Rachel Kovaciny's Blog, page 90

"House of Living Stones" by Katie Schuermann

Why, oh why, did I wait so long to read this book?  I've had it on my TBR shelves for like two years now, and yet I just kept putting it off.  Silly me.  This was, overall, a delightful book.

Emily Duke arrives in the small Illinois town of Bradbury looking for a fresh start.  She's got a new job at the university there, and Zion Lutheran Church hires her as their choir director.  At Zion, she encounters a staggering number of odd, eccentric, quirky, or troubled indiv...

Winners of the 2017 Tolkien Party Giveaway

Here we go!  The Rafflecopter winner-picking widget has spoken, and I've done my best to match the winners it picked with prizes they will like.  Congratulations, winners!  Everyone else... there's always next year :-)

Four postcards -- Savannah Grace
Four postcards -- Olivia
Four postcards -- Natalie
Tolkien quotation stickers -- Cecilia of Frell
Gandalf stickers -- MiddleEarthMusician
Gandalf stickers -- Fawnabelle Baggins
Hobbit hole stickers -- RM Lutz
Bard the Bowman stickers -- M...

Answers to the Middle-earth Movie Songs Quiz

Here are the answers to the lyrics quiz from earlier this week!  And everyone's scores are below.

1.  Now I see fire, inside the mountain.  I see fire burning the _trees_.  ("I See Fire")
2.  May it be an _evening_ _star_ shines down on you.  (2 words) ("May it Be")
3.  The tears we cry Are falling rain For all the _lies_ you told us.  ("Gollum's Song")
4.  Blunt the knives, bend the forks, Smash the _bottles_ and burn the corks.  ("Blunt the Kniv...

Answers to the Shire Quiz

Here are the answers to the "How Well Do You Know the Shire?" quiz, and everyone's scores.




1. The Brandywine River separates the Shire from ____________.

a. Buckland


2.  The Shire is divided into four ______________.

b. Farthings


3.  Bilbo Baggins (and later his cousin Frodo) lives in a hobbit hole called _______________.

d. Bag End


4.  In The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo Baggins sells his home and moves to a house called _______________.

c. Crickhollow


5.  Bilbo Baggins live...

"The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power" by Jane Chance

There are several different places in this book where I wrote "mind = blown" because the nuances Jane Chance teased out of Tolkien's storytelling were so amazing.

I'm serious.  She brought up things I never, ever thought of, and I'm on my seventh reading of The Lord of the Rings.

I'm trying to find words to explain all the wonderful things I learned from this book, and I'm falling so short.  I'm going to have to re-read it again and again to really internalize and remember a lot of wh...

Middle-earth Movie Songs Quiz

Here's the second party game I've come up with for this year's party!  I usually try to gear one toward people who are more familiar with the books, and one toward those who are more familiar with the movies, so here's one that involves the movies.  (And if you're familiar with both, then you are probably going to be good at both!)  These are the lyrics used in the movies, so although some of them might be in the books as well, I'm looking specifically for the lyrics sung in th...

How Well Do You Know the Shire?

Time for our first party game!  The rules are simple:  put your guesses in a comment.  I've enabled comment moderation, and I won't publish people's guesses until after I've revealed the answers on Saturday.




1. The Brandywine River separates the Shire from ____________.

a. Buckland
b. Breeland
c. Mirkwood
d. Rohan


2.  The Shire is divided into four ______________.

a. Districts
b. Farthings
c. Quartos
d. Counties


3.  Bilbo Baggins (and later his cousin Frodo) lives in a hobbit ho...

"Finding God in the Lord of the Rings" by Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware

This is a fantastic little book.  It goes through the whole trilogy in chronological order, pulling out events and examining them in the light of Christianity to see what they contain.  Faith, hope, love, sacrifice, redemption, grace, desire, fear, death, weakness, danger -- there are so many wonderful topics packed into this book!

While it's set up so you could use it as a devotional, reading one section a day, I didn't read it that way -- I gobbled it up as fast as I could, underli...

A Tolkien Blog Party -- 2017

Can you believe this is our FIFTH Tolkien Blog Party?  I had no idea when I first came up with the idea back in 2013 that it would become an annual thing, but I'm so happy it has :-)



The Tolkien Tag 2017
As usual, it's time for you to copy these questions onto your own blog and answer them, add your post to the linky thingie here, and then raise your beverage of choice in a toast to Bilbo and Frodo -- their birthday is on Friday! Some of these are repeat questions from past parties, and s...

Giveaway for the 2017 Tolkien Blog Party

Hobbits give presents to their guests on their birthdays instead of receiving them, so maybe I should be a hobbit after all -- I do love giving things away!  I've got some very cool prizes this year, if I do say so myself.  Here they are!  Because this is my FIFTH Tolkien Blog Party, I got rather celebratory and so... there are quite a few this year.


TWO sets of four postcards each featuring Middle-Earth locations
Erebor, Edoras, Rivendell, and Minas Tirith
(I will draw two winne...