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Showing posts from September, 2018

Lembas is tastier than you think

So, I have a teacherly friend who's doing a composition course focused on food, and one of her students picked Tolkien's lembas. Since they have to do brief e-mail interviews, Laura asked me if I'd be up for it, and of course it was. It was a fun exercise, who I decided to post the questions as well as my responses. (1) Which theory [ lembas as communion bread or military hardtack)] do you believe is more accurate, and what is your personal belief on this subject? Does it make a difference that one is a military food and the other religious? You're spot-on about the two most common interpretations of the lembas. My answer about the accuracy of one interp over the other will be extremely unhelpful: my answer is "both and neither." The question is something of a false binary. On one hand, lembas are their own thing. Plotwise, it's a convenient way of explaining how Frodo and Sam feed themselves in Mordor. On the other hand, why can't lembas be both mi

One of the ironies of being a job-hunting Tolkienist.

The MLA Job Information List went up Monday, and there's some fun job ads out there. I saw the following from Grove City College, which is about 20 miles from my hometown -- they're hiring a 20th-century British literature scholar with a focus on the Inklings. Gold, right? Alas, not so much. They're a committed Christian college, and apparently my materialist-atheist bend just doesn't qualify . . . especially as one of their four required letters of reference must be from one's pastor. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

Fun Stephen R. Donaldson Quote of the Day

So, I'm re-reading a bunch of SRD interviews in prep for an encyclopedia entry I'm doing on him for The Literary Encyclopedia , and I came across the following gem. For context,  SRD is talking about the need to re-read his first 6 Covenant books before beginning The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant : When I started back on Lord Foul's Bane, to re-read the Covenant books after twenty years, I was blown away. I thought if these books had been written by anybody else, I would call them masterpieces. These books were written by somebody whose a better writer than I am now. It was a very intimidating experience. I had expected the opposite. The truth is I can find some flaws in the first six books that I wish I could change, but that didn't have to do with how they're written. I love how they were written. I was blown away, and I thought, "I can't compete with this."  Well, they are masterpieces! This quote tickles me because, if I ever wrote a maste