Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 8

Indexes of Middle-earth

This post arises as I clarify the ideas of my index on the page naming the nameless. A key idea advanced on that page is that Tolkien sees a story as generating its own index, which is the world of that story. A principle of Tolkien’s art, adopted by conventional indexes of Middle-earth (such as the Tolkien Gateway), […]

Magic ring and tower: first foundation

In the first months of the writing of a sequel to The Hobbit, in an untitled chapter that became ‘The Shadow of the Past,’ Tolkien pictured an opening scene in Bag-End. Gandalf is speaking about the magic rings made by the Necromancer and distributed to various folk of Middle-earth: The dwarves it is said had […]

Tower

‘The Fall of Númenor’ posits the world of the ancient north as the time between the fall of Númenor and the migration of the English tribes to Britain as the Danes smashed the older northern world. This historical period glimpsed in the oldest northern writings is semi-mythical, where myth is understood to take its meaning from […]

Tolkien studies (a perspective)

From the perspective of my own shortcut to mushrooms, the history of Tolkien studies is a curious one involving two distinct phases. Within a decade of Tolkien’s death in 1973 two books had appeared that still today define the state of the emerging field known as ‘Tolkien studies’: Tom A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth. Allen […]

Myths

The story of Adam and Even told in the Book of Genesis provides for Tolkien the ultimate myth. It tells of the Fall, giving to myth the meaning of a name for a story from before a fall. Tolkien made use of the category of myth to define his own art, or at least some of it (the ‘Silmarillion’ stories are […]

Eternity and Immortality

The ‘Fall of Númenor’ is a retelling of the ancient story of Atlantis, the only ancient source for which are two dialogues of Plato, the Timaeus and the (unfinished) Critias. The two dialogues continue the discussion of the Republic. Socrates asks to see the ideal state brought into the world and into history. Timaeus tells how a […]

Sullis

Through R.G. Collingwood, his colleague at Pembroke College, Oxford between 1925 and 1936, we catch a glimpse of Tolkien pondering what the lost story of Nodens might include. Collingwood’s Archaeology of Roman Britain contains a chapter on Inscriptions that names “Nodens the god of Lyndey” together with “Sul the goddess of Bath” two of  “the very numerous non-Roman divinities […]

The Garden of Eden

Tolkien was a slow reader. He certainly read Beowulf, yet we shall see in later posts his mind was always drawn back to the first story of this Old English poem. We may be certain he also read all of the Latin Bible, and no doubt looked on occasion at the Hebrew and Greek originals. Yet, again, he never quite […]

Magic ring

Consider this apparent paradox in the story of Bilbo Baggins. In the first chapter, a wizard scratches a “queer sign” on his front door that the next day tells thirteen dwarves this is the home of the burglar they are looking for. On seeing Bilbo, the dwarves are skeptical, and it takes Gandalf’s authority to […]

Bilbo’s titles

Having gone down the secret passagway and found Smaug asleep, Bilbo Baggins goes back again, and this time has a conversation with the dragon. Asked his name and origin by Smaug, Bilbo avoids a direct answer and gives rather a string of titles culled from the adventure we have read: “Barrel-rider,” “Ringwinner,” and “Luckwearer,” for example, and: “I […]