The Marquis de Leech

Taxation is a political decision, and ought to be treated as such. Ditto monetary policy - I have a heartfelt loathing for the Reserve Bank Act 1989 on democratic grounds. Anyway, local council elections in New Zealand are bad news for the Left. My own home town has gone back to the old Tartan Mafia for the first time in three decades.

Dwarven forge fires would be hotter than Orodruin. This wasn't a matter of heat, but rather of magic - the One Ring was created there, so it could only be destroyed there. In other news, I have just finished a re-read of the Finnish Kalevala, and have some thoughts on its role in influencing Tolkien: Kalevala Comments: Tolkien Influences and the Translations.

I don't think I'll catch that total - I'm limited by the stockpile of my local library, and the fact that the ones I haven't read are invariably ones from her last twenty years, when everyone thinks she wasn't as good.

Now fifty Agatha Christies (26 Poirots, 8 Marples, 13 stand-alones, 3 Tommy/Tuppences). I was saving Curtain for this particular landmark.

A look at character suicide in Tolkien

Can I also note that it's a crying shame Christie didn't dabble more in Horror? She had far more talent for that than in the mediocre thrillers she kept putting out at various intervals.

And another story out. Of Tin and Tintagel (5800-words about... tin) is out as part of the Spring 2022 edition of New Maps Magazine: https://www.new-maps.com/news/2022/05/spring-2022-issue-out/

Finished my 40th Agatha Christie book. Yay. (That'd be 23 Poirots, 5 Marples, 10 Stand-alones, and 2 Tommy/Tuppences).

New story out (The Night of Parmenides) as part of Aftermath, the 2022 SpecFicNZ anthology: https://specfic.nz/2022/04/27/aftermath-tales-of-survival-in-aotearoa-new-zealand/

Short stories are great fun. If you need help looking for a market, try the Submission Grinder: https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/Search/ByFilter

Best of luck. The Hobbit is a quick, easy read. The Lord of the Rings starts in a similar vein, but gets heavier as time goes on. I'm guessing you've seen the films, so you might notice various discrepancies. Then have a go at the Lord of the Rings appendices. That will be a key source for the upcoming Amazon series, while also being a good test of whether you want to try The Silmarillion at some point.

I must say, if that star is Eärendil, he's really wanting to get away from his wife this time... Anyway, I can report another look at in-universe text authorship. This time trying to make sense of the mess that is The Grey Annals (HOME XI), one of the foundational pillars of the published Silmarillion: Sourcing the Sources: Who Wrote the Grey Annals?

I can report that I've just finished a mammoth (14,000 word) look at the implicit historical bias within the Akallabeth: Elendil the Insufferable Lying Bastard - Part One Elendil the Insufferable Lying Bastard - Part Two Elendil the Insufferable Lying Bastard - Part Three Elendil the Insufferable Lying Bastard - Part Four

Finished my 25th Agatha Christie today (17 Poirots, 2 Marples, 6 stand-alones).

Watsonian explanation: Providence. Doylist explanation: It makes more a more exciting story. George RR Martin uses this trope too of course. It's very, very common in fiction, because it increases the stakes.

The podcast of my review of The Nature of Middle-earth is now out. Unfortunately the audio is pretty terrible at my end: Reading Tolkien: The Nature of Middle-earth

Putting Eöl on trial, and acting as his defence lawyer: Sinda's Advocate: Defending Eol It's an intellectual exercise, but Dear Eru, I feel dirty afterwards.

Extending the Siege of Angband would have indeed resolved so many difficulties, and it is truly bizarre that it never occurred to Tolkien that that might have been preferable to, say, Noldorin Eol. (Oh, and I'd like to take this opportunity to complain that Hostetter's appendices really shouldn't have been appended to an "official" book).

Essentially, we get a look at what Round World Arda would have meant, so far as the Elvish origin story goes. That is all greatly extended, and that mysterious origin story from The War of the Jewels get built upon. For instance, Ingwe, Finwe, and Elwe are all established as being quite far down the family tree - and both Finwe (Miriel could learn more) and Elwe (moving to Valinor is a temporary idea) have varying motivations. Then there's the Eastern Orcs, who rejected Sauron's overlordship, and indeed mocked him for his Annatar disguises. And Feanor doing metal-prospecting in Beleriand before getting himself killed. It's really the strange little nuggets like these that make the book interesting. My biggest criticism is that by trying to make everything so neat and tidy, Tolkien was taking the myth out of his own mythos.

I've read the thing (wound up doing an interview with a podcaster about it - not yet released). It's both interesting and immensely frustrating. The contortions that Tolkien went through in order to put everything on a coherent chronological footing are mental - Tolkien was literally pondering making Eol into a Noldo, just to make Maeglin's age fit. There is a sense of sadness that the author was spending his last decade in what amounted to a dead-end of world-building. On the other hand, the Numenorean material is excellent, and really helps flesh out the island.

A short story of mine to end the year - on pages 117 to 122: https://777e51b3-8330-4e63-85de-d3272089b883.filesusr.com/ugd/97c387_dd179b71b8ea40e39dfa891c0a173474.pdf

As a heads up, the National Library of New Zealand has decided to donate 400,000 books to the Internet Archive for digitalisation. This is causing some understandable concern among authors about copyright infringement: https://societyofauthors.org/News/News/2021/November/Internet-Archive-a-warning-to-authors

Just finished another essay: Misopogon: In Defence of Beards Among Tolkien's Elves and Men

Been going on a bit of an Agatha Christie dive this past couple of months. Just finished The Big Four, which is truly bizarre - Christie's attempt at a tacky spy thriller, with Poirot inserted. (Funny thing. Though I'm not the sort of reader who can solve her mysteries by in-story clues alone, I am sufficiently on the ball with Christie's use of literary tropes to make a reasonable guess who the murderer is. I'm still patting myself on the back for spotting what was going on in Peril at End House half-way through the book).

Tolkien's words are ambiguous here - and the book certainly treats the WK as gone. "The Age of the World" thing is just poetic phrasing, I think. Not meant to be taken literally. Especially since the WK was obviously gone after the Ring's destruction.