Inspired by my last post, here's how #Tolkien got carried away and made a mistake:
The Book of Mazarbul is a manuscript compilation recording the fate of Balin and his Dwarves that the Fellowship of the Ring found and read in Moria.
1/21
@TolkienSociety @theoneringnet @JRRTolkien It is described this way:
"It had been slashed and stabbed and partly burned, and it was so stained with black and other dark marks like old blood that little of it could be read. Gandalf lifted it carefully, but the leaves crackled and broke as he laid it on the slab…
2/21

THREAD: The scene below from the @LOTRonPrime trailer brought to mind #Tolkien’s the Hill of the Slain (Haudh-en-Ndengin in Sindarin) the memorial of the “Battle of Unnumbered Tears” the Elves fought against Morgoth in the First Age. Art: Ted Nasmith 1/11
#RingsOfPower #LOTRROP The monument first appears in the ‘Book of Lost Tales’, written c. 1916-18, where it is named
‘the Hill of Death’, is described as the ‘greatest cairn in the world’, and it is made
by the sons of Feanor, who arrive late and find their kin slaughtered (Lost Tales I: 241). 2/11

THREAD: Re-reading Marina Warner’s (@marina_warn) From the Beast to the Blonde, in preparation of welcoming her to @UofGlasgow and @UofGFantasy soon for @OnceFantasies! Her emphasis on transformation in fairy tales really foregrounds the affordances of fantasy:
1/6
#OnceFuture For Warner, metamorphosis/shape-shifting/change, defines the fairy-tale. The wonders of the fairy-tale “disrupt the apprehensible world in order to open spaces for dreaming alternatives” - a lot of common ground with many definitions of fantasy/the fantastic here.
2/6
#OnceFuture

THREAD🧵We don’t know if #Tolkien read Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (no evidence he even knew of it) but thinking about Nathaniel Chanticleer and Bilbo Baggins, both middle-class, middle-aged, unlikely/reluctant heroes, going there + back again, 1/7
@TolkienSociety @UofGFantasy and returning having lost their respectability but having gained something more important, makes one wonder… 2/7
(Art above👆by Michael Herring and David Wenzel)
(Below👇 first edition covers)

Do you remember this iconic scene from Peter Jackson’s The #LordoftheRings? I think it’s visual origins go back to the early 20th century, long before #Tolkien ever thought about hobbits and Black Riders! THREAD 🧵👇 1/12
@TolkienSociety @theoneringnet @UofGFantasy @JRRTolkien In the film, the hobbits hide away as they hear a horse approaching. They’ve found the perfect hiding spot, the root of a tree, but it’s touch-and-go! They’re nearly discovered! 2/12

For @FolkloreThurs’s #wild men theme: in #Tolkien’s hapless Túrin Turambar 3 myths collide: Kullervo (Finnish), Sigurd (Old Norse) + Oedipus (Greek). Oedipus is important not only for the incest motif
1/6
#FolkloreThursday @TolkienSociety
Art: @TedNasmith, Akseli Gallen-Kallela but also because of his movement from wilderness to city. Abandoned as an infant in Mount Cithaeron (wilderness), Oedipus moves from Corinth (city), to the cross-roads (wilderness, where he unwittingly kills his father)...
2/6
#FolkloreThursday @FolkloreThurs @TolkienSociety

I've been asked several times today to give my view on this so here it goes. First things first, there are links between Middle-earth and the history of Europe but not in any way this thread suggests. 1/13
@TolkienSociety @theoneringnet @JRRTolkien

https://twitter.com/Robkearney1981/status/1294803278354681856

There is no such quotation in Tolkien's published works - unless the author of this thread or the article they cite have access to unpublished letters/manuscripts by Tolkien (and permission to quote from them):

https://twitter.com/Robkearney1981/status/1294806375479021568

2/13

THREAD for @FolkloreThurs’s #Underworld + #underground theme: Katabasis (descent to an underworld) is common in classical myth + lit, e.g. Odysseus, Aeneas, and Orpheus visit the Underworld. But this mythological theme is also prominent in fantasy literature:
#FolkloreThursday Examples: in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, Ged + Arran journey to the Dry Land of the dead to discover why magic is “thinning” in Earthsea. Resisting the desire for immortality (or rather serial longevity) is key in Le Guin’s mythos.
@FolkloreThurs #FolkloreThursday

4th #Tolkien session @IMC_Leeds: “J.R.R. Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches”.
First up: Andrzej Wicher: “How Christian is The Lord of the Rings?: Tolkien’s Work Seen in the Context of the Biblical and Theological Tradition” @TolkienSociety @UofGFantasy Wicher’s main thesis is that the more Tolkien tries to avoid religion in The #LordOfTheRings, the more he ends up including it. He begins with Tertullian and the idea of Christianity as a paradox. @IMC_Leeds #IMC2019 @TolkienSociety

3rd #Tolkien session @IMC_Leeds: “Materiality in Tolkien’s Medievalism, III”!
First up: @EMuellerHarder on “Tolkien’s Elvish and Archaic First Map of Middle-Earth: Lost Connections in Space and Time” @TolkienSociety @UofGFantasy #IMC2019 @EMuellerHarder: Ptolemaic cartography as leaning towards modern cartography - still, how about chorography in medieval cartography? (Attempt to represent the world based on experience and experience) @IMC_Leeds @TolkienSociety @UofGFantasy #IMC2019

2nd #Tolkien session @IMC_Leeds: “Materiality in Tolkien’s Medievalism, II”
First up: Gaëlle Abaléa on “Corpses, Tomb, and Barrows: The Materiality of Death in Tolkien” @TolkienSociety @UofGFantasy #IMC2019 How are people in Middle-earth dealing with death? Abaléa is drawing upon Louis-Vincent Thomas’s “Les Chairs de la mort” in her analysis.

1st #Tolkien session @IMC_Leeds: “Materiality in Tolkien’s Medievalism, I”!
First up: Kristine Larsen on “Medieval Automata and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Gondolin” @TolkienSociety @UofGFantasy Larsen is talking us through the sort-of-mechanical dragons in the Fall of Gondolin. Are they mechanistic dragons? Surreal hybrids of beast and machine? Are they related to WWI tanks? #IMC2019 @TolkienSociety @UofGFantasy

A thread on doing the #PhD you love regardless of what’s “trendy” or “canonical”. #phdchat
Mine was on J.R.R. #Tolkien, nearly 15 years ago. I had an amazing supervisor who was nearly taught philology by #Tolkien at Oxford (he missed him by a year!) My thesis became this book: What got me thinking about this was this blog post by friend and #Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff, best known from the 2-volume History of the Hobbit (an edition of all Hobbit manuscripts with notes): sacnoths.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-reme…

THREAD: For @FolkloreThurs’s #worldreligions theme, and since it was the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God yesterday, here are some unusual icons of the Virgin Mary in the Eastern Orthodox tradition: 1st the scene of the Dormition by El Greco in Syros #FolkloreThursday 2nd: the three-handed Madonna (Παναγία Τριχερούσα) belonged, according to tradition, to John of Damascus in the 8th century and is believed to be wonderworking. It’s now in the monastery of Hilander in Mount Athos @FolkloreThurs #FolkloreThursday #worldreligions #medievaltwitter

Brad Eden on “A Man of His Time?: Tolkien and the Edwardian Worldview” #s849 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds #Tolkien Eden will take us through ideas and concepts of the Edwardian cultural milieu that he hopes will inspire further research on #Tolkien’s cultural context. #s849 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds #Tolkien

Claudio Testi on “Frodo Surrealist: André Breton and J. R. R. Tolkien on Dreams” #s849 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds Testi argues that there are surrealist moments in The #LordoftheRings via dreams. Breton’s manifesto attempted to merge reality and dreams via surrealism. He also talked about dreaming while awake. #s849 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds

Joshua Richards on “Tolkien’s Agrarianism in its Time” #s849 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds #Tolkien Richards: can we really accept that the early Middle-earth is the same as the later one? Themes may be the same, but the socio-cultural context is different. Focus on one version of Middle-earth in this paper: the earliest #LordoftheRings drafts. #s849 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds

Anna Vaninskaya on “Longing for Death: Tolkien and Sehnsucht” #s849 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds #Tolkien Vaninskaya will focus on the recurrent motif in #Tolkien of the desire to voyage to Elvenhome via the concept of Sehnsucht (Longing) #s849 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds

.@LelieFairy on “Hobbits: The Un-Recorded People of Middle-Earth” #s749 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds .@LelieFairy: what do hobbits know about the world outside the Shire? In The Hobbit Bilbo knows very little, and so does the reader. In The #LordoftheRings Tolkien world have had two sort of readers: those who knew The Hobbit and those who didn’t. #IMC2018 #s749 @IMC_Leeds

.@krisswank on “Eldest: Tom Bombadil and Fintan Mac Bóchra” #s749 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds .@krisswank: Tom Bombadil has much in common with Fintan Mac Bóchra of the Irish tradition. In an early prose fragment Tom B is “one of the oldest inhabitants of the kingdom” after the Britain had suffered many invasions. #s749 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds

#Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches, I: first up, Andrzej Wicher on “Some Boethian Themes as Tools of Characterization in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings” #s749 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds Wicher links Théoden’s lethargy with the amnesia/lethargy that Lady Philosophy can heal in Boethius #s749 #IMC2018 @IMC_Leeds