Returning to the Shire, changed to his core. His dangerous service saved the most beautiful place in his world--Home--but Frodo could never feel at peace. But for Tolkien, at least, he found that as a husband & father, and in the work of a brilliant storyteller.

[elmendea]

Laitië hantaleyë! Alassëa nostarë!

[gogandmagog]

A 1945 invitation, sent out by J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife Edith, to family and friends, asking them to attend the 21st birthday of their son, Christopher Tolkien.

[lenbryant]

LOTR in real life...

[ggungabyfish]

Ugh, a day late but...

To the Professor!

[the-eternal-captain-harlock]

"Who shall see the clouds gather, the heavens bending upon crumbling hills, the sea heaving, the abyss yawning, the old darkness beyond the stars falling upon fallen towers?" 

- J. R. R. Tolkien - The Markirya Poem

[ggungabyfish]

Turned this into something positive. Well done.

[pitoframbling]

[frigidreads]

Surprise Tolkien video! In all honesty, I'm a long-time fan of the professor, and as many of you likely will figure out I enjoy talking about his work. I hope you enjoy.

[tolkienillustrations]

“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, October 1966

[i-am-pinkie]

Beautiful 😍❤️

middle-earth meme  [2/7 quotes]  

[elmendea]

The Professor! Laitië hantaleyë! 

[la-pheacienne]

George Martin, 2013: "In a very basic level winter is coming for all of us. I think that’s one of the things that art is concerned with: the awareness of our own mortality. “Valar morghulis” – “All men must die”. That shadow lies over our world and will until medical science gives us all immortality… but I don’t think it makes it necessarily a pessimistic world. Not any more pessimistic than the real world we live in. We’re here for a short time and we should be conscious of our own mortality, but the important thing is that love, compassion and empathy with other human beings is still possible. Laughter is still possible! Even laughter in the face of death… The struggle to make the world a better place… We have things like war, murder and rape… horrible things that still exist, but we don’t have to accept them, we can fight the good fight. The fight to eliminate those things.There is darkness in the world, but I don’t think we necessarily need to give way to despair. One of the great things that Tolkien says in Lord of The Rings is “despair is the ultimate crime”. That’s the ultimate failing of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, that he despairs of ever being able to defeat Sauron. We should not despair. We should not go gentle into that good night".

JRR Tolkien, 1962 : "One reviewer once said, this is a jolly jolly book, all the right boys come home [...]- this isn't true of course, he can't have read the story. [...] Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . . . (He quotes Simone de Beauvoir) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings".

"Lotr is all rainbows and unicorns and Asoiaf is nihilistic and grimdark". Wrong, and wrong. In all its hope and radiance, lotr often gets very dark, and despite all the death and suffering, the hopeful moments in asoiaf shine bright. The meeting point of these two is this: having hope while in despair, and even better, refusing to give up because you have to go on despite not having any hope left.

[lenbryant]

Here's a "Jesus-y" theological seminary lens approach to studying Tolkien. The lecturer is kind of a dork, but it's always good to hear stories of Professor Tolkien. (Just ignore all the giant crosses on the walls behind him.)

[lenbryant]

Hobbits know how to live, and eat. Enjoy life like a Hobbit.

Today I’m thinking about hobbits.

For all the criticism that can be levied against Tolkien’s work and the LOTR movies based on it, there’s something that occurred to me just recently that I find strangely refreshing.

The hobbits eat. They are a culture that revolves to a large degree around food—bountiful food, frequent food. They are not, by and large, a skinny folk, but tend to carry weight with them. Hobbits are stout.

And the narrative does not say they’re bad for this.

They get hungry more often than humans, and eat many more meals in a day.

The narrative shows that this clashes with a questing life, but it does not say they’re bad for this. When Merry and Pippin moan about second breakfast, the joke isn’t “ha ha hobbits are gluttons” so much as it’s “ha ha culture shock/these yokels are out of their depth because they’ve lived a relatively very easy life, entirely unlike Strider”.

They eat large amounts at a time. Their larders are the size of living rooms and their everyday meals are feasts.

And the narrative does not say they’re bad for this.

So just this once, we have an entire culture of some-degree-of-fat people who eat big and eat often and have something of a fixation on food, and while the narrative does show that these ingrained habits are the result of a life of comfort and security that they must, with difficulty and understandable complaint, leave behind when they go on their journeys beyond their own borders for entirely practical reasons, it does not judge them as lazy, fat gluttons who were Wrong About It and must become human-grade health nuts in order to be worthy of heroism, or use them as a well of fat jokes.

Bilbo tricked a dragon while sporting a paunch.

It’s not every day you get a story like that.

[velvet4510]