I touched on the unexpected ability of US and Soviet authorities to avoid destroying the planet in my first post on Denethor. I’m no expert on international relations and military strategy, so it’s gratifying to see that someone who is an expert has done the research and backs up my suspicion that it was, first, […]
Search results: "Denethor"
I organized the Defenders of Denethor [1] Committee (membership: 1) in response to a post by Stephen C Winter on his blog “Wisdom from the Lord of the Rings“. Mr Winter does not go easy on the Steward of Gondor. The post levels accusations like “deluded”, “lack of self-knowledge”, and “given to fantasy”. There are […]
I’m currently taking the mini-course “Tolkien’s Ents and the Environment” from Signum University’s SPACE program, taught by the unwiðmetenlic Sørina Higgins. We were discussing Gimli’s speech about the glories of the Glittering Caves (III, viii) and how it parallels the (more frequent) references to trees and plants as the object of environmentalist sympathies. Sørina challenged […]
Sane people in Tolkien use less than 7% French words. Fëanor uses 9%.
The team at the Oxford Dictionary have upgraded their text visualization tool. The first beta version was the tool of some idiosophizing a few months ago. This new version still has the 500-word limit, but it’s gotten better at guessing which meaning of a word the author had in mind, and it handles Elvish words […]
Lee Smith is full of good ideas these days. Her latest is a graph of the characters in LotR who call each other by the familiar pronoun. Her graph has caused me to reconsider an earlier opinion. I once wrote a post in which I complimented Faramir on a slick linguistic move to seduce Éowyn. […]
Amazon announced three months ago that they were going to make a TV series set in Middle-earth. I have now decided what I think about that. (Idiosophy is an exact science, but not a swift one.) Good. In my dreams, Middle-earth becomes the setting for a hundred stories by different teams, with different points of […]
Over at her blog, Lee Smith has found something fun to do on a rainy February day. She’s collected every time somebody insulted somebody else in The Lord of the Rings. To nobody’s surprise, “fool” is the most common way to insult someone. There’s more give-and-take than I’d thought, though. If we define “calling someone […]
Akallabêth tells us there were three languages in use in Númenór: For though this people used still their own speech, their kings and lords knew and spoke also the Elven tongue, which they had learned in the days of their alliance, and thus they held converse still with the Eldar, whether of Eresséa or of […]
The Monday meeting of the Defenders of Denethor is now in session. I commented over there, but I’m putting this here because Stephen’s got a serious discussion going on, and this gets less serious the more I think about it. Where I think we both ended up is, Denethor is doing the right thing according […]