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"Orfeo, following this pattern, sets aside his societal role as king and grows unrecognisable in the wilderness, a conscious loss of identity which reflects his grief at the loss of Heurodis."

At one point, the Lord Buddha's two chief disciples try to charge the pilgrims for volumes from the Sacred Library. When Monkey calls their bluff and says "we shall go back and tell Buddha about this!" they quickly change their tune. Ultimately, the pilgrims "took several loads of books." But because they hadn't paid for them, they'd been given "no written scriptures, but only white paper."

"Then the demon chief opened his gigantic mouth and swallowed him alive. Now Sun gave him great pains, so that the demon took emetics to cast him out. But Sun said he was too comfortable to come out; he meant to pass the winter there as it was warm; he would set up a kitchen, and cook the demon's vitals on a tripod of bones, from time to time, as he required food."

Two gems from the WTF?! department:

* "We have all got our Gollums. Gollum is always being suppressed and rejected, but always there. It is impossible to get rid of him. He cannot be killed." (p. 262)

* "The Crack of Doom is itself perhaps fundamentally a repellent image of the engulfing sexuality that civilization must repudiate." (p. 263)

-- Derek S. Brewer, "The Lord of the Rings as Romance"

Brewer thinks "too many of the Companions survive" (260). He'd have killed Merry off at Pellenor Fields, Sam at the Crack of Doom, and "the admirable Gimli too should have gone at the gates of Mordor" (261).

To each his own, I suppose. But why the gates of Mordor for Gimli, I wonder? If you're going to kill him off, why not at his weakest moment, going through the Paths of the Dead – or trying to?

"Self-sacrifice is most poignant when it is entirely solitary; when apparently no one can ever know of the lonely painful deed that has been ungladly volunteered, and that has apparently been of no avail. This solitary heroism is Frodo's, and the more convincing in that Tolkien does not totally isolate him physically, since Sam remains with him[...]. But Frodo becomes progressively withdrawn even from Sam."
- Brewer

"Although I stayed at his house frequently, I never knew when he got any sleep at night, for as has been said 'he had a Johnsonian horror of going to bed'. With Chaucer, whom he knew so well, he must have muttered:

And also domb as any stoon
Thou sittest at another book
Tyl fully dashed ys thy look.

So many books were left unfinished; so many were never printed[...]." - d'Ardenne,

Tolkien "told us that the discovery of Gothic took him by storm, a sensation as full of delight as that aroused by 'first looking into Chapman's Homer', 'though', he added, 'I did not write a sonnet about it'."
- d'Ardenne, "The Man and the Scholar"

* Hobbits "were wildly discussed at the breakfast table and in the nursery."
* Father Christmas "delivered [his letters] himself, leaving on the spotlessly clean carpet a very dirty and disreputable footprint as his signature, an irrefutable proof of the authenticity of the letters."
- D'Ardenne, "The Man and the Scholar"

"The journey of the Fellowship from Lórien to Tol Brandir, with its canoes and portages, often recalls The Last of the Mohicans, and as the travellers move from forest to prairie, like the American pioneers, Aragorn and Éomer for a moment preserve faint traces of 'the Deerslayer' and the Sioux[...]."

"It would be possible, even tempting, [...] to examine [...] the development of draconitas from Glorund through Glaurung to Smaug; [and] to consider the developing but never determined theme of the 'dragon-helm' and its corruptions through the many versions of 'The Tale of Túrin' [...]."

"Certainly [Tolkien's fictions] are about 'creatures who never existed'. Most novels are about 'people who never existed'. The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compred with biography [...]."

"Writing twenty years ago, I began this chapter with the words, 'There is, in a way, no more of "Middle-earth" to consider.' This was tempting Providence with a vengeance, for there were twelve volumes of 'The History of Middle-earth' yet to appear and to be considered."

(p. 266: "several medieval words mean both 'mask' and 'ghost'", including "the Old English word gríma" which "is also applied to helmets")

"As often with Norse saga, a good question to keep asking [when reading The Silmarillion] is, with each disaster, 'Who is to blame?' Answers are never simple."

Orwellian reference of the day: "His [Gandalf's] renunciation [of the Ring] makes sense in an age which has seen many pigs become farmers"

"I am not sure that more could have not been done by acting: Elijah Wood's eyerolling facial expressions at moments when he yields to the Ring tend, especially in the first film, to suggest that he is swooning helplessly, rather than struggling with his own better judgment."

A truly jarring misquote of a memorable line: "'I suppose you will all stay to supper?' he said in his politest 'please don't stay' tones."