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For the past year as part of our column A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook has been looking at how Tolkien's writings on Beowulf, namely the lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," informs and is informed by his work on the legendarium that he was undertaking at the same time. Last month, he considered the crossing of ships from and back to the West. A familiar journey to fans of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, a ship journey from and to the West also appears in Beowulf.
A ship-burial suggests that beyond the Shoreless Sea is hell, the realm of mortal shades in ancient English mythology. Tolkien reads the first ship of the exordium to Beowulf as ancient myth, the ship-burial as Anglo-Saxon art. The art breathes meaning into the myth, yet raises the uncomfortable thought that the good king came to his people out of death. Early in 1936, Tolkien penned an "Elvish myth" that told of a king who sailed the Straight Road, out of a mythical flat world and into the round world of history, and then died side by side with his Elvish friend, fighting Sauron in Mordor. This legendary appendage to The Fall of Númenor spells out Tolkien’s reading of the exordium, a connection that Simon explores in this month's A Sense of History article.
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Featured Article
Straight Road by Simon J. Cook
The next in a series of articles about ships passing to and from the West, Simon uses The Fall of Númenor to attempt to arrive at Tolkien's reading of the exordium to Beowulf.
Art Credit: Fusion by Simon
New Fanworks
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Melkor demands an account of Mairon’s failures.
Read more ...Message in a Bottle by StarSpray [Writing]
Over the course of his very long life he had found a handful of messages in bottles, but it had been a very long time. So when he found the glass bottle on his little stretch of pebbly beach, he picked it up with the intention of tossing it into his recycling. But it wasn’t, he found, just another beer bottle.
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A Nerdanel/Nienna moodboard.
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The Stars of Home by Idrils Scribe [Writing]
Elrohir has been found after his long abduction by the Black Númenóreans of Umbar. He comes home to Rivendell, but all is not well: the Elf-child that was taken is now a Man grown. War and darkness have left Elrohir deeply scarred, and even at home there is danger...
An alternate universe for the Under Strange Stars series, in which Elrohir goes with Glorfindel instead of running away from him after the events of Under Strange Stars. This story can be enjoyed without having read the original.
Many thanks to Grundy and Marchwriter for their excellent beta-reading and brainstorming.
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When uneasy dreams bring him back into Beleriand, Daeron finds a pair of twins who have lost their home, and an enemy who has lost himself. The Shadow's reach is growing ever longer, and if they are to survive, they must do it together.
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Fëanor shrugged, studying the contents of his wine glass. “Something must be done about that house. It will fall down eventually.”
“It does not follow that it must be you that tears it down single-handedly. Are you sure you do not want help?”
“It’s not as though I have much else to do. I need to build something new there,” he said after a few moments. “To do that, I must first clear away the old and broken things.”
Decades out of Mandos, too many things in Fëanor's life remain broken. He can't do anything except wait for his sons to come to him, but he can do something about the old and crumbling house where they once lived.
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This is my new poetical attempt to add my own interpretation to Tolkien's Cosmology as to Eru's Creation and the Valar's minds and behind-the-scene providence reasons and mechanisms.. I often review Eä as part of our own world, just in another dimension, this is why I have always seriously thought on the matter who the Ainur are, who Eru is, how he matches our own religious pantheon, and this has been conducted after serious research of many esoteric teachings of our own planet's heritage.
Read more ...Around the World and Web
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Tolkien Sapphic September is a month long event focusing on Sapphic relationships and characters in Tolkien and adjacent materials.
