We've Started the Eowyn Challenge and the Middle Earth Heritage Society

Apologies for no posts in a bit - its a busy time for Wotan at his workplace!! Yesterday the UK was blessed with one of the warmest days of the year so far and it afforded myself, partner and our Corgi, Charlie, to start the Eowyn Challenge (our cat Meowman was not interested and preferred to do the couch challenge). We have decided this summer to walk to Rivendell from Hobbiton (roughly 450 miles). We travelled to one of the ancient seats of the Bishops of Winchester - Farnham (the ruins of the castle are pictured)- and walked roughly 5 miles which essentially according to the Eowyn Challenge (the "Horse Joy" challenge as it were) got us into Tookland (27 miles to the first encounter with the Black Rider - why am I looking forward to that?).

Farnham Castle is currently managed by The English Heritage Society and as we were passing by the gates I got thinking about what The Middle Earth Heritage Society would look like in the future time of Middle Earth (say the 20th Age) what ruins would exist (Minas Tirith, Isengard, Edoras) - with the passing of the Elves one would think that Elvish buildings would fade as well (although as in the Lord of the Rings Online game - one would still see some remains of Elvish architecture like Edelethion). Would men have set up a society to manage and fund the upkeep of the most famous sites of Middle Earth and as a member of the Middle Earth Heritage Society you could get in free to all these sites. Would there be museum displays of the great battles - and I'm sure to secure government funding from the Elessarion goverment you would have to do some interactive educational elements (try on the armor of a Numenorian soldier, make your own remedy out of Athelas leaves, etc) - would there be a gift shop (purchase your own Lembas bread recipe, palantir snow globes, etc.). What would people be thinking as the walked across the stone ruins of what was Osgiliath or Minas Ithil - would there be a coffee/gift shop and travellers restaurant on top of Weathertop?

Coming back down to earth (middle) - I'm in the middle of reading Elizabeth Whittingham's The Evolution of Tolkien's Mythology which gives an excellent analysis of how Tolkien developed key elements of his mythology and the various phases this development went through in the forty years Tolkien spent weaving his world - the chapter on the Valar alone is worth the book as it charts how Tolkien's concept of the Valar in Book of Lost Tales as being closer to the gods and goddesses of Greek and Norse myths (war like, descriptions of the buildings they built to live in, descriptions of who was married to who) changed over the years to more removed and ethereal powers more in line with the Judeo-Christian concept of the angels. Also an interesting tidbit that alluded me on first (and second) reading is the fact that in the early 1950's texts of the Ainulindale "the reader learns that Varda rejected Melkor prior to the Great Music and that as a result 'he hated her, and feared her more than all others," which helps explain the animosity Melkor feels for the Valar." I'll be blogging on this in the near future.

Great news that Guillermo del Toro is set to direct The Hobbit and the "other movie" (which according to his post on The One Ring.net Del Torro does not want to call "the bridge movie") - there is a lot in Appendix Two and several writings for the writers to draw upon to portray the 50 years between the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings - it will be interesting to see what they come up with and now that Sir Ian Mckellen is on board as Gandalf whether there will be a Grey Book Part 2 on his website.

Launch a Website - Read Tolkien Books

This week in the midst of launching a new website for the theatre I work at the Hackney Empire I got through two excellent books from the latest batch of books on Tolkien - The Frodo Franchise by Kristen Thompson and The Silmarillion Thirty Years On edited by Allan Turner. I enjoyed both very much and found some really good insights in each.

The Frodo Franchise is an in-depth analysis of the development he current Rings franchise from the movie and DVD's to website, games, and fan clubs that have sprung up. I especially love how that moment when Peter Jackson pitched the movie idea to New Line's Bob Shaye (after beiing forced by Mirimax to attempt to compress the movie into two parts - including cutting out completely Lorien and Galadriel) and after watching the preview reel Shaye said why two movies when Tolkien wrote three books - there is something almost mythic about this moment. Also the line of one of the Weinstein's (loveling depicted as trolls in one of the credits) saying - "do you have to have four hobbits?" just showed what PJ was up against. From a marketing point of view the online promotion and alliance with the fans now seems just commonplace (just look at the current marketing campaign for Cloverfield) and it will be interesting to sse how The Hobbit movie(s) will be promoted. Also, this book brought me to two web sites that has passed me by in the course of the movies - Lord of the Peeps and Figwit the Elf in Rivendell who thanks to the fans has become an online elf star (and made into a peep as well). Well worth a read a Thompson's blog is one I look at on a regular basis - especially as news on The Hobbit movies are starting to take off (as well as Ian Mckellen's excellent website where one can find any news and rumors of his Gandalf doings - the king of actors as his recent Lear in the UK showed)

On a different front - Walking Tree Presses The Silmarillon Thirty Years On is an excellent series of essays celebrating the thirty anniversary of the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977. The two essays that really had an impact on me (they are all very good) is Professor Michael Drout's very personal essay on what it was like to first read The Silmarillion when his parents were in the midst of a divorce and the idea of sadness and nostalgia (coming from the greek words nostos - "return home"/algos "pain."

My other fav article was Jason Fisher's Tolkien, Lonnrot, and Jerome - a really fascinating article about the role of Christopher Tolkien in forging together the vast source work of material Tolkien left at his death in 1973 into the published Silmarillion and comparing to the same process Lonnrot used in fashioning The Kalevala and Jerome used in The Vulgate Bible. This is a topic I first became interested in when I read Nagy's article in Jane Chance's Tolkien the Medievalist "The Great Chain of Reading" which relates that the various versions of some of the key cycles Tolkien developed (Beren, Turin, etc) were paralleling the various source works of the key myths and legends in different versions (lays, prose works, chronicles). What Christopher did is take these and develop a single narrative that became the "accepted story" of that specific cycle of legend - that is until he published in the 1990's The History of Middle Earth and we learned that actually there are many versions of the stories. Fisher who has an excellent blog called Lingwe - Musings of a Fish, also shows places in the story where Christopher actually had to write some of his own material (as in the chapter in the Silmarillion "The Ruin of Doriath") to give the story a unified narrative struture) Fisher as also done some great work on paralleling this to the creation of the Finnish epic The Kalevala - and he has made me take that CN Eliot Finnish Grammer I purchased for Ebay a year ago (the very 1915 edition Tolkien used to study Finnish) and start to "plod through some of the original" as JRR said.

It also got me thinking of another poet we all read and accept what is fixed in the literal poem as the "authorized story" - and that is Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey. In college I did some work on the various lies that the willy Odysseus uses when he returns to Ithaca (to the goatherder Eumeaus, his son Telemachos and finally wife Penelope) - in each he says he from Crete and analysis of the language and structure indicated that this might be an older part of the oral tradition of the Odyssey (also similar with the Proteus episode) - it would be interesting to look at how those forgers of the Homeric tradition in Athens put together these epics into what we now accept as the Iliad and the Odyssey - and can we do similiar with Gilgamesh and Beowulf?

Both two great reads and worth a read - now its on to three more Tolkien books and I am slogging my way through the new translation of War and Peace which is excellent.

NB: Picture from Patrick Wayne's excellent website of images from The Silmarillion