Posted on by Olga · 17 Comments

How I met The Silmarillion.

In my personal universe winter is closely associated with the development of my fascination with Tolkien. It was in December that I first picked up The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, with the latter sitting on my bookshelf for several years after the purchase, untouched and unopened, biding its time to storm into my life precisely when it meant to. I spent the whole last month of the year with my nose buried in the books, unable to part with the stories. However, no matter how much I loved The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it was my January dive into The Silmarillion that sealed my respect and love of Tolkien’s books and turned me from just a reader into the student of his works.

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Posted on by Olga · 6 Comments

Dots and curls: on the diacritics in Quenya and Sindarin.

Pronunciation of words in real and invented languages can be of various kinds: in some tongues words are pronounced in the same way they are spelt, but in others there are entire systems with reading rules of different degrees of complexity.  In some cases the way a word is spelt versus the way it is pronounced can be divided by a yawning gap. Some languages have special marks above or below letters to indicate certain peculiarities in their pronunciation. J. R. R. Tolkien’s invented languages Quenya and Sindarin are no exceptions. Read more

Posted on by Olga · 3 Comments

In starlit memory.

In many ways Elvish immortality in Tolkien’s Legendarium is more like a doom for its bearers, rather than a blessing: being not permanent living per se, it is rather the state of an immensely long life until the end of Arda without any knowledge of what comes afterwards. Thus, alongside moments of joy, Elves carry great burdens of battles lost, dear ones dead and sorrows experienced over the courses of their really long lives, and the burden becomes only heavier with years. As Men are growing stronger and more powerful, Elves are waning and fading gradually. In Tolkien’s own words, they “are concerned rather with the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change, than with death” (Letters, № 131).

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Posted on by Olga · 4 Comments

In the pits of iron.

Over the course of Middle-earth history its villains have always been inventive in hiding the places of their habitation as much as they possibly could so that nothing and nobody could interfere with their evil deeds. Various camouflage devices have been applied, beginning with going deep underground to veiling tall towers in shadows and deceits. Unsurprisingly, the first bad boy to go subterranean was Melkor: he had set the trend for living below ground level way before the counting of time even started.

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Posted on by Olga · 6 Comments

Down in the inky dark.

Hobbit folklore is a very curious layer of their culture, giving an insight into the race’s beliefs, views of the world, fears and ways of storytelling. Among the usually light-hearted, simple tales, there can be found some truly creepy oddities, which is rather peculiar for the quiet hobbit folk most of whom will not come within gunshot of anyone smelling even faintly of adventure. Despite looking like spooky tales to give hobbit children nightmares and keep them clean of any unwholesome, disreputable (in the hobbits’ opinion) spots after dark, they may as well be based on real places or creatures inhabiting Middle-earth, albeit largely unseen by the general public. One of such tales is about the Mewlips. Written in verse form, it is one of the creepiest stories of hobbit folklore.

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Posted on by Olga · 7 Comments

“I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me”

The opening line of The Hobbit firmly belongs to the treasury of best-known book openers in literature. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. This short sentence invites readers into a whole new world full of  interesting places, charismatic characters and glorious deeds. Both in the world of Middle-earth and outside it this very hobbit-hole becomes the starting point of dangerous journeys and exciting adventures. So what exactly is this dwelling of a hobbit?

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