Tolkien

Follow Friday

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 6 Comments

Just been having a conversation with someone I’m following about how to find good blogs to follow on WordPress.

I don’t use the search function very often. I have found the occasional good stuff via search, but it is rare.

Instead, I follow the blogs of people who write good comments on blogs I’m already following. Or people I find on Twitter or Instagram who share an interesting article. Or people I know from other contexts.

I have also followed a lot of people whose posts are featured in The River Crow’s excellent series, Friday Foraging.

In this post, I am going to share a list of the people whose blogs I am following on WordPress. (The title is from #FollowFriday on Twitter)

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Review: Tolkien Movie

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 2 Comments

I really enjoyed the movie Tolkien but found some of it to be odd. I get that biographical movies have to truncate, elide, and simplify, but they should be true to their subject. Overall this was a very enjoyable film, and Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins were great as Tolkien and Edith. A fine performance from Adam Bregman as Geoffrey Bache Smith, too.

Spoilers after the jump…

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Wonder and delight: Tolkien and Pagan ideas

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 17 Comments

JRR Tolkien loved ancient Pagan mythology, especially Norse mythology. He also loved trees, flowers, rivers and streams, mountains, woods, and landscape generally. His writing is infused with a love of Nature, as well as an in-depth knowledge of ancient cultures and mythologies. He was, however, a Catholic, both by upbringing and conviction. He wrote his legendarium as a supporting world for his invented languages; though the earliest version was intended “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own”.

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Thoughts on Planet Narnia

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 4 Comments

Brenton Dickinson has an interesting post up about his upcoming critique of Michael Ward’s theory that the Narnia books were written to illustrate the ideas of medieval planetary astrology (one book per planet). I read a bit about Planet Narnia when it came out, but have never got around to reading it, partly because I can see that the books have planetary symbolism now that it’s been pointed out, but it is not the main point of the books.

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