Everyone: CSL Estate, please just let Francis Spufford publish “The Stone Table.” CSL Estate: Best I can do is a TV adaptation of the Boxen stories

The better you know and understand Beowulf, the more you see it appear in various places in Tolkien. It's not just in languages or scene allusions, but in the style of how Tolkien depicts a scene. Here's one, small example 1/x

W.H. Auden told Tolkien: "I don’t think I have ever told you what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf." Tolkien once described what he thought original Anglo-Saxon would have sounded like:

One more reason to read David Rowe’s book!

The Lewis and Tolkien busts have been found! The kids hid them behind some books.

New book delivery today! I finally added the Maker of Middle-earth exhibition book to my Tolkien collection

Great news to get this loose end tied up, and even better that it’s a text that was already known. Looking forward to reading John Garth’s new article

Aragorn’s Bree Pipe (In progress)

It would be a great day for the Lewis Estate to approve the publication of The Stone Table

An excerpt from Quettar Vol. II: Christopher Tolkien’s transcription of his father’s notes on Middle-earth numbering systems.

Tolkien is the solution to this problem. His imaginative reconstruction of a pre-Christian world within a Christian metaphysics enables the modern mind to experience how the early Medieval Church so persuasively synthesized orthodoxy with pagan wonder and practice

Here are two of Tolkien’s circular prayer cards, about the size of coins, on which he inscribed various prayers, including the Our Father (on both), the Hail Mary, lines from Psalms 69 and 19, and Gloria in excelsis

Tolkien had a special devotion to the Our Father prayer. It’s on both prayer cards below, he wrote an essay on the history of its translation, he translated it into Elvish, and he saw the pivotal scenes in Mordor as an example of its petitions.

How about THE INKLINGS AND KING ARTHUR? ;)

Latest Tolkien-adjacent purchase ✨

The fate of the Elves for Tolkien may be unique in that while most everything else in the Legendarium comes to align more closely with reality over the course of his life, the Elves’ fate moves from being more realistic to being less realistic.

Ironically this occurs for the same reasons everything else becomes more realistic. Tolkien tries to make his metaphysics more consistent. In doing so, he realizes he cannot simply eliminate the Elves at the end of time. They must have a possibility of redemption.

Honestly the market for rare Tolkien books goes up faster than the stock market

A great video worth watching, even though I disagree with Graham on this

There really ought to be a verse about his fireworks.