HSU IT Department

Well now, this is fun: The Department of Special Collections at Marquette’s Raynor Memorial Library, which is home to much of Tolkien's original papers, is creating a collection of interviews of Tolkien fans. Their goal is to collect 6,000 audio interviews. Why 6000, you ask? One for each of the Riders of Rohan that Théoden mustered and led to the aid of Gondor, of course:

[S]ix thousand spears to Sunlending,
Mundburg the mighty under Mindolluin,
Sea-kings' city in the South-kingdom
foe-beleaguered, fire-encircled...

Find out more here ==> https://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/Mss/JRRT/fandomoh.php.

Take the day off from work and read "DM of the Rings," a very funny comic in which a long-suffering dungeon master tries to persuade Dave -- I mean Frodo -- and eight other players to stay in character as he leads them through a lengthy adventure in a strange new place called Middle Earth. I have been giggling away for an hour straight and we're not even through Moria yet. If you have ever been a DM/GM (*koff*tcpip*koff*), you'll find the creator's comments underneath each episode funny as hell, too -- I was particularly amused by those for Episode XIII.

"Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign..."

Episode I: The Copious Backstory ==>

THANK YOU to everyone :) for the warm birthday wishes and virtual gifts, and to the wonderful rivertempest for the real gift of Snape's wand (yes! Snape's wand!!!) -- it is a thing of beauty and I shall cherish it.

Also, my mom sent me this. She knows me well lol.

"The next day he had almost forgotten about Gandalf. He did not remember things very well, unless he put them down on his Engagement Tablet: like this: Gandalf Tea Wednesday. Yesterday he had been too flustered to do anything of the kind..."

Check out Food in Tolkien's The Hobbit, on http://recipewise.co.uk. It provides historical context (the Shire as Victorian England?) plus recipes for seedcake, etc. so that "we can faithfully recreate that same Tea Party that Bilbo, Gandalf and the Dwarves so enjoyed."

Wonder no more, your curiosity is about to be satisfied! Be sure to watch (listen) all the way through the credits, hee hee hee...

(Also, FYI, the Colbert Report is going All Hobbit, All the Time this week -- last night was Ian McKellen, tonight is Martin Freeman, Wed Peter Jackson, and Thursday Andy Serkis. Yay!)


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During filming of The Hobbit, Ian McKellen had an angsty moment over the fact that he was acting with thirteen dwarves and yet not a single actor was there on camera with him -- all he had were 13 photographs of the dwarves on top of stands with little lights; whoever he was "talking" to their light would flash, but the actual actors did all their camera time separately and were filled in later by the computer techs. "I cried, actually. I cried. Then I said out loud, 'This is not why I became an actor'. Unfortunately the microphone was on and the whole studio heard..."

I sympathize with him. Much as I love special effects and amazingly realistic goblins, dwarves, dragons, monsters, spaceships, etc., there's something missing when 90% of what you see was produced inside a computer. The best, most memorable performances I've ever seen are live: Phantom of the Opera, Les Mis, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Mikado, even the junior high musicals I was in (under protest) and the high school musicals I worked tech crew on were magical in a way that movies can't be. When you know there are no second takes...when the actors are responding in real time to the audience...there's a wonderful feedback loop that gets going, and its remarkable. Light years different from what happens in a movie theater, where your reaction makes no difference at all to what's playing on screen.

This is also why I'm very excited about the movie version of Les Mis that's coming out next month. Instead of the usual approach, where the singers do all the singing in the studio months ahead of time and then have to time their acting to what they did weeks earlier, this production is allowing them to sing in real time, while they act. It's an interesting middle ground between live performance and movie-musical, and the actors are pretty excited about it.

We've already bought our Hobbit tickets; may have to snap a couple of these up as well.

"...Here is a book that will break your heart." C.S. Lewis, on The Lord of the Rings.

Benjamin Harff, a German art student, has made this doubly true. He decided for his capstone project to do a hand-illuminated, hand-bound copy of Tolkien's The Silmarillion. He spent six months on it and had the volume bound in leather by a professional hand book-binder (he assisted).

It is the most beautiful thing I've seen, such a remarkable labor of love and art.

Here are pictures, and an interview + more pictures.

In these days of 140-character tweets and instant this-n-that, my heart is reassured when I see evidence of appreciation for Things That Take Time.

Also of course we wants it precious, we wants it!!!

I actually had no plans to read this but got it for Christmas by accident, as Spouse bought it for someone who turned out to already have it. It was OK but different from King's usual product in that there were zero supernatural elements in three of the four stories (the exception was the Devil); the slightly not-normal element in one of the others (rats, again -- he does have a thing for rats) might have simply been hallucinations. The first story, "1922," was just deeply, deeply sad (and a little heavy on grossness/gore), although I was expecting a very different ending for the son so props for the unexpected there. "Big Driver" I thought could have been about 30% shorter (many many pages on her crawling through the woods and down the road, and the excuse given for her not reporting the rape was pretty thin). But "Fair Extension" was great -- a traditional deal-with-the-devil story, with the twist that the man doesn't end up regretting it at all; what he bargained for turns out to be exactly what he wanted and he enjoys it thoroughly (though it isn't nice at all). And the last one, "A Good Marriage," was fantastic -- old-fashioned tension cranked up wire-tight in the best Hitchcock tradition, reminiscent of Gaslight, perhaps. Ten of ten for that one.

This was interspersed with a long, long, LONG overdue re-read of the Fionavar Tapestry. Every time I fall into those books I'm more in awe of his skill in story-telling, world-building, character development, and evocation of raw emotion. He's like Tolkien in the grand sweep of the story, but totally unlike him in that Tolkien's main characters are primarily "little people" both physically and in terms of power (apart from Gandalf and Aragorn, of course), while the Fionavar books are crammed with kings, gods, half-gods, legendary and mythic beings, larger-than-life men and women. I mean, King Arthur and Lancelot -- come on! And yet they're all so human, so vulnerable, so bound up with our most human elements: bitterness, hatred, despair, fear; love, hope, courage and trust. And freedom -- cutting across it all is the randomness of free choice, the knowledge that above and beyond anything else, we still have a say in our fates.

Exponentially different as King and Kay are, I envy both of them their sheer productiveness and their mastery of their chosen forms of the craft.

Up next: Sandman, The Wake. And possibly a re-read of the awesome and heavily-fictionally-footnoted Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Yay for vacations and massive stretches of unallocated time!!