#Tolkien in a letter to Christopher, 7-8 November 1944: "I coined the word eucatastrophe: the sudden happy turn in a story.... It produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth...a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back."
Tolkien described the feeling after listening to a sermon with daughter Priscilla (Prisca) in St. Gregory's. He also met an old vagrant in rags with a tin can, gazing into the distance in some rapt thought, "Looked a great deal more like St. Joseph than the statue in the church."
I love this letter because, when he used words like "as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back" and "it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled," I feel like he put into words what I understood deeply but found it hard to explain.
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Chocolate was once associated with witchcraft in colonial Latin America. Women traditionally prepared chocolate for drink and folk medicine, so there was fear that they practiced witchcraft through chocolate, making them subjects of Inquisition's crackdown. 1/8 #FolkloreSunday
Chocolate was known as the "food of gods" and currency in ancient times. According to legend, Aztec emperor Montezuma II drank gallons of it daily for vitality. Chocolate was also consumed for strength in giving birth and menopause, or staying awake for rituals and revelries. 2/8
Women traditionally prepared chocolate drink and the association carried as the Inquisition purged "heretical practices", including folk medicine. Historian Martha Few said that many testimonies featured chocolate, like those who feared women put potion in their morning cup. 3/8
Letters from Father Christmas originates from Tolkien's tradition of writing illustrated letters to his children every Christmas, from 1920 to 1943, making them look like they come from a figure called "Father Christmas". 1/8
A 🧵for #BookWormSat #Christmas and #Tolkien
Every letter described Father Christmas' adventures in the North Pole, with squiggly handwriting and special stamps and envelopes to make them look real. In this first letter (1920), he reassured John Tolkien that he'd deliver toys to Oxford and drew his house for him. 2/8
Over time, Tolkien added new characters, from Ilbereth the Elf secretary to North Polar Bear and two bear cubs, describing and drawing their shenanigans, like when the bear slipped while carrying a pile of gifts or falling (again!) when fixing the damaged roof. 3/8
Without Christopher Tolkien (21 November 1924 - 16 January 2020), the world of #Tolkien studies and our understanding of his vast expanse of imagination would not have been like now.
A thread of birthday appreciation for #TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday 1/13
📷: Josh Dolgin
Christopher was Tolkien's number one fan, the one who understood his father's work after Tolkien himself. Starting from listening to tales of Bilbo Baggins as a kid, he assisted Tolkien in drawing maps and giving feedback during the 15-year gestation of Lord of the Rings. 2/13
He briefly served in Royal Air Force, but it didn't stop his contribution to Tolkien's writing in LOTR, since his father kept sending him parts of LOTR manuscripts. In 1945, he joined The Inklings literary club following Tolkien, where he read parts of LOTR manuscripts. 3/13
19 fiction books by Palestinian authors: novels, short stories, and folktales.
1. My First and Only Love (2021) by Shahar Khalifeh. Nidal, an elderly exile, recounts the story when the 1948 Nakba scattered her family; a story of love and resistance from the eyes of a young girl.
2. Salt Houses (2017) by Hala Alyan.
A story of four generations of the Yacoubs, a middle-class family in Palestine, beginning in Nablus in 1963. It focuses on migration and the struggle between staying connected with one's traditions and still finding a home in a new country.
3. Minor Detail (2017) by Adania Shibli.
This caused a stir after Frankfurt Book Fair canceled the award ceremony for the author. It depicts tragedies shared by a Bedouin-Palestinian girl in 1949 and a woman from modern-day Ramallah who read the girl's fate in newspaper archive.
Chocolate was once associated with witchcraft in colonial Latin America. Women traditionally prepared chocolate for drink and folk medicine, so there was fear that they practiced witchcraft through chocolate, making them subjects of Inquisition's crackdown.
#FolkloreSunday 1/8
Chocolate was known as the "food of gods" and currency in ancient times. According to legend, Aztec emperor Montezuma II drank gallons of it daily for vitality. Chocolate was also consumed for strength in giving birth and menopause, or staying awake for rituals and revelries. 2/8
Women traditionally prepared chocolate drink and the association carried as the Inquisition purged "heretical practices", including folk medicine. Historian Martha Few said that many testimonies featured chocolate, like those who feared women put potion in their morning cup. 3/8
In Tolkien's works, Faerie is seen as the land of endless beauty and peril. Humility is required here, or disasters strike. The concept is also present in Hutan Larangan ("forbidden forest"), prevalent in various cultures in Indonesia. 1/8
A 🧵for #Tolkien and #FolkloreSunday
In Tolkien's early writing, an explorer, Eriol, was about to enter a tiny magical house called the Cottage of Lost Play. The house asked him to will himself to be as tiny as the "little folk" to enter. We can read it as a test of Eriol's humility. 2/8
🎨: Amani Warrington
One of Tolkien's "fairy poems" showed the consequence of acting with arrogance when you got a chance to enter the Faerie: the unnamed narrator was reduced to a rambling wreck, suffering an indescribable feeling of loss. 3/8