. Alas, not me: Star Trek
Showing posts with label Star Trek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Trek. Show all posts

31 July 2022

Hailing Frequencies Closed -- Nichelle Nichols (1932-2022)

Lieutenant Uhura



Damn it. 

When I was a little boy, Uhura always struck me as so calm, so perfectly poised, and so completely on top of everything she had to do. Even in those episodes when they tried to make her act scared, that never seemed to fit her character. I never bought it. Now, when she had to play her part in Mirror, Mirror, fending off evil Sulu and tricking him, she did it with such sang froid and such charm -- that was Uhura all over. That was the Uhura I knew.

Yet there was more. Something seemed to emanate from her that I can only call beauty. I don't mean her looks -- though she certainly had the looks, and that silky voice -- but it was something that came from within which told you you were in the presence of someone very special and good. If anyone tries to tell me that this was just acting, I won't believe you. But if it was just acting, Nichelle Nichols was as stunning an actress as I have ever seen.

I didn't know anything about what she meant to others, to men and women of color in my own country and in other places. How could I? I was an eight year old white kid from a middle-class family. I had pretty much everything. Including hope. Maybe it was her cool competence playing itself out against the backdrop of the riotous  1960s in the United States that gave me this hope that we had somehow turned a corner, that what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature had prevailed, that the heart and words of Martin Luther King had rung in a new dream for us all. Lieutenant Uhura, I think, was one of those better angels to me.

I didn't know then, or learn for years afterwards, of the role Martin Luther King had played in keeping Nichelle Nichols from quitting Star Trek. That blew my mind as much he did and as Uhura did. It seemed to reaffirm what they stood for, and what I think I suspected even as a little boy watching Star Trek: that the future I saw every week on the bridge of the Enterprise was the promised land that King told us that we would all one day get to. Because it isn't the promised land unless every last one of us is there.

Lately all that hope seems so far away. I don't know that I believe in a promised land any more. I don't know that I can still sing that anthem of my youth in a land that is forgotten. Every day more of us seem to bear the mark of Cain. Every day more seem proud to wear it. Every day more seem proud to declare that we are not our brother's keeper. But the seed of Cain is monstrous. It can never do more than live in darkness and rail against the light.

When I saw that Nichelle Nichols had died, I wanted to weep, something I never do for people I don't know who have lived long, long lives. I keep choking up as I write this. But is it because there is no hope or because I have lost the courage to dare to hope in the face of darkness?

I don't know. The odds don't seem too good right now. But then I think of Uhura, so cool and brave and smart, and she reminds me of my favorite line by her, delivered as she sends Kirk and others off to rescue Spock from death itself: 'All my hopes.'

 



All our hopes, Ms. Nichols, all our hopes.


11 September 2017

The evolution of a commonplace

I discovered Tolkien when I was eleven and, as you've probably gathered, I rather liked his work. From then until I went to college seven years later, I read The Lord of the Rings probably three times a year. When I got to college I meant to study English as well as Classics, but to go to graduate school and write a dissertation on Tolkien. I must have mentioned this to someone on the English Faculty because somebody, I no longer remember whom, made it clear to me how very little chance there was that I would be allowed to write such a dissertation, and how doing so would be academic suicide. As I said, I don't recall who told me this or whether it was meant kindly or contemptuously, but it was enough to decide not to be an English Major.

Fifteen or so years later, with a doctorate in Classics firmly stitched into the lining of my then spiffy ego, I was sitting in a paper session at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (then called The American Philological Association) listening to another young scholar answer questions about his paper. He was doing fine. His paper had been good, and he had handled the questions deftly. Then he chose to illustrate a point he was making by reference to an episode of Star Trek. Again, I don't recall the particulars, but I remember recognizing (as a lifelong Trekker) that the allusion he was making was absolutely appropriate to his subject, but utterly wrong for this audience. As I was thinking "No, no, no, don't pick that", I felt the room slip away from him.

Another twenty-five years down the line, popular culture has a much wider acceptance within the academic world. Indeed the flowering of disciplines unheard of as little as three decades ago astonishes me. Some of them speak to me, and some don't. Some I don't understand at all, but understanding is not necessary. Not everyone that speaks, speaks to me. Not every message is meant for me. That's okay. I try not to be so arrogant as to think that something has no value if I don't understand it or like it. 

But recently I was chatting with someone about a forthcoming article on Tolkien I had written, the main title of which is 'These Are Not the Elves You're Looking For', a rather obvious allusion to the famous line in Star Wars: Episode IV: 'These are not the droids you're looking for.' The person I was speaking to suggested that I would be wise to change it, since an allusion to Star Wars might put some people off. 









05 June 2017

Wonder Invoked -- On the Uses of Enchantment



Trying to find my room on day one of Mythmoot



The theme of the most recent Mythmoot --  held just this past weekend in the Khazad-dûm-like corridors of the nevertheless comfortable and welcoming National Conference Center, where the fish entrees were always, fittingly, tasty --  was 'invoking wonder.' To be honest, my eye is a bit jaundiced when it comes to themes, which inspire me to think of (un-)motivational posters about the unstoppable power of one's dreams. But I am too much of a romantic to be anything but an easy prey to cynicism.

And yet I knew exactly where the fair folk of Mythmoot were coming from when they spoke of the importance of wonder and the first moments in their lives that they could recall experiencing it. For me that moment came in or just after September 1966, when I heard the words "Space, the final frontier...." for the first time.  There was something about the music and the way William Shatner said these words that moved me, that opened vistas of space and time for me the way the words "Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast" did for Tolkien, and "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead" did for C. S. Lewis.

Many years later, in an interview after Kirk died in Star Trek: Generations, William Shatner said of the moment of Kirk's death on screen that Kirk "faced death as he had faced all those aliens, which was a mixture of awe and wonderment...." Shatner also said that it did not come through on the screen. It did for me. It was perfectly clear to me, just as the sense of awe and wonder with which Kirk approached "all those aliens" always had been. There were quite a few such moments over the years. There was "second star on the right and straight on till morning at the end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country; there was Kirk's "young, I feel young" at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.


But for me perhaps the most evocative is that sine qua non of Shatner imitations, that speech both famous and infamous, as beloved as belittled, from the episode Return to Tomorrow:



For me, and for my memory, wonder began here. But it's come in a thousand different forms since then, in experiences as well as in books.

  • That beautiful late summer afternoon over two decades ago, as our boat approached the harbor. The was setting sun before us, and the land's violet shadow reaching out towards us. It was drowsy and balmy and I was standing by the transom to enjoy the breeze. My eyes were unfocused but looking over the side at the swells we were soaring through. Then something else moved that wasn't the water. Beside us a humpback whale crested the surface to take a breath. I gasped. Somewhere in my mind the crew of The Pequod were shouting "she breaches", but all I could do was gape. By the time I was able to say anything to the others on board, who were all in the cabin, the whale was gone. 
  • "And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last." (If you don't recognize these words, you're surely reading the wrong blog.)
  • Five years have past; five summers, with the length
    Of five long winters! and again I hear
    These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
    With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
    Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
    That on a wild secluded scene impress
    Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
    The landscape with the quiet of the sky. (Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey)
  • Every night in a chill Vermont winter, with the snow crunching beneath our feet as Argos and I walked past the dark wood, as the trees popped in the frigid air, and the luminous green curtain of the Northern Lights swayed and shimmered around us.
  • The day I saw an eagle lazily pivot 360 degrees on a wingtip, as if he were doing it just because he could.
  • "It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself" (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell).
  • Whenever I discover the joy of silence, sitting by my window with a book, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the leaves of the oak trees.
  • That day underwater in Bonaire, as I looked down at my buddy 30 feet below me, and watched his bubbles rise towards me; and when they came within a couple of feet, I realized I could see my reflection in their surface.
  • The description of the history of the dragon's hoard in Beowulf.
  • The adagio of BWV 1060, especially this version
  • How even now, eleven years after she died, I can still feel the softness and warmth of my mother's hand in mine.
  • The still, small voice that comes after the earthquake, the fire, and the whirlwind.
  • The morning star.
  • The Sea, 
  • And the Sea,
  • And the Sea.
I could easily keep going with this list, since the things on it, and a hundred other things like them, and still others of a joy or sorrow too private to tell, are the things that help me keep going. That's what wonder does. It beckons me onward and bids me hope. Following isn't always an easy thing for me. My eyes tend to look back and rest on the things that went wrong. By all rights I should have turned into a pillar of salt long ago. Yet maybe there's a place where wonder can help to balance past and future. It's a hope like this that has always made me so fond of one particular poem in The Lord of the Rings. Even as a child reading this book for the first time, and knowing nothing of what it's talking about, this poem about wonder moved me. Whether that makes my soul old or prophetic, I don't know. 
I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been; 
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair. 
I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see. 
For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green. 
I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know. 
But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

08 May 2016

Thanks, Ma -- Reflections on how cool my mother was

I saw this image over on Facebook this morning, Mothers' Day, and it reminded me that my mother took me and four of my eleven or twelve year old friends to the very first Star Trek Convention on 22 January 1972 at the old Statler Hilton in New York City. I don't remember much aside from getting to watch The Ultimate Computer and the blooper reel on a big screen, fan art exhibits with lots of space-scapes painted on black velvet -- not to mention the semi-nudes of Lt Uhura and Yeoman Rand that captured my almost pubescent attention, and which my mother made sure we didn't linger near too long -- and I remember her buying us all lunch at a diner, grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, the indulgence of fries and a coke. It was the day I realized that my mother was cool, and cool in my friends' eyes, too. That meant a lot to me then, though the kindness and patience of it means far more to me now. 

But she was cool and kind and patient in so many ways. She also took me to baseball games and to libraries, to the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to book stores and toy stores, to operas and to Broadway plays, to art classes and to skating rinks. She helped me with my homework when I needed help, and made sure I did it even when I didn't. She led me to the well of knowledge and told me how good it tasted. She told me endless stories of her childhood in the 20s and 30s, of being a young woman during the war, of the city as it was then, and of my grandmother's people across the sea. 

She never once complained when she sent me out for a quart of milk and I came back two hours later with the milk, a new book, and no change. The grocery store was across the street, the nearest book store a mile away. She knew I heard a different drum than others heard, and was content to let me follow its beat. She knew that for me all roads led to book stores.

She showed me how to work hard, and how to be true. She showed me what love and tolerance and forgiveness and kindness and duty were all about, and in the best way possible: by her own ceaseless example. She showed me things I am only beginning to understand now, ten years after her death, lessons I cannot even articulate yet, debts I can only hope to pay forward.

Thank you, Ma. You were a jewel among women.



(No, that's not me in the photo.)

04 March 2015

Me, Spock, and Beowulf, All on the Ferry.

In Beowulf, when the hero enters Heorot, the mead hall of King Hrothgar, he is greeted by the king and invited to join them at their feast. Then a man named Unferth, who sits in a position of great honor at the feet of the king, begins to speak, questioning Beowulf in a manner that probes his history and tests his character even as it insults him. Unferth is the king's þyle, his 'orator' or 'spokesman.' Beowulf, unprovoked and undaunted (as the hero no doubt should be), responds in kind, to the delight of the king. Evidently, Beowulf's response told Hrothgar everything he needed to know about him:
                             Then the treasure giver,
Grey haired, battle-famed, knew joy.
The Lord of Bright-Danes had heard Beowulf,
Counted his courage, his strength of spirit.
 
Then laughter lifted in the great hall --
Words were traded, Wealhtheow walked in,
Hrothgar's queen....

(Beowulf, 608-13, trans. Williamson)

In his lecture on this scene and the character of Unferth for our Beowulf through Tolkien class, Professor Tom Shippey described the role of the þyle as follows:
'What's a þyle, which is what Unferth is? I think that's rather easy. Both Gríma Wormtongue and Unferth have a place and that place is at the feet of the king. Later on Hrothgar, lamenting the death of one of his men will say "he was my runwita and my rædbora" (1325). Runwita means "a knower of secrets;" rædbora means "giver of advice." And that, I think, is what Unferth is. He is a confidant, someone who knows the king's secrets. He is a "rædbora," someone who gives the king advice, a counselor.

'In fact, if you're thinking of The Godfather, which is often quite a good idea in these circumstances, he is the consigliere to Hrothgar, who is himself the godfather, you might say.... So we could say that Unferth is a counselor, he's a spokesman because of þelcræft [or "þylcræft" = "oratory," the skill of a þyle]. He's very possibly a kind of genealogist. We're often getting these remarks about people being well known. This is an oral culture dependent on memory. You need somebody who remembers everything and you need someone who can say to the king "yes, yes, he is the son of so-and-so, he's the grandson of so-and-so." Important to remember that. Somebody has to do these things and Unferth does it. Tolkien translates, I think very sensibly, that he is the king's "sage." He is the wise man for the king, who is there to give the king advice. He's a mixture of a kind of researcher and possibly also spin doctor.

'And I'd finally suggest that he's a bit like the king's subjunctive mood. He says what the king might be thinking, but the king won't have said it. So that if it's wrong, as it is when he challenges Beowulf, it's retractable. It's not the king's fault. It's his adviser, and you can blame the adviser....'1 
Last Friday morning (2/27/15) as I was crossing Long Island Sound on the 11:00 AM ferry out of Orient, NY, I was thinking about this scene and Professor Shippey's commentary on it, which I had just listened to again in my car as I drove to Orient. Suddenly I made a connection I had not thought of before.  I think it arose from the combination of the way Hrothgar waits and watches while Unferth fences with Beowulf, and Professor Shippey's explanation of the role of the þyle as ' bit like the king's subjunctive mood.'  But I remembered a scene in Space Seed, one of the best and most important episodes of the original Star Trek.

In this episode, just in case you've never seen it, the Enterprise discovers a 170 year old ship from earth floating derelict in an unexpected region of space. There is no historical record of such a ship, and they go on board to investigate, finding 84 cryogenic pods with humans inside them, more than 70 of whom are still alive.  One of these humans revives, a magnetic, mysterious man who will identify himself only as Khan.  Kirk and Spock suspect that he and his shipmates might be the genetically engineered supermen who vanished at the end of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.  A dinner (or feast, if you will) is held to welcome Khan to the 23rd century.  As they sit at the table, the following conversation takes place:
KIRK: Forgive my curiosity, Mister Khan, but my officers are anxious to know more about your extraordinary journey.

SPOCK: And how you managed to keep it out of the history books.

KHAN: Adventure, Captain. Adventure. There was little else left on Earth.

SPOCK: There was the war to end tyranny. Many considered that a noble effort.

KHAN: Tyranny, sir? Or an attempt to unify humanity?

SPOCK: Unify, sir? Like a team of animals under one whip?

KHAN: I know something of those years. Remember, it was a time of great dreams, of great aspiration.

SPOCK: Under dozens of petty dictatorships.

KHAN: One man would have ruled eventually. As Rome under Caesar. Think of its accomplishments.

SPOCK: Then your sympathies were with --

KHAN (turning to Kirk): You are an excellent tactician, Captain. You let your second in command attack while you sit and watch for weakness.

KIRK: You have a tendency to express ideas in military terms, Mister Khan. This is a social occasion.

KHAN: It has been said that social occasions are only warfare concealed. Many prefer it more honest, more open.

KIRK: You fled. Why? Were you afraid?

KHAN: I've never been afraid.

KIRK: But you left at the very time mankind needed courage.

KHAN: We offered the world order!

KIRK: We?

KHAN: Excellent. Excellent. But if you will excuse me, gentlemen and ladies, I grow fatigued again. With your permission, Captain, I will return to my quarters.

(Kirk stands, and Khan leaves.)

Unify, sir?
With your permission, Captain, I will return to my quarters.

Now I don't believe that the writers of this episode (Gene L. Coon and Carey Wilber) were thinking of Beowulf when they composed this scene. I couldn't even guess if they had read it (though the writer of Star Trek: Voyager, Heroes and Demons definitely had2).   Still I would say that the parallel between the scenes in Beowulf and Space Seed is much more illustrative than that between Beowulf and The Godfather. While the positions of Unferth and Hrothgar are indeed analogous to those of consigliere and godfather, it is in Space Seed that we see the parallels in behavior, as Spock questions Khan while Kirk looks on, evaluating Khan's reactions and responses.  

The verbal duel between Spock and Khan all but proves that Khan is the dangerous enemy they suspected he was, and makes amply clear for us the nature and purpose of such an exchange. For while a modern reader of Beowulf might not immediately recognize what Unferth is really doing, there is no mistaking what Spock is up to. Kirk's involvement makes the parallel even clearer.  First he pretends that it is not he, but his officers who have questions for Khan, which allows Spock to begin his 'attack,' as Khan puts it.  

Then, when Kirk moves to defuse the tense situation by claiming that a social occasion is no place for warlike speech, Khan challenges him more directly, saying that he prefers his warfare 'more honest, more open.' At which point Kirk presses his attack even more forcefully than Spock had.  Even so, when the exchange becomes too heated, Khan is allowed to retreat, avoiding a more dangerous confrontation. Like Hrothgar Kirk learns what he wanted to learn. That the king wished to see if the man before him was the sort of man he hoped for, and that the captain wished to see if the man before him was the sort of man he feared him to be, is not a material difference.  

So there I was with Beowulf and Spock on a ferry (a ferry) last Friday morning, thinking these thoughts. A few hours later I got to my hotel outside Boston.  I checked the news and said "Oh, no." Leonard Nimoy had died, at exactly the time I was thinking about him. No, I don't think there's a connection between these two events, not on any level, not even on the spooky chance-if-chance-you-call-it level. Except in my heart, where this wonderful character and the apparently decent man who gave him such persuasive life dwell now forever.  I am even especially glad I was thinking about him just then.  I now have another reason to remember him.

_________________________________ 

Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, edited and translated by Craig Williamson (Philadelphia 2011).  The line numbers cited above are for Williamson's translation; those directly below are from the Old English text.
Þa wæs on salum    sinces brytta
gamolfeax ond guðrof;   geoce gelyfde
brego Beorht-Dena;   gehyrde on Beowulfe
folces hyrde,    fæstrædne geþoht. 
Ðær wæs hæletha hleahtor,   hlyn swinsode,
word wæron wynsume.   Eode Wealhþeow forð
cwen Hroðgares....
(lines 607-13)
A more literal translation would run as follows:
Then the giver of treasure, gray haired and brave in battle, knew joy. The lord of the Bright Danes took hope in [Beowulf's] aid; in Beowulf the shepherd of the folk heard steadfast determination.

There was laughter from the men, it made a sweet sound, his words were pleasing. Wealhtheow, queen of Horthgar, came forth....
_________________________________


1 Since I was transcribing an audio recording, all punctuation and paragraphing are of course mine. I have tried to faithfully represent Professor Shippey's words, though I am not completely sure whether the word after 'wrong' in the final paragraph is 'as' or 'and.'  The difference, if there is one, is minimal.

Gríma Wormtongue is of course the counselor of King Théoden in The Two Towers. He first appears in the chapter The King of the Golden Hall, in a scene which has much in common with this one.

The recording is proprietary so I may not link to it.

2 See the article on Heroes and Demons at Memory Alpha for the comments of Naren Shankar, the writer of this episode, who states that he even went back and researched Beowulf in preparing the story. He was surprised to learn that no one else on the production team had ever read it.  

22 June 2014

It's just the wind, right?


It's just the wind, right?  Or maybe not.

Perhaps it's because I was a little boy in the late 1960s.  There was so much going on.  A larger world swirled like The Starry Night upon the limits of my own.  The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, drugs, young men with long hair, pretty girls in gauzy shirts and peasant skirts, Martin Luther King, Civil Rights marches, peace marches, riots, Vietnam, body counts on Walter Cronkite.  It was all so overwhelming, so impossible to make sense of, so strange and wondrous and daunting for a boy who lived in books.

But there was one thing I did make sense of.  We were going to the moon.  I loved looking up at the stars and puzzling out the constellations.  As dim and pale as they were above the streetlights of the Bronx, they still shone brightly for me.  The sky was more full of worlds than all the books ever written.  And we were going to the moon.

With every Apollo mission we came closer, until one magical night in July 1969 that was even better than Star Trek.  I went outside and looked up, not because I expected to be able to see anything, but because we were there.  We were there.

Even afterwards I watched every mission, still excited.  The tension of Apollo 13 was breathtaking, but my faith then was childlike and perfect: I had no doubt they would return safely.  It was only years later that I realized how close they had come to never coming back at all.  But that was after Challenger, when the boldness of going into space no longer seemed linked to an equal brilliance of leadership.  The glory and vision of Apollo sank into scheduled maintenance on the Hubble.

It wasn't that the astronauts were less brave or less skilled.  They still climbed on top of a rocket and rode fire into the heavens.  It wasn't that experience and routine made their missions less dangerous.  We have the evidence to prove the opposite. It was that the gap between our reach and our grasp became so great that we confined ourselves to what we could do in near orbit and what we could see from afar.  Our one and only spaceship, which was plump and stodgy to begin with, became a delivery van.  

Perhaps it's because I was a little boy in the late 1960s, but even Hubble's images of the far end of the time, and Kepler's detections of hundreds of planets circling distant stars, as magnificent and humbling as they are, will never be as compelling as the Apollo Program.  If I could look up and see the Pillars of Creation in the night sky and pick out Kepler-186f, I would be outside looking up every single night.  Not because they would be beautiful.  No, not merely that.  But because some part of my humanity would want to know what it was like there, would want us to go there, even if I know that such journeys will almost certainly remain forever beyond our ability.  Still the idea of such voyages of discovery would trump the pedestrian impossibility.  That's why the idea of Mars will not die.

Perhaps it's because I was a little boy in the late 1960s, but a night came in early 2005 when the Huygens probe landed on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and rekindled the wonder I had felt long before.  The simple expedient of attaching a microphone to the outside of the craft allowed me to hear the wind blow on another world.

To hear the wind blow on another world.  

To hear the wind blow on another world.  

We were there.

More on Titan
More on Apollo
The Magic Words
The Other Magic Words

19 June 2014

The Mythgard Institute

In the winter of 2012 I was poking around the internet, looking as we all do for god knows what  -- our futures perhaps -- when I came across this guy named Corey Olsen who was calling himself "The Tolkien Professor."  Now I'll admit that my first reaction (okay, it's my default reaction) was skepticism.  "The Tolkien Professor" just sounded a bit geeky, and I'm old enough to remember when geek was not a compliment.  And what was with that definite article, huh?  The Tolkien Professor?  Was that like The O'Neill, The O'Donnell, The Humongous?

But since an essential part of real skepticism is to investigate those things at which we first look askance, and since I have always loved Tolkien, I decided to check it out.  First I listened to the podcasts of his undergraduate classes at Washington College, then to his Tolkien chats and Q&A sessions, and the Silmarillion Seminar (of blessed memory).  As someone who has read The Lord of the Rings so many times that, if I told you how many, you would roll your eyes and assume I was wearing a costume as I wrote this,* I can reasonably lay claim to being a competent judge.

And let me tell you this: Corey Olsen knows his stuff.

Now don't misunderstand me.  The discussions on the podcasts are only very seldom about whether Balrogs have wings (since of course they don't).  Rather, they are serious literary discussions that explore the ceaselessly amazing world of Middle Earth through careful study of the texts themselves.  At the same time they are also lighthearted, full of humor, and untrammeled by ponderous literary theories.  Instead they pay attention to what the author actually wrote.  Inconceivable.

While Professor Olsen's undergraduate lectures are still available through iTunes and his website (www.tolkienprofessor.com), ever since 2012 he has been embarked on a new adventure, creating and building up The Mythgard Institute, which offers graduate courses online for Master's credit and for auditing. (Tuition for both is quite reasonable.)  While many of the early courses have focused on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, the range of courses and the number of professors have been steadily expanding.  Most recently, for example, Professor Olsen, a Medievalist and Chaucerian by trade, has offered two semesters on Chaucer.  I have audited both of these classes, and rarely have I had so much fun and learned so much at the same time.  I'm thinking of making a pitch for more Middle English next spring or summer.  How about Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl?

But wait there's more.  In addition to the Mythgard Institute there's also The Mythgard Academy, which since the summer of 2013 has offered free courses on works and authors proposed and voted on by those of us who have made voluntary contributions (think NPR).  But to listen and participate is absolutely free, and if you miss a session the recordings are usually posted within a day or two.  Nor are the readings limited to Tolkien.  We recently had a course on Ender's Game, which raised my opinion of Orson Scott Card as a writer, and in the end of July or beginning of August we'll be starting Frank Herbert's Dune.  I'm very much looking forward to that.

Clearly I am quite pleased to have made this discovery.  I have learned a lot about Tolkien and tons about Chaucer.  I can't find enough good things to say about the job Corey Olsen does.  I just wanted to take the opportunity to say that.

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*Don't own one. Never worn one.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  It's all in good fun.  And the only convention I've ever been to was the first Star Trek convention in New York when I was eleven.  Even then no pointed ears.