Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 11

Will Cave.

Will Cave.

Canyons of your mind

and now for something else.

Under the mill? c. 1912

Your hands, my dear, adorable, Your lips of tenderness —Oh, I’ve loved you faithfully and well, Three years, or a bit less. It wasn’t a success. Thank God, that’s done! and I’ll take the road, Quit of my youth and you, The Roman road to Wendover By Tring and Lilley Hoo, As a free man […]

Under the mill? The Shire, 1912

This was written in Berlin by a Cambridge man, two years before the First World War broke out. I think it speaks the same language of English identity as does Tolkien, in an innocence scarcely conceivable today after two wars with Germany. Here is a sense of an English ‘home’, not where the original English […]

Watching the US election

Back in the summer I got caught up in the US election. Even a month ago I was daily scanning The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker for the latest Trump Riddikulus spells. By the third debate I’d had more than enough, and now cannot wait for the whole circus to be over. But […]

soundtrack

wow

I think we just watched the script of early 21st-century western culture appear before our eyes. The three act circus of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Donald Trump just redefined the meaning of the silent, moral majority and in the process gave us the weapon we were lacking in the fight against ISIS, namely some semblance of […]

By any other name.

Studying the history of ideas can engender a jaundiced perspective on contemporary academic writing. Weariness can arise from a recognition that each generation is inventing the wheel. To give but one example, every generation since the 1870s seems to have proclaimed that the Anglo-Saxons rather interbred with than ethnically cleansed the older settlers of the British Isles, and […]

Heathen kings under a swift sunrise

A sort of addendum to my last two posts: two scenes from the siege of Gondor in the movie version of The Return of the King that provide food for thought. Here is Gandalf explaining to Pippin what awaits a mortal after death. But the description he gives is lifted from Frodo’s vision of the undying lands […]

Tolkien: Christianity and Paganism

Commenting on my last post, Death and the Tower, John Carswell of True Myths raised the issue of the relevance of Tolkien’s own religious beliefs to my discussion of Tolkien’s meditations on death… Let’s revisit briefly the concluding passages of Tolkien’s 1936 tale of the ‘Fall of Númenor’. Seeking immortality, the Númenoreans had prepared to sail to the undying lands in […]