New Activity Coming To "Tolkien Geek"...

OK, here we go.

Back when I finished the editorial “clean-up” of my posts on “The Lord of the Rings” I felt a tremendous sense of relief. I had no real plans for additional material but in the back of my mind I knew that this wouldn’t be the end.

Over the last year or so I’ve gotten a number of comments and e-mails asking if I would consider writing about other Tolkien works. One of the most common requests was “The Silmarillion”. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any way I could take on that kind of project. “The Silmarillion” is so layered and so complex a part of Tolkien’s “history” of Middle-Earth that this would be a challenge far greater than the time and resources that I have to put into it.

But I wanted to continue. Tolkien has a way of constantly pulling you back into his world. So, I decided to create a series of posts based on selections from “Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth”

Why “Unfinished Tales” and why just selections?

To me this is the logical next step in exploring Tolkien’s work because this volume contains so many additional stories that relate directly to the events and characters from the War of the Ring. In fact, much of this material could very well have been made a part of the Appendices included in “The Return of the King”. It’s like finding deleted scenes among the special features on a DVD. These writings provide a nice background of additional material that help the reader appreciate the final work.

Also, “Unfinished Tales” is a collection of Tolkien’s unpublished works that span a huge block of time. Because all of the material relating to Middle-Earth’s First Age and most of the stuff dealing with the Second Age is so far removed from what most readers are familiar with in “The Lord of the Rings” I decided to stay away from that. And among what is left, there are a couple of chapters that I wasn’t all that interested in or that I referenced at length so much in my other posts that it would be too repetitive.

What I envision for this project is touching upon seven sections from “Unfinished Tales” but writing about them in roughly the order that they take place within Middle-Earth's chronology.

So even though I’ll be skipping back and forth throughout the volume’s table of contents, to the reader they will follow a natural progression. Also, because each section covers a specific story, they aren’t intertwined with any of the others. This allows me the flexibility to take my time without having to worry about getting to the next chapter within the same story like I did in the earlier posts.

Each section may take more than one post. Some will only take one. But in each case I will refer to the footnotes included in each chapter and may very well draw on other works the way I did when I blogged “The Lord of the Rings”.

Now the first thing I need to do is get a handle on the new Google version of Blogger and update the site. Then I can get things going.

So until then, thanks for your patience, and I hope to make my first entry soon.