Alas, not me

A question posted online in a private group set me thinking about which hand Frodo wears the One Ring on. During The Lord of the Rings  Frod...

  This essay first appeared back in November and December of 2021 as five separate posts, which I have now decided to combine into one, whil...

Pity, Power, and Tolkien's Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many  now has a publication date -- 12/12/2023 -- and an ISBN: 9781606354711 . A fe...

Gandalf and Frodo's argument over Bilbo's pity and mercy and the death which they agree Gollum deserves versus the healing the wizar...

'Good night, Frodo! [said Bilbo] Bless me, but it has been good to see you again! There are no folk like hobbits after all for a real go...

In discussing Bilbo joining Frodo on the journey to Elvenhome, Tolkien comments in Letter 246 (p. 328): But [Bilbo] also needed and deserved...

“Good Morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long b...

Previously we have noted that parenthetical commentary appears and disappears as the story grows lighter and darker by turns, and that this ...

  Unsurprisingly, given what we've seen in Parts One , Two , and Three of this post, the narrator includes no lighthearted parenthetica...

As we saw in Part One and Part Two , the number of parenthetical comments rapidly declines from the first chapter onwards. Thirty-two pare...

After the 32 parentheses in A Long-expected Party,  the number in  The Shadow of the Past  plunges to five. Of these one occurs in direct s...

When I first got the idea for this post, my idea was to write it up quickly. The more I looked at the evidence I had gathered (with the welc...

Nowadays I hear people say they are waiting for their Hogwarts letter, which usually is already quite overdue since their eleventh birthday ...

It is easily forgotten that Sam must have witnessed the moment when Frodo wished to strike Bilbo for reaching for the Ring. He arrived just ...