When Tolkien Gets Weird

So, I've never made a systematic study of the final three volumes of HME, though I've dipped into them a lot over the years. I find that it's when I have a project that involves specific lesser-known items among Tolkien's oeuvre I get to know those works really well.*

My current project was chosen, in part, so that in the process of researching and writing it I wd become as familiar with this late-period material as I am with BLT I & II, HME IV-V, and the LotR volumes HME VI-IX.**

And what I'm finding is that occasionally Tolkien will make a statement that strikes me as decidedly odd. In conversation with Tolk folk, I find that even the most well-versed of them might not know all of these offhand, so vast has JRRT's published writings now become. So I thought it might be interesting to devote a short series of blog posts to a run of representative examples.



Feanor's seventh son never reached Middle-earthValinor is North AmericaMelkor made the MoonMelkor Rapes the Sun


--John R.
current reading: snippets of many different things.
current location: Williamstown.
currently missing: two small black cats.


*for example, the essay I did on FALL OF ARTHUR, or the one on Tolkien's dwarves a few years before that, or heavy immersion into the earlier iterations of THE SILMARILLION for MR. BAGGINS.

**I have a different project lined up for later this year that will involve a lot of work with the Appendices drafting