Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 2
April 10, 2020
Back to home school. 3 challenges
Return of the King: Back-to-home-schooling. Day 1. Delineate the relationship between three ages of Middle-earth invoked by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mines of Moria. Ask your children to explain how Boris Johnson saw society when his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, said she did not. Tell your parents (any age) to give the key to these four pages (make sure […]
March 6, 2020
Palantir
Palantír I need to be able to fade in and out different elements in the crystal ball. For example, while the green elongated circle is eclipsed by Weathertop and then marginalized and protected, by way of the touch of a tree in Lothlórien the spirit of Old Man Willow is found in the forest that devours […]
February 20, 2020
St Andrews
St Andrews. Tolkien delivers his lecture on fairy stories, the text of which appears to have survived with first and last pages missing (and can be read in the Flieger & Anderson edition). He stays with Malcolm Knox (1900–1980), pupil of Collingwood and later Principal of St Andrews University. In this post I put aside the later dramatic turn, the […]
February 16, 2020
On Fairy-stories, March 1939
Those who step beyond the scrappy, unfocused, and negative gateway to On Fairy-stories explore the ultimate reader’s guide to The Lord of the Rings. Although first and last pages are missing, what appears to be the draft of the lecture given at St Andrews in March 1939 is transcribed in Flieger & Anderson’s critical edition of On Fairy-stories. The lecture […]
February 15, 2020
1965 Foreword
Your copy of The Lord of the Rings likely has at the beginning a ‘Foreword to the Second Edition.’ This short text of 5 pages was added in 1965, and serves, primarily, to deny any stated connection between the legendary story of the Great War of the Ring and the real war. “This tale grew in […]
February 12, 2020
War
The second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1965) carried a new author’s Foreword, which challenged anyone to say how World War II impacted on the story of the Great War of the Ring. The only way to meet this challenge is to detail the writing of the story in the shadow of the real […]
October 23, 2019
The Riddle of The Hobbit
This is a placeholder. We are in the process of uploading video 6. When that is done I’ll link to it here and then add a commentary.
September 5, 2019
Tolkien’s boys stories
I recently came upon Dawn Felagund’s analysis of the gender inequalities of Tolkien’s Valar (the angelic manifestations of sub-creative art who dwell somewhere in the world, now separated from our Middle-earth by a lost ocean of time). Dawn’s work is exemplary: rigorous analysis acutely directed, the gender map she draws of sub-creation delineates precisely the […]
August 29, 2019
On video 5: Gollum’s end
This episode unveils what is, in effect, a lost story by J.R.R. Tolkien. The video will appear here when we release it in a day or two. In 1944, as he was writing of Sam and Frodo’s meeting with Gollum on the road to Mordor, Tolkien rewrote ‘Riddles in the Dark,’ the chapter in The Hobbit […]
