Posts Tagged with Tolkien

The Beorn identity: more weird search terms

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Ace Frehley
Ace Frehley

It’s been too long since my last roundup of weird search terms. Maybe it’s because I seem to get a lot of repeated hits about Ace Frehley and Peter Criss and I don’t feel they’re quite weird enough. But mainly, it’s that I wanted to share only the best with you, my loyal readers and hopeful Googlers.

 

The lycanthropic

I blog and write about werewolves, so it’s heartening to see that people find this site by searching for such specific topics as “werewolves in manitoba,” ” celtics and wearwolfs,” “songs to help write about werewolves,” and “would i find werewolves in canada.” To which I would answer: 1) read some of my short fiction, 2) learn to spell, 3) read this post, and 4) no: they find you.

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Weird search terms

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English: Eric Burdon at the Audimax in Hamburg...
English: Eric Burdon at the Audimax in Hamburg, July 1973 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been waiting forever to do a post like this, but I wanted to wait until I had a good variety of truly weird search terms. I can’t hold a candle to the sublime absurdity at other blogs, such as Amy’s, but I feel I finally have some gems.

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Books to Film: The Two Towers

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Time has a way of changing your perspective on things, and favourite movies and books are no exception. The article below was originally published in 2004; and since then I’ve reread The Two Towers and rewatched the movie version. So rather than just tinker with this I decided to let it stand, with some second thoughts added in.

I still like both book and movie — but they are very, very different creatures.

Director Peter Jackson had a thankless task in adapting the second part of The Lord of the Rings for the big screen.

The difficulty lies in the fact that Tolkien originally intended The Lord of the Rings to be a single volume. His publisher balked at this; it was too much of a risk for a book whose only known audience consisted of readers of The Hobbit — in many ways a vastly different book. Thus the story was published in three volumes.

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Beorn again: Tolkien’s favoured lycanthrope

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Those of you who have been Puttin’ the Blog in Balrog and following the many posts collected at BookSnobbery, or those who are just fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, may be interested to read more on the Big Friendly Guy who pops up briefly in the story but is none the less memorable for all that. I’m talking, of course, about Beorn.

Tolkien explored the notion of “the wild” literally and figuratively in the character of Beorn. He was a civil (if potentially dangerous) host, and the head of a well-ordered household in which domestic animals obeyed his commands. Yet he lived between the inhospitable Misty Mountains, home to the less-than-human goblins (or orcs, as Tolkien later referred to them), and the menacing Mirkwood, perilous to all who entered.

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The unofficial Middle-earth soundtrack

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Leonard Nimoy

Longtime readers of J.R.R. Tolkien know he had a deep fondness for poetry and song.  Apart from his own compositions chronicling the early history of Middle-earth (such as The Lays of Beleriand), he filled both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with poetry, composed or recited, as it were, by the characters as part of the story. It added a richness and depth to the imagined peoples of his fantasy world that is rarely matched or emulated.

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Tolkien’s dwarvish (not dwarfish) names

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Confusticate and bebother these dwarves: Bilbo tries to keep names like Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Bifur and Bofur straight.

For all that Tolkien devoted The Silmarillion to the vast history of the Elves (and, to a lesser extent, Men), it’s clear from The Hobbit (and in the characterization of Gimli in The Lord of the Rings) that he had a soft spot for Dwarves.

In the first place, Thorin Oakenshield isn’t the leader of a band of three or seven or even nine dwarves, but thirteen; and, remarkably, they all have personalities and relationships and are pretty well fleshed out for secondary characters.

But where did Tolkien find such distinctive dwarvish names as Fili, Kili, Dwalin, Oin, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur, among others?

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