Meanwhile, back in Middle Earth

I found this tidbit to be a nice change of pace on a day without much good news.

This is one thing that the Jackson movie got pretty much right.

And Smaug.

The rest?

Meh.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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13 Comments

  1. Mariana2 says:

    Only, dwarf doors are invisible when closed.

  2. Kathleen10 says:

    Here’s some good news. A 900 year-old sword from the Crusades was just found in Israel, buried in sand and underwater. It’s pretty great to see it even encrusted with shells and rocks. They are cleaning it up and will display it.
    Did God allow it to be found at this particular point in time.

  3. mibethda says:

    From the 1979 Folio Society edition of the Hobbit (Ch.11, On the Doorstep). Fraser’s work in the Hobbit is good, but the illustrations he drew for the Folio’s 1977 LOTR, designed by Ingahild Grathmer (the pseudonym of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark) were works of artistic genius.

  4. Charles E Flynn says:

    @mibethda,

    The Folio Society edition of LOTR is still in print, for $210 plus shipping for the three volume set.

    The Folio Society no longer requires a membership commitment.

  5. Those would be nice to have. Beautiful books are a treasure.

  6. Aegidius says:

    History became legend, legend became myth, and for nine hundred years, the Sword passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer.

  7. Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien is being reissued in December. You can find it on Amazon.

  8. excalibur says:

    Meh, indeed, with [liberal] women scriptwriters; early days wokeness.

  9. Macarius says:

    “Iuxta lapidem glaucum sta cum turdus pulsat,” legit Elrond, “et sol occidens in luce ultima Diei Durini claustellum illuminabit.” (Hobbitus Ille, Caput III)

  10. Semper Gumby says:

    The world was young, the mountains green,
    No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
    No words were laid on stream or stone,
    When Durin woke and walked along.
    He named the nameless hills and delles;
    He drank from yet untasted wells;
    He stopped and looked in Mirrormere,
    And saw a crown of stars appear,
    As gems upon a silver thread,
    Above the shadow of his head.
    The world was fair, the mountains tall,
    In Elder Days before the fall
    Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
    And Gondolin, who now beyond
    The Western Seas have passed away.
    The world was fair in Durin’s Day.

    A king he was on carven throne
    In many-pillared halls of stone
    With golden roof and silver floor,
    And runes of power upon the door.
    The light of sun and star and moon
    In shining lamps of crystal hewn
    Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
    There shown for ever fair and bright.

    There hammer on the anvil smote,
    There chisel clove, and graver wrote;
    There forged was blade, and bound was hilt;
    The delver mined, the mason built.
    There beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
    And metal wrought like fishes’ mail,
    Buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
    And shining spears were laid in hoard.
    Unwearied then were Durin’s folk;
    Beneath the mountain music woke:
    The harpers harped, the minstrels sang,
    And at the gates the trumpets rang.

    The world is grey, the mountains old,
    The forge’s fire is ashen-cold;
    No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
    The darkness dwells in Durin’s halls;
    The shadow lies upon his tomb
    In Moria, in Khazad-dum.
    But still the sunken stars appear
    In dark and windless Mirrormere;
    There lies his crown in water deep.
    Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

  11. mibethda says:

    Charles E. Flynn,
    The current printing of LOTR and the Hobbit are not quite the same as the original printings. Prior to the early 1980s Folio Society printed most of their books by letterpress. Over the next few years they converted almost exclusively to offset for reasons of cost (in the late 1980s, Folio did return to letterpress to print a few, small high quality books using letterpress – I have a couple: Milton’s Morning of Christ’s Nativity and other poems and Anglo Saxon Elegies; both beautiful volumes, but they printed virtually everything thereafter in offset except for their limited editions which cost up to $1000). The first printings of both works was bound in quarter leather; the current printing of LOTR and Hobbit are cloth bound.

  12. Semper Gumby says:

    There’s a helpful Atlas of Middle-Earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad.

    The recent discovery of the aquatic Crusader sword mentioned above is interesting, instead of a Monty Python quote, Tolkien:

    All that is gold does not glitter,
    Not all those who wander are lost;
    The old that is strong does not wither,
    Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

    From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
    A light from the shadows shall spring;
    Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
    The crownless again shall be king.

    The Jerusalem Post last week: “A team of Israeli archaeological researchers identified a Crusader encampment in the area of the Tzipori Springs in Galilee, the first time that a Crusader encampment was found in the field.”

  13. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    A nice Jackson detail was including Gandalf’s reference to “October the twenty-fourth” when Frodo awakes in Rivendell, having escaped the Nazgûl. Why October 24? Is there anything special about October 24, as there is about that famous date in The Lord of the Rings, March 25? Well, however Frodo came to arrive there on that date in those circumstances, one can imagine Tolkien enjoying the thought that, in what is the far future of the events of The Lord of the Rings, it would be added to the general Calendar as the Feast of the Archangel Raphael. For, isn’t Gandalf, in his degree, a type of St. Raphael, companion (‘comitem […] in via’ in the Collect), skilled in healing – if I am not mistaken (‘ut curarem te’ in the Lectio) – even though on this occasion Gandalf was delayed, and Elrond did the healing?

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