Here’s my second fic for the Back to Middle-earth Month challenge, written for the “archetypes” challenge. After the Battle of the Five Armies, Bilbo and Gloin consider legend’s due. (Major spoilers for the Hobbit book.)

The King Has Come Unto His Hall
Bilbo stood in an alcove off the Hall of the Fathers, where the dwarves of Erebor had always ( Read more... )

For the interested, I’ve written a rather substantial Back to Middle-earth fic. According to the Unfinished Tales, Gondorian kings and stewards occasionally visited the hallows holding Elendil’s remains. This story is officially about Faramir’s attempt to honor that old custom. Along the way I tried to flesh out some other aspects of Faramir’s ( Read more... )

As I’m getting my old fic in order to post on the blog, I’m also doing some edits on stories I think would benefit from them. Sometimes this just involves running what I have through a spell-checker or skimming it and correcting things you really can only see with fresh eyes. But sometimes a particular story will strike me as worth a little more ( Read more... )

I forgot to renew my warranty on my laptop, and so rather than purchasing an extension was going to have to buy a new warranty rather than an extension. (My fault; I got the email notification but just never did anything with it.) This was much more expensive than I was expecting, and I have an older machine anyway, going on four years. So I ( Read more... )

As I said at FB, it's hard to see how a video could be simultaneously this wrong and this right. And yet, and yet...

( Read more... )

On Tuesday I'm taking a French language exam and somewhere in the last two years I've lost my dictionary. I usually use an online dictionary to look up words anyway, but we're not allowed to use computers in the actual exam, so I needed a dictionary that ran on flattened out tree pulp rather than circuit boards. I'm actually fine with that, since ( Read more... )

Over at FB, ellen_kushner posted a fun link:

http://bookriot.com/2012/09/30/the-book-riot-50-11-top-ten-made-up-literary-couples/

Basically, the author suggests characters from different classic books - different classic books, that would make a ( Read more... )

Some time ago TOR.n posted a photo of a replica of Gil-galad's shield:

( Read more... )

The results for the Tree & Flower awards were announced last night. My own shinies include...

First Place:

1. "In the Depths of Winter" in Arwen

Aragorn, as the new king of Gondor and Arnor Reunited, ushered in a new age of peace - and, Gondor quite naturally hoped, the beginnings of a new dynasty. But just because something is expected does not ( Read more... )

... and the 75th anniversary of the Hobbit'spublishing, here's one of my favorite letters. German publishers asked whether he was Aryan (this was in the leadup to WWII), and here's his reply. From The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

30 To Rütten & Loening Verlag

[One of the 'two drafts' mentioned by Tolkien in the previous letter. This is the only one ( Read more... )