Variants of Unknown Significance
My gynecologist won’t stop bothering me about getting a genetic test done.
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Posts Tagged: Lord of the Rings
Let Go the Reins: Talking with H. S. Cross
H. S. Cross discusses her new novel, GRIEVOUS.
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Moving Targets
Love twists itself into fear, into statistics, into things people can live with.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Straw House
“It’s not healthy, how you live. People aren’t meant to sleep all day. We need the sun. We’re meant to live in the sun.”
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Mr. Clarke, the Real Hero of Stranger Things
He’s the teacher who encourages questions beyond the class assessment, who always gets his students to open the “Curiosity Door.”
...moreNew(ish) Tolkien Book Coming in 2017
Beren and Lúthien, a Middle-earth story about forbidden love between an Elven woman and human man, based famously on Tolkien’s own love for his wife, is set to be published as its own title in 2017, on the 100-year anniversary since the two characters first appeared in a Tolkien story. The story is to be […]
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #29: Literary Bitches
All too often, it gets hurled at strong women like a boulder of hate tied up with a big red misogynistic bow.
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Is Gender F***ing with Our Fantasies?
To lift the censorship, degradation, and foreclosure of girls’ fantasies, we may have to investigate the gendered limitations on how we think about early loves, impulses, celebrity crushes, and maybe, sexually stirring gentleman pirates.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Heirlooms
The strings of our DNA mark us as one, but it’s the roots of our memories that bind us.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval
I have learned to put myself, my ego, to one side and truly experience someone else’s poetry.
...moreSave the Children
Graeme Whiting, headmaster of the Acorn School (motto: “Have courage for the truth”) of Nailsworth, Great Britain, recently published a blog post condemning “sensational” fantasy novels such as the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Hunger Games series that feature “dark,” “insensitive,” and “addictive” subjects. At the LA Times, Michael Schaub wrote about the […]
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The Slow Fall of the Hot Heroine
If nothing else, it’s the opinion of other women that encroaches on mine. Resemblances spark my joy; differences become character flaws.
...moreA World Without Hope
At Salon, Gerry Canavan compares the bleakness of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to the gain and loss of hope in Star Wars: Star Wars has always been, in the EU at least, a universe more or less without hope, that only looked hopeful to casual fans because they were looking too closely at just a very […]
...moreYou’re Such a Gollum
A man is facing two years in prison after comparing Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the Lord of the Rings character, Gollum. However, the judge in the case isn’t sure that the comparison is really an insult: The judge adjourned the case to February and despatched…two academics, two behavioural scientists or psychologists and an expert […]
...moreWalking the Road Into Mordor
A Tolkien scholar writes about how he fought off a lawsuit from the Tolkien Estate: I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and put my research skills to work on my defense. Unfortunately, the case law was sparse. The only similar case I found was The Estate of S. Morgenstern v. William Goldman over the latter’s […]
...moreGenealogy of Hobbits and Hiawatha
Through his research for an article for the journal Tolkien Studies, John Garth believes he has discovered a surprising source text for several episodes from Middle Earth: Longfellow’s trochaic epic, “The Song of Hiawatha.” The dragon Smaug has long been associated with the hoard-dragons of ancient Icelandic sagas; Garth suggests that the particular manner of […]
...moreGandolf Would Not Imbibe Pumpkin Spice
According to Pobst, who worked on the Xbox version of 2002′s The Fellowship of the Ring adventure game, initially there were going to be pumpkin patches in the Shire and “the Tolkien Enterprises people went nuts about it,” to the point where production had to be shut down while the pumpkins were removed. The reason? […]
...moreOut of the Binders and Into the Refrigerators
The success of The Magicians trilogy stems in part from its self-awareness. Lev Grossman wields his familiarity with fantasy genre fiction to critique and alter the usual formula. So why do his female characters all serve the same purpose? …he’d almost certainly be familiar with the infamous tradition of “Women in Refrigerators,” coined by comic […]
...moreNobody Tell Gollum About This
“Among those who bear the name of Senicianus to none grant health until he bring back the ring to the temple of Nodens.” It sounds like it comes from a fantasy novel, but it’s a real inscription regarding a real ring found in a Roman site in England. It did, however, inspire J. R. R. […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Fake Out
Rumpus blogger Rick Moody posted a comment to my recent post about Lord of the Rings asking whether the special effects of that film still held up. I got to thinking about why we accept some special effects as cool even when we can tell they’re fake while we turn up our noses at other […]
...moreThe Eyeball: Lord of the Rings
Last Friday I was laid up with some kind of nasty stomach bug that left me prone most of the day. What better time than to revisit Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring? It was literally the first thing my hand fell upon when I nauseously pawed at my DVD cabinet looking […]
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