News from Bree and other random discussions

[RoseMorninStar]

Someone sent it to me and sadly it didn't include the name of the artist. But I see (on Etsy) that it's a poster/print. There's a rune in the lower right corner of the full poster.

[Eldy]

This came up in my recommendations tonight ... the NYT apparently has a series called "Overlooked" where they publish belated obituaries "about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times". It's behind a soft paywall (I have better luck getting through on my phone than my laptop, for whatever reason).

Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien's Middle-earth - The New York Times

In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long shot cold call to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American publisher with the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the setting of the author’s widely popular “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

To her surprise, an editor agreed.

Fonstad spent two and a half years on the project, reading through the novels line by line and painstakingly indexing any text from which she could infer geographic details. With two young children at home, she mostly worked at night. Her husband left notes on her drafting table reminding her to go to bed.

Her resulting book, “The Atlas of Middle-earth” (1981), wowed Tolkien fans and scholars with its exquisite level of topographic detail; the most recent paperback edition is in its 32nd printing.

[...]

Fonstad's Atlas made a huge impression on me as a 13-year-old on the cusp of jumping into organised Tolkien fandom head-first (even more than Barbara Strachey's Journeys of Frodo, which I also remember fondly), and I already knew a little bit about Fonstad herself, but there was a lot of detail here that was new to me.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I am surprised and pleased to see this! It is well-deserved; Fonstad-s book is definitely a seminal work.

[RoseMorninStar]

I have a copy of Atlas of Middle Earth. Nice.

The National Park Service posted this on FB.

Screenshot 2025-01-14 at 10.39.32 AM.png (924.13 KiB) Viewed 16445 times

[Inanna]

The NPS is just adorable.

[Frelga]

For Fro-doe!

Here's a fun bluesky thread starting here

Let’s take a quick look at LOTR from Sauron’s perspective, where it resembles nothing so much as a counter-espionage spy thriller.

My favorite part, about the Ringwraiths looking for Baggins.

The WW2 era intel equivalent of parachuting a bunch of German spies into England and having them march into a pub and go “TUBE ALLOYS… ATOMICS… TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW OF THESE THINGS, MEIN HERR, AND I WILL COME BACK WITH GOLD.”

[N.E. Brigand]

This came up in my recommendations tonight ... the NYT apparently has a series called "Overlooked" where they publish belated obituaries "about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times". It's behind a soft paywall (I have better luck getting through on my phone than my laptop, for whatever reason).

Overlooked No More: Karen Wynn Fonstad, Who Mapped Tolkien's Middle-earth - The New York Times

I had the privilege of meeting her at the Blackwelder conference in Milwaukee in 2004 -- she wasn't one of the speakers but a regular attendee like the other 249 of us -- and she signed my misprinted copy of the Atlas: in one printing, as she well knew, one of the page layouts is printed in reverse. She signed it on that page.

[Frelga]

Shire Reckoning tweet reminded me that Galadriel's gift to Aragorn was a sheath for Anduril.

Also remembered

"You shall not be sheathed again until the last battle is fought."

Do you think the gift was a subtle hint that it wasn't a good idea to carry an unsheathed sword? (How did that work, anyway?)

[Eldy]

Do you think the gift was a subtle hint that it wasn't a good idea to carry an unsheathed sword?

Well, Aragorn was engaged to Galadriel's granddaughter at that time.

[Alatar]

Shire Reckoning tweet reminded me that Galadriel's gift to Aragorn was a sheath for Anduril.

Also remembered

"You shall not be sheathed again until the last battle is fought."

Do you think the gift was a subtle hint that it wasn't a good idea to carry an unsheathed sword? (How did that work, anyway?)

I think that Tolkien liked to say things that sounded epic

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I never interpreted that passage as meaning that Aragorn did not previously have a sheath for Anduril. The one that Galadriel gave him was just a better one.

[N.E. Brigand]

Shire Reckoning tweet reminded me that Galadriel's gift to Aragorn was a sheath for Andúril.

Also remembered: "You shall not be sheathed again until the last battle is fought."

I meant to note this a couple weeks ago, but Aragorn's statement you quote from "The Last Debate" brings to mind a certain head of state who has worn fatigues rather than a dress suit for the past three years. That man has explained that he wears it as a sign of support for the troops he leads and has said that he won't wear formal attire again until the war is over and his people are safe.

And that reminds me somewhat of a certain country singer who explained in 1971 song that he always wore black both "for the poor and the beaten down" and for "in mourning for the lives that could have been: each week we lose a hundred fine young men. ... just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back, up front there ought to be a man in black."

But it also suggests a discussion in Akira Kurosawa's 1962 action comedy Sanjuro between the titular hero (S) and the wife of the man he's trying to rescue (M):

M: You glisten too brightly.

S: Glisten?

M: Yes. Like a drawn sword.

S: A drawn sword?

F: You're like a sword without a sheath. You cut well, but the best sword is kept in its sheath.

I can't find any video of that on Youtube, where most of the clips are from the film's famously bloody climax (after which Sanjuro references that exchange).