Tweet of the Day, TIME TRAVELERS MUST READ THIS edition.

You want to calibrate exactly when you go to eavesdrop on this drunken conversation between Arthur C Clarke, CS Lewis, and JRR Tolkien. You don’t want to get there too early. Two drinks is too soon; five drinks is too many. You want to arrive somewhere between three and four ales apiece: that’s probably the peak point for Awesome Drunken Conversations.

…What? Recording awesome stuff on the sly is the only really ethical use of time travel that I can think of. I mean, you don’t want to actually change anything, right? …RIGHT?

This teacher will end up regretting that he messed with JRR Tolkien and TERRY PRATCHETT.

If this Graeme Whiting had just stuck with being generally dismissive of Game of Thrones, he’d have been fine. I mean: the statement “I’m not going to let my nine year old watch GoT” is an absolutely uncontroversial opinion. Virtually nobody reading this is going to go Oh, sure, it’d be a fun bonding experience for the family. And I figure that not letting my kids read the GoT books until puberty teaches them how to successfully hide things from me is likewise a perfectly valid parenting choice.  So this Whiting guy was actually not in a bad rhetorical place, if he had just been smart enough to realize it. Continue reading This teacher will end up regretting that he messed with JRR Tolkien and TERRY PRATCHETT.

Book of the Week: “Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.”

OK, I admit it: I’m saving JRR Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary for Pennsic.  Gotta have something to read while I’m waiting for the rain to stop, the dancing to start, or the beer to get cold. But my wife read it, and she liked it, and shoot, it’s JRR Tolkien.  It’s not like I’m taking some kind of hideous risk here.

And so, adieu to A Matter for Men, which was apparently a touch more, ah, controversial a choice than I had hitherto imagined. Continue reading Book of the Week: “Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.”

On the Matter of the perverted Messianic romanticism of Islamic State.

Via @cayankee comes this article with a provocative (to me) title, but that’s mostly because the article actually understated the influence of the Arthur legend on Tolkien.

But the story of the arrival and lingering global charisma of ISIS features something that sets it apart: the idea of the Caliphate. Last June, the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph. The grandiosity of the claim was likely lost even on many educated non-Muslim observers. A position that has been gone from Islam in anything but name for 1,000 years, the caliph has to meet certain requirements: he must control territory, must enforce sharia law within it, and he must descend from the Quraysh tribe, the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad (the Ottoman emperors claimed the title into the 20th century, but their claim is widely rejected because they did not descend from the Quraysh). Pledging allegiance to a valid caliph, when one is available, is an obligation that ISIS supporters view as binding on all Muslims. And while Baghdadi’s claim has been divisive even in the world of violent jihadism, groups in Nigeria and Libya have apparently made this vow of allegiance.

[snip]

Far from being a parochially Islamic impulse or a nerd’s fantasy – something you can get involved in from ‘your mama’s basement’, as one counter-terrorism expert has said – the myth of the Caliphate echoes dreams of transcendent legitimacy that are deeply embedded in European culture and literature. To find a story of a sovereign authority long lapsed in kingship but still entitled to the allegiance of all the just, and fated to reappear at an auspicious moment, we need look no further than The Lord of the Rings (1954-55).

Continue reading On the Matter of the perverted Messianic romanticism of Islamic State.

Rare JRR Tolkien speech recording to be released later this year.

Got sent this via email: there’s a tape from 1958 of JRR Tolkien talking about the Lord of the Rings to a… dinner party.

:pause:

Heh.

Anyway, they’re remastering the tape and will release it later this year.  Here’s a preview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC1jXlECkJk

Cool.

Moe Lane

PS: Do not expect it to be free.

Tolkien dissed by Nobel Committee?

@Slublog is just a bit offended that the Nobel prize committee back in the Sixties apparently did not particularly enjoy JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings, and definitely rejected it for a prize.  In particular:

The reporter discovered that jury member Anders Österling wrote that the novel ‘has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality’.

…I’m sorry: Anders who?

Moe Lane

Why ‘Tolkienesque’ is a word.

The rest of the essay is, frankly, crap – China Mieville is one of those writers who only rarely has anything to say that I find particularly interesting, and I suspect that he allows his self-perception as a quite clever fellow to get in the way of the material he produces – but this is a pretty good paragraph.

But Tolkien’s most important contribution by far, and what is at the heart of the real revolution he effected in literature, was his construction of a systematic secondary world. There had been plenty of invented worlds in fantasy before, but they were vague and ad hoc, defined moment to moment by the needs of the story. Tolkien reversed that. He started with the world, plotted it obsessively, delineating its history, geography and mythology before writing the stories. He introduced an extraordinary element of rigour to the genre.

It is instructive to compare the first edition of The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth (which appeared to have been written before The Silmarillion was readily available) with the second; it’s startling to see how much of the cultural and linguistic backstory can be found in Tolkien’s text.  Not quite visible to the casual observer, but embedded in the work and giving it strength.  Which is probably one reason why… no, that’s an unkind thought.

Via Charlie Stross, in the middle of a grumble on Steampunk.  Which I found to be a little odd, because the horror aspects of the genre have been familiar to at least roleplaying gamers since Day One.  It’s part of the genre’s charm, for a given value of ‘charm.’

Moe Lane

PS: I’d also like to note that any discussion of Tolkien’s purpose and goals with LotR that only includes the word ‘linguistic’ as an adjective modifying a sneer is not really an informed discussion.