Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers

Word on Fire publishers deserve congratulation for producing such a handsome and well-made volume Holly Ordway. Tolkien's Faith: a spiritual biography. Words on Fire: Washington, DC, USA. 20...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/03/review-of-tolkiens-faith-spiritual.html

The main benefit of this new, expanded, version of the original 1981 selection of The Letters of JRR Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien; is that it induced me to "read ...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/03/notice-of-expanded-but-underwhelming.html

For JRR Tolkien, "elvishness " is a quality that first entered Mankind by heredity from the rare "interbreeding" of Men with Elves; especially Beren and Luthien, Tuor and Idril and Aragorn and Ar...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-elvish-strain-in-mankind-and.html

From letter 97b, of the 2023, expanded, edition of Letters by JRR Tolkien*:  Mother discovered her small daughter drawing. "What are you drawing, darling" said she. "I am drawing God."  ...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-joke-quoted-by-jrrt.html

I have recently discovered the excellent Fadedpage  web site; which is done by volunteers, and provides free, high quality, downloadable e-books from a variety of authors in the public domain of...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/02/free-high-quality-e-books-of-charles.html

Of course I do not enjoy everything by JRR Tolkien that has been published; but - with one exception - I do find all his works (finished and incomplete) to be worthwhile and respect-worthy...  ...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/02/valedictory-address-only-published.html

JRR Tolkien. The Notion Club Papers - in "Sauron Defeated" The History of Middle Earth Volume 9, HarperCollins: London, 1993.   . The Danes attack Porlock that night. They are driven o...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/02/broad-relic-in-notion-club-papers-is.html

Christopher Tolkien published the surviving material of The Notion Club Papers (in The History of Middle Earth - Volume Nine) in two parts, each of which has a particular character who serves as ...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/01/ramer-contra-lowdham-comparing-tolkiens.html

When I first read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings some half century ago, I didn't much enjoy the poetry - mostly because I did not enjoy any poetry at all at that time in my life.  Or, mor...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-adventures-of-tom-bombadil-and.html

From Beowulf and the Critics by JRR Tolkien, edited by Michael DC Drout, 2002.  Tolkien located civilization in the masculine institutions of the Beowulf poet (in particular the bright hall)...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/12/jrr-tolkien-beowulf-and-nature-of-this.html

The recent collection of Tolkien's Numenor material into a single volume The Fall of Numenor (edited by Brian Sibley, 2022) has triggered considerable further thought concerning one of Tolkien's...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/11/numenor-and-insufficiency-of-mortal.html

From The name Nodens by JRR Tolkien - Report on the excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and post-Roman sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Reports of the Research Committee of the Society o...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/11/a-note-on-silver-handed-nodens-and-tar.html

I have a strong, and still increasing, conviction that we ought to move away-from the kind of impersonal abstraction that has been characteristic of spiritual, mystical, meditative and prayer lif...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/11/experiencing-spiritual-contact-with-jrr.html

Since the Christian churches are thoroughly corrupted and converged to totalitarianism, and Christian evangelism has proved all-but useless in The Modern West; our best hope perhaps lies in incul...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/11/jrr-tolkien-cs-lewis-and-wanting-heaven.html

"For landing on a new planet, you've got your choice: miracle; magic; or sticking to normal probability, the only known or likely way in which any one has ever landed on a world."  "'Oh! So yo...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/10/space-travel-in-notion-club-papers-by.html

If we assume that because Final Participation  (FP) is our destiny, what God wants from us at this stage of things; then perhaps it ought not to be impossibly difficult or rare. Perhaps we shoul...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/10/tolkiens-subcreation-is-more-or-less.html

Nick Groom. Twenty-first century Tolkien: What Middle Earth means to us today. Atlantic Books: London, 2023. pp xxiii, 451. Nick Groom, the author of Twenty-first century Tolkien, approaches To...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/09/review-of-twenty-first-century-tolkien.html

I first came across Charles Williams in Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings (1979) which I read in 1987, while living a somewhat Inklings-like life; researching English, and a Don in Durham Castl...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/08/charles-williams-city-of-god-and-this.html

Some people have badly misunderstood The Shire as some kind of an 'anarchy'; with the implication that a lack of much in the way of formal government  mistakenly-equated with a condition of unco...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-shire-was-not-anarchy-nor-did-it.html

The transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinit...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/07/why-i-found-it-necessary-to-revise.html

JRR Tolkien. The Battle of Maldon, together with The homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's son, and The Tradition of Versification in Old English. Edited by Peter Grybauskas. HarperCollins: Lon...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/07/review-of-battle-of-maldon-by-jrr.html

Simon Blaxland-de Lange. Owen Barfield: Romanticism come of age. Temple Lodge Publishing: Forest Row, UK, 2006/ Second Edition 2021. pp. xvii, 367.  Blaxland-de Lange's is the only biography o...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/06/romanticism-come-of-age-second-edition.html

Eventually fell into a vague dream, in which he seemed to be looking out of a high window over a dark sea of tangled trees. Down below among the roots there was the sound of creatures crawling a...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/06/frodos-dream-of-elf-tower-in-crickhollow.html

'We will come', said Imrahil; and they parted with courteous words.  'That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,' said Legolas. 'If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-trade-off-between-life-and-works.html

A few days ago, I stumbled across a new unabridged audiobook version of JRR Tolkien's seminal essay On Fairy Stories , published on the website of Catholic Culture Audiobooks .  The superb per...

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2023/05/tolkiens-on-fairy-stories-audiobook.html