David Louis Edelman David Louis Edelman

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Posts Tagged 'J.R.R. Tolkien'

  1. Revisiting Middle Earth: “Unfinished Tales”  •  June 28, 2007
    There's something both satisfying and frustrating about "Unfinished Tales," a posthumous collection of J.R.R. Tolkien fetishism. You get JRRT at his most didactic, listing chronologies of imaginary kingships as if he were tracing the lineage of Jesus. You get Christopher Tolkien at his most pompous, pointing out all of the petty differences between versions of his father's stories in lots of dry footnotes.
  2. Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Children of Húrin”  •  June 6, 2007
    “A darkness lies behind us, and out of it few tales have come,” says one character early in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin. “…It may be that we fled from the fear of the Dark, only to find it here before us, and nowhere else to fly to but the Sea.” Sador is speaking here [...]
  3. Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Return of the King”  •  May 25, 2007
    A single theme kept running through my head as I read j.R.R. Tolkien's "The Return of the King." It's the way evil acts continually redound to the greater good in the end.
  4. Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Two Towers”  •  May 20, 2007
    Many people who read "The Lord of the Rings" falter somewhere in "The Two Towers," and that's perfectly understandable. It's a difficult book about moral choice and the temptations of good and evil.
  5. Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Fellowship of the Ring”  •  May 14, 2007
    Ideally one should write about the three books of The Lord of the Rings as a unit, since that’s the way J.R.R. Tolkien wrote them. It was the publisher’s decision to split the novel into three parts, a decision that the author only grudgingly accepted. He wanted LOTR published in six parts, with book 1 [...]
  6. Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Hobbit”  •  May 10, 2007
    J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion contains a beautiful depiction of the world’s creation through music by Eru Ilúvatar and his choir of Ainur. It has passionate love stories, an Oedipal tale of woe, and theological conundrums aplenty. The Hobbit, by contrast, contains: A character who invents the game of golf by knocking the head of the goblin Golfimbul into [...]
  7. Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Silmarillion”  •  May 7, 2007
    After finishing up MultiReal (for the time being, at any rate), I felt that I needed to immerse myself in something familiar. Something classic. And so I decided to re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books on Middle Earth chronologically from start to finish, from The Silmarillion to Return of the King with a pitstop at the newly [...]