Tolkien Meta Week Starts December 8!
Join us December 8-14, here and on Tumblr, as we share our thoughts, musings, rants, and headcanons about all aspects of Tolkien's world.
The narrator of the Quenta Silmarillion uses death, grief, and mourning rituals to generate sympathy for or dehumanize groups of characters considered the Other.
In a book as full of death as the Quenta Silmarillion, grief and mourning are surprisingly absent. The characters who receive grief and mourning—and those who don't—appear to do so due to narrative bias. Grief and mourning (or a lack of them) serve to draw attention toward and away from objectionable actions committed by characters.
The first of some posts on the Elf-tower on the western margin of The Lord of the Rings attempts to frame the relationship between the narrative and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and an analysis of Frodo's dream-visions.
Who wrote The Silmarillion? This paper briefly discusses the evidence from Morgoth's Ring that supports the idea that that "Silmarillion" narrator is Elven.
A biography of Pengolodh, emphasizing what he would have known of the history he wrote about and how that impacts interpreting The Silmarillion for fanfiction.