Tolkien on Adaptations
"The canons of narrative in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies." —J.R.R. Tolkien From September 6th to 9th,...
The Languages of the Second Age
J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium is a remarkable piece of world-building, even moreso at the time The Lord of the Rings was published than today, when terms such as "world-building" have entered our lexicon, largely through attempts to imitate Tolkien, or some of his many imitators. Tolkien's...
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Onomastics
[caption id="attachment_16984" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) gazes at a broken sword he holds in his hand, in a publicity photo from Amazon Studios' upcoming "The Rings of Power" series.[/caption] "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." —Phil Karlton I once...
Translation Conventions in Tolkien and Tolkien Adaptations
The past is a foreign country. —L. P. Hartley My corollary to this rather well-known quote is: "The past is a foreign language," and I like it well enough that sometimes I forget it was not the original quote. When watching films and television shows set in...