George R.R. Martin has announced on his Not A Blog that Ted Nasmith is producing the art for the 2011 Song of Ice and Fire calendar.

Nasmith is probably best-known for his work depicting Middle Earth and is esteemed as one of the very best of the artists working in Tolkien’s world.

The HBO series A Game of Thrones will — as film tends to do —  “set” the image of Westeros for many readers of Martin’s epic. It will be interesting to see how much the film-makers draw on Nasmith’s imagery.

Today, March 25, is Tolkien Reading Day. The date was selected to commemorate the anniversary of the Downfall of Sauron. Enjoy!

The Dark Tower by John Howe

…hell, I can’t say for sure. It may very well be sitting, unpublished, in an old notebook or a hard drive right now. Pick any of his essays published here or over at the Robert E. Howard Electronic Amateur Press Association; there’s at least a bit (and sometimes a lot) of brilliance in every one. But for my money it’s hard to top this line from his classic essay “Long Ago, Far Away, and So Much Better Than It Is Today?”

We humans aren’t as lucky (or is it unlucky?) as Tolkien’s Elves, but Valinors of sorts are available to us, be they the green-gold stun grenade of a spring day, the Polaroid poignance of that one page it might be easier to skip in the photo album, or a chance hearing of a long-ago hit single that ruled the airwaves all during one of those cusp-between-adolescence-and-adulthood summers when possibility and probability were still in equipoise.

–Steve Tompkins

That is poetry right there. And lump-in-the-throat inducing, more so now that Steve is no longer with us. I look back on his time here at The Cimmerian as a Valinor of sorts, a better Age that has passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow.

One year gone; how is the emerald isle Steve? We miss you here back on (Middle)-earth. Sleep well.

It’s fair to say that Steve Tompkins brought me back to Robert E. Howard.

I never lost my appreciation for Howard’s work; how could I? It had inspired me to become a writer. But by millenium’s turn it had been years since I’d actually read a Conan story or plunged into the adventures of El Borak or Solomon Kane. I never decided to put aside Howard, it just sort of happened as I explored new horizons, new frontiers.

As the Internet developed into a massive cultural resource, I got curious about what the Web could tell me about Howard. I found The Barbarian Keep and read Don Herron’s The Dark Barbarian. It was gratifying to see that the stories that had brought me so much pleasure in my youth still had resonance for so many people.

Then I found the Robert E. Howard United Press Association Web site and discovered an essay by one Steven Tompkins: “Grinning, Unappeased Aboriginal Demons — Every Pict Sure Tells a Story — and an American One At That.”

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Exactly one year ago, on March 23, 2009, Steve Tompkins passed. Tempus fugit…

Morgan Holmes once wrote on the REHupa blog how he mourned the loss of his friend. He noted back then that some Cimmerian bloggers never knew Steve Tompkins. Indeed, I had not that privilege. When our managing editor Deuce Richardson asked me to join the shieldwall, one of my fears was that my English would not be up to the standards that TC‘s readers were accustomed to. Steve Tompkins’ essays — his weekly production was above and beyond mere “blogging” — set a high standard. I don’t even think that my mastery of French equals his English skills, so how could my skills in the latter language be good enough to not disappoint? I would probably have had about the same feeling if Deuce had asked my overweight self to run after Usain Bolt!

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Slowly—too slowly and decades overdue, in my opinion—fantasy literature is gaining a foothold in colleges and universities. Long ignored and/or the subject of sneering intellectuals and defenders of the literary “canon,” works like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings are finally starting to appear on a handful of college syllabi. (To geek out a moment and quote Gandalf the Grey, “that is an encouraging thought.”)

For this slowly building acceptance of fantasy literature in academic circles, one has to acknowledge the work of the college professors who have cajoled, pled, or insisted that it be allowed into the hallowed halls of academia. These include men like Tom Shippey (former Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University and author of J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and The Road to Middle-earth), Corey Olsen, aka., The Tolkien Professor, an English Professor at Washington College, and Michael Drout, Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

Drout is editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics and a co-editor of Tolkien Studies. At Wheaton he teaches Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, medieval literature, fantasy, science fiction, and writing. He also writes a blog, Wormtalk and Slugspeak, which is definitely worth adding to your list of links.

Drout also wrote and narrated a fine entry in The Modern Scholar audio book series, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which is the subject of this post. I recently had the pleasure of listening to it during my commute to work and found it immensely enjoyable, lucid, thought-provoking, and ambitious. It offers prima facie evidence for why fantasy literature deserves to be the subject of academic study.

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As for any inner meaning or ‘message,’ it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical… I cordially dislike allegory, and have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence… I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other resides in the purposed domination of the author.

–J.R.R. Tolkien

Reading Saunders’ review of Leonard Carpenter’s Conan the Hero, namely the myriad thinly-veiled Vietnam allegory that makes the bulk of the plot, put me in mind of the above Tolkien quotation. Naturally, it made me also think of how Robert E. Howard is one of those authors whose every work is heaving with such applicability, and how much a disservice Carpenter does to Howard as a result.

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Part nine of Blogging the Silmarillion concludes with Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age

“Many are the strange chances of the world,” said Mithrandir, “and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.”

–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

A recurring theme in The Silmarillion is Elves and/or Men meeting force with force, the result of which is endless cycles of war and ruin. In the Quenta Silmarillon Melkor steals the three Silmarils, and their maker, the Noldorin Elf Fëanor, vows to recover them at all costs. Fëanor’s destructive oath sets in motion a millennia-spanning series of conflicts that continue until the Valar intercede in the War of Wrath, another horribly destructive affair which mars Arda forever and ends the First Age of Middle-earth.

But even after Morgoth’s defeat in the War of Wrath, evil is not destroyed, nor are possessiveness and pride stamped out of the hearts of Men. In the Akallabêth the Númenóreans fall victim to the same Fëanor-like sins of pride and overreaching when they try to wrest immortality from the Valar. The result is the destruction of their civilization.

Thus far it’s been pretty bleak stuff from Tolkien, and with only one section of The Silmarillion left it’s still very much an open question whether Men and Elves will ever learn from their mistakes, or whether Middle-earth is doomed to ever more destructive wars of possession. And so we arrive at Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.

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Part eight of Blogging the Silmarillion continues with the Akallabêth.

According to scholar Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien struggled to reconcile his belief in a Christian heaven with the uncertain fate of the pre-Christian heroes he so adored. Un-baptized and living in a pagan age, where would the spirits of great Northern heroes like Beowulf dwell after their death? Likewise, what would be the fate of his Middle-earth creations, for example the slain Elven heroes Fëanor, Fingon, and Fingolfin? And where would their living, immortal brethren ultimately take up residence? The answer as explained in The Silmarillion is twofold: The Halls of Mandos, which houses the spirits of Elves slain in battle, and Valinor, the Blessed Realm, a paradise on earth removed from the darkness of Middle-earth.

Valinor and the Halls of Mandos serve as halfway houses for pre-Christian souls, or as Shippey notes in The Road to Middle Earth, a “middle path” where they remain until the Ragnarök-like ending of the world. While the Halls of Mandos can perhaps be thought of as a less rowdy Valhalla, Valinor makes a wonderful, shifting metaphor: The Garden of Eden; a lost time of innocence; a dim remembrance of a better time in our own lives; a loved one separated by death but who we hope to rejoin one day; they’re all applicable ways of assigning meaning to the Undying Lands.

Of course Valinor is sadly beyond not only our reach, but the reach of the denizens of the Third Age of Middle-earth. It’s a divide not merely between heaven and earth, but a split on Middle-earth itself. This is Tolkien’s myth of The Lost Road, an impossible straight path on a curved earth that leads to a land of magic and deathlessness. Frodo, en route to the Grey Havens, sings of this myth in the final pages of The Lord of the Rings:

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate;
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun

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Part seven of Blogging the Silmarillion concludes the Quenta Silmarillion with a look at Chapters 22-24.

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No careful reader of Tolkien’s fiction can fail to be aware of the polarities that give it form and tension. His work is built on contrasts—between hope and despair, between good and evil, between enlightenment and ignorance—and these contrasts are embodied in the polarities of light and dark that are the creative outgrowth of his contrary moods, the “antitheses” of his nature.

–Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World

J.R.R. Tolkien was, paradoxically, a man of deep faith who was subject to extreme bouts of despair. He believed that life here on earth is a long defeat, an inevitable march toward the destruction of man and all his creations. However, he also believed in an afterlife. Despite numerous defeats and endured miseries, there existed for Tolkien the possibility of final, unlooked-for victory (coined by Tolkien as a “eucatastrophe”) in this world or the next.

These contrasting sides to Tolkien’s personality are revealed in the final three chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion. In chapters 22-24 we experience (Middle)-earthian defeats that result in unimaginable ruin, followed by the Valar-backed defeat of Morgoth, a victory of truly epic scale.

It’s foolish to think that we can ever have a paradise on earth, for life here is transitory, a passing thing. So too it was in the First Age of Middle-earth. The Elves built cities of surpassing beauty and strength, but each in turn fall into ruin. While Part Six of Blogging The Silmarillion revisited the sack of Nargothrond, in this section of The Silmarillion we witness the ruin of the kingdom of Doriath, followed by the fall of the hidden mountain city of Gondolin. This is the culmination of the Long Defeat for the Elves, whose greatest and seemingly most enduring works come to a violent and ruinous end.

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