This Creature is Lore

Soon I shall hopefully be remembering to make the 9pm toast to the Professor, on his birthday. This being so close to the new year, it seems a good occasion for reflection upon some fannish stuff.

- I have not been very good about supporting my fellow tertiary-world writers this past year. Some people probably know I had a sort of fannish meltdown closer to the start of 2014, right around the time I was also a B2MeM mod, didn't fulfill my B2MeM writing prompt and pulled only minimal moderatorly duties, etc. This general trend largely persisted throughout the year, due to a comination of RL and discovering what my limits are as far as attempting to participate in fandom outside of LJ and the SWG. It's too late to go back and amend that, but I hope to do a bit better in 2015.

- For almost as long as I can remember, I've had characters living in my head. Sometimes they have almost literally been all I had. They used to be my own characters invented from scratch. Since 2007, they've been my versions of Tolkien's (usually minor) characters. Though in a way these are still my own, my precious, and I'm sure I have used them in ways he would not always have condoned, I owe their existence to this now-deceased pipe-smoking philologist. Even though I haven't written much this year, they are always there, having adventures and mishaps I've yet to put down in words, grudingly channeling my interests and emotions in appropriate symbolic ways that help me to maintain my outward sanity, and sometimes offering instructive thoughts on how to better myself (or serving as unhappy exemplars of what not to do).

- I'm not precisely the hugest Jackson!film fan these days, but I have Peter Jackson's particular brand of fannishness and its results to even thank for the fact that I'm thanking the Professor now. I saw all three of the first trilogy in the theatres with an esrtwhile boyfriend. Thankfully, that philanderer is long gone from my life, but technically, the films are not, since they first prompted me to read the books (which I admittedly found to be very slow going the first time around). Due to Sir Lee's portrayal, the subtleties of which did not escape me, I was a Saruman sympathizer before I even read the books; to be perfectly frank, I'd found out about the character's pre-wizard history via the interwebs well before I even read up to the point where he actually appears in The Two Towers (I think I read TTT in 2005 or so). This probably explains, well, a lot, come to think of it.

I gather that the artist goes by Alllor. I love their style (when one considers my aesthetic sensibilities as reflected in my own artsy shamblings, tihs probably makes sense, and yes my Russian Tolkien fandom fixation is apparently here for the long haul).


Left to right: Olórin, Aiwendil, Curumo. That particular Curumo is the one from The Black Book of Arda. I have possibly mentioned that he is a tragic lunatic genius double-dealer who is obsessed with that chalice (among other things). <3
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ETA - also, have video footage of Christopher Tolkien. It never would have occurred to me to look for this, but I randomly happened upon it.

Okay, done spamming LJ now.  I'd been debating doing this as a Blingee for a while and it suited my mood today.   I also learnt that Blingee is not a site I should be using on a laptop as falling-apart as this is.
I'm going to go ahead and blame Dwim and Wheelrider for this.

if the uncensored version of bats**t offends, apologies.  I usually put uncensored colorful words behind a cut, but I really just didn't feel like cutting this.

Fonstad (Atlas of Middle Earth) posits that Orthanc was hewn into a volcanic plug.  Which seems very sensible.

Especially in light of Pico Cão Grande (São Tomé and Príncipe).  DUDE.

- Watching Tibetan sky burials on youtube totally counts as doing anthropology homework, right?

- Huzzah, new artist!crush. Lucy Nurnberg.

Geography of Death III

- I've been considering the nature of some of Tolkien's inventions I hadn't much thought about before, e.g. Balrogs. 
( Blathering on the nature of the Valaraucar. )

So I was trying to figure out where this bizarre but interesting rendition of Barad-Dûr came from, and I decided it was a good time to test the 'search image on google' add-on for Firefox. 

This tool is rather like the Tineye reverse image search thing, but at the bottom of the google results it also has thumbnails of "visually similar images."  The first one of these seemed to be premised upon the search tool's evident conviction that the Dark Tower resembles a soda bottle:

Behold, Coca-Cola Blāk, the short-lived coffee-flavored soft drink.  They discontinued it because everyone in Mordor was getting too jittery.

(Scroll to the bottom to see the two side by side...I think it also believes the bridge resembles a corkscrew..)

I decided the internet needed to know that I keep seeing Anke Eismann's art floating around and that I think it's pretty cool.  I am extremely fond of angular, severe, vaguely creepy aesthetics.  Her work fits the bill (well, I find many of the eyes a bit too creepy and verging on unsettlingly comical, but if one pretends they don't have eyes...)  Her Faramir actually looks like Faramir's supposed to look *glowers in movie-Faramir's blonde direction*. 

And, this has got to be the only picture of Tom Bombadil I've seen that makes him look imposing and reverend even as he still looks kinda goofy and cuddly.  Impressive.  --->  It won't allow direct links to the image, it's about one third of the way down this page.

I didn't have a Tom Bombadil tag before now?  For some reason, this perplexes me..

There has been quite the hubbub around
( [possible spoiler for those trying to avoid all info about the films] )
in the upcoming Hobbit films.  I have opinions, my main one being that there's not yet enough info to have a fixed opinion one way or another.  I also have other opinions.  I sense an essay coming on, someday when I have time.