Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 10
February 14, 2017
Reading ‘Lord of the Rings': Part II
In the first of this series of posts I showed how in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien drew upon and even played with the etymology of the word ‘read’. For example, when Gandalf on Caradhras makes fire and then declares – If there are any to see, then I at least am revealed to them. […]
February 13, 2017
Reading in ‘Lord of the Rings': Part I
The following ruminations have their origin in an explanation of the epithet ‘Unready’ given to the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred that I encountered in Eleanor Parker’s excellent A Short History of the Danish Conquest: Æthelred has gone down in history as the ‘unready’, an epithet which was not, in origin, a comment on his preparedness, but on an irony of […]
February 4, 2017
Fair is Foul: Macbeth and LOTR
The twin pressures of earning a living and working on Rounded Globe have left me for now with insufficient time to continue my close reading of Return of the Shadow. I hope to resume in about a month. In the meanwhile, here is a first attempt to set down some as yet inchoate thoughts about the […]
January 24, 2017
LOTR: early drafts: Tom Bombadil in passing
This post is only in passing about Tom Bombadil. My general concern in this series of posts is to grasp how a new story about hobbits, began in the last weeks of 1937, slowly grew into the book we know today as The Lord of the Rings. My posts of a month ago followed the early […]
December 24, 2016
LOTR: Christmas 1937 to March 1938
In the week before Christmas, 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the first chapter of a new story about hobbits. It bore the title ‘A long expected party.’ The next few weeks saw Tolkien pen three new drafts of this chapter – each enlarged and more polished – and then, around late February, start writing the adventures […]
December 21, 2016
LOTR: January & February 1938
It would be nice to post about Tolkien’s progress only around the dates that Christopher Tolkien has singled out in Return of the Shadow, his edition of his father’s first drafts of the volume that would become The Fellowship of the Ring. But that would mean waiting until the end of next February, when a lightening […]
December 19, 2016
LOTR – the very first pages
Continuing my meditations of last night on the first five manuscript pages of the story that would become The Lord of the Rings, and which Tolkien set down on paper sometime between the 16th and the 19th of December, 1937. A photograph of the very first page of this manuscript is helpfully reproduced in Return of the […]
the week before christmas – the story of the Ring begins
79 years ago to this day – it is the evening of the 19th of December, 2016 that i write this – the lord of the rings had begun as a story (though the story did not yet bear this title). we know that on the 16th of December, Tolkien had yet to begin a […]
December 9, 2016
the ecology of addiction
You may find the Shadow of the Wood at your own door next: it is wayward, and senseless, and has no love for Men. The other day my youngest son, Albert, asked me: ‘what does “to be addicted” mean?’ After some head scratching I replied: ‘being addicted is when a plant has control of you.’ […]
November 30, 2016
Animals
About ten days ago, while on my morning walk in the large expanse of scrub/parkland that borders my house, two puppies appeared out of nowhere and followed me home. As I write they are sitting on the porch outside. Having never had a dog before I have been blown away by the encounter with two […]
