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Author: Bob Byrne

Talking Tolkien: Ten Things I Think I Think

Talking Tolkien: Ten Things I Think I Think

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It’s time to wrap up Talking Tolkien. And I thought a Tolkien-themed version of Ten Things I Think I Think would be a fun way to do it. So away we go…

READ THE LEGEND OF SIGURD & GUDRUN

I read this last year, and I intend to write an essay on it, but just haven’t fit it in yet. This is a good book. And you can really see the influence it had on Tolkien. It’s as depressing as a Jim Thompson novel, but still well worth reading. I highly recommend it for fans of The Silmarillion.

After finishing this, I tried to read The Story of Kullervo, but it didn’t really work for me. It’s not by Christopher Tolkien, and the way it was laid out, and read, felt different from Sigurd, Gawain, etc. I plan on powering through it, as it was also influential on Tolkien. But I’m not recommending that one, yet. Definitely check out Sigurd.

I WANT A ‘TALES OF MIDDLE EARTH’

I’m not a fan of how the rights holder of Robert E. Howard’s works is handling new fiction. At all. Not just the barren output – but the whole approach (which has been mostly talk so far).

I’d love to see a collection of short stories based on Tolkien elements. Ideally done by people qualified to write in Tolkien’s style (folks who wrote like Dennis L. McKiernan, Andre Norton, Peter S. Beagle, Terry Brooks – not just big-names to put on the cover).

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Talking Tolkien: The Lay of the Nauglamir

Talking Tolkien: The Lay of the Nauglamir

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Today in Talking Tolkien, it’s a long-term project I work on every so often. The story of the Nauglamir (The Necklace of the Dwarves) may well be my favorite story in all of The Legendarium. It was the subject of my very first Tolkien essay.

Last year, I read The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. I really liked that book. I also read part of The Story of Kullervo, though the layout and non-Tolkien commentary didn’t work nearly as well for me (it was not a Christopher Tolkien effort). Tolkien was an expert in this area. The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit came from the old Noridc legends.

If your knowledge of Norse mythology comes from Bulfinch’s – or Marvel comic books – you’re going to find these are VERY different. But I liked reading the old sagas (and no wonder The Silmarillion is so depressing – those old Nordic sagas make Platoon look like a light-hearted romp).

And the Sigurd book got me a bit inspired.

I sketched out the entire history of the Silmaril which was fashioned into Nauglamir, and began creating an epic poem about it (NOT an ‘Epithon,’ for you Nero Wolfe fans out there…). I’m not into metering, so it doesn’t qualify for some definition of verse or form. But it still reads like a poem to me.

It’s 90 lines so far, with a lot more to go. The scope of the Nauglamir Silmaril is truly amazing, and fraught with tragedy. I’ll add more the next time I go into Tolkien mode. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this (except for a Solar Pons poem I wrote, summarizing “The Unique Dickensians”).

I can put together a haiku on the fly:

Source of joy and woe
Light of Yavanna shining
Pride of the Noldor

This, however, is well outside of my writing zone. But it’s fun.

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Talking Tolkien: Philosophical Themes in the Silmarillion – by Joe Bonadonna

Talking Tolkien: Philosophical Themes in the Silmarillion – by Joe Bonadonna

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We kicked off Talking Tolkien with Joe Bonadonna, and he’s back! After looking at religious themes in The Lord of the Rings the first time around, it’s philosophical ones in The Silmarillion. Joe does the heavy lifting – I’m just a pretty face. As with his first essay, he wades into pretty deep waters. Joe has guested for my ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ Pulp series, and I’m thrilled he wanted to Talk Tolkien. He even recruited two of our contributors. Read on, and thanks, Joe!

First, I want to reiterate that I am most definitely not an expert on Tolkien’s writings and his history of Middle-earth. Naturally, I’ve read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, as well as Smith of Wooton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham, and The Children of Hurin. But I haven’t read anything else Tolkien wrote. Thus, I’ll only be scratching the surface here.

My sources used in research, from which I quoted passages, are: Ruth S. Noel’s The Mythology of Middle-Earth, Robert Foster’s The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth, Paul H. Kocher’s Master of Middle-Earth, William Ready’s Understanding Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter’s Tolkien: The Complete Biography, and the Tolkien Gateway website, as well as The Hobbit, the appendices in The Return of the King, and The Silmarillion itself. Please note: although the titles of Kocher’s, Noel’s and Foster’s books use a capital E for “earth,” I will use Middle-earth as Tolkien himself did. All that being said, I just wanted to clear the air so you good folks who are reading this will know that I am by far no scholar or expert on all things Tolkien. I’m just here to share an old college essay with you.

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Talking Tolkien: On The Tolkien Reader – by Rich Horton

Talking Tolkien: On The Tolkien Reader – by Rich Horton

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It’s another of my Black Gate cohorts this week for Talking Tolkien. Rich is one of the science fiction cornerstones at the Black Gate World Headquarters, but he’s been a Tolkien fan since the seventies. He’s gonna talk about a book I never added to my shelves. Before the explosion of books like The History of Middle Earth Series, and Children of  Hurin, and his Beowulf, there weren’t a lot of ‘other’ Tolkien books out there besides the main five.

But even before The Silmarillion finally saw print, there was The Tolkien Reader. 

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The Tolkien Reader was first published in 1966 by Ballantine Books in the US; in response to the greatly expanding popularity of The Lord of the Rings, driven by the paperback editions from Ballantine (and the pirated edition from Ace.) This was an attempt to bring a varied sampling of his work to readers hungry for more. I read it myself in the early ’70s, after I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. As an introduction it reprints a piece Peter Beagle did for Holiday (perhaps at the instigation of Alfred Bester?) called “Tolkien’s Magic Ring”, which primarily discusses the Middle-Earth books.

It’s a good and varied collection throughout, and really does the job of showing a different side to Tolkien (though not THAT different!) from that seen in The Lord of the Rings. I’ll be looking at each of the sections separately, and slightly out of order, in that I think the best part by far is Tree and Leaf, which comes second in the book.

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Talking Tolkien: Does Size Matter? The Rankin-Bass Hobbit by Thomas Parker

Talking Tolkien: Does Size Matter? The Rankin-Bass Hobbit by Thomas Parker

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Fellow Black Gater Thomas Parker and I share quite a few interests – but within those interests we tend to vary wildly. I enjoy chatting with him. I conned him into writing a…I mean, he graciously agreed to do a Horace McCoy piece for A (Black) Gat in the Hand, and I’ve been after him to shore up my Black Gate views by doing a guest piece for me. And man, do I LOVE this one on the Rankin-Bass classic, The Hobbit. It was worth the past four years of badgering him.  Read on!

Let me begin with a statement that is impossible to prove but that almost no one would dispute: J.R.R Tolkien’s 1937 children’s fantasy The Hobbit is one of the most beloved books in the world, and because it serves (according to the cover of my old Ballantine paperback) as the “enchanting prelude to the Lord of the Rings” it is also one of the most influential books of the last century, all of which means that those who would presume to adapt the story for other media would be wise to tread warily.

Over the decades, there have been stage adaptations (including an operatic one), graphic novels, and many audio renderings. But when it comes to film adaptations, there are really only two versions to choose from, and they couldn’t be more different in scale, emphasis, and execution.

Most recently we have the triple-decker expansion offered by Peter Jackson — The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), three movies that together have a running time of almost eight hours and that were made with all the technical sophistication and immense resources that Mordor… er, a major Hollywood studio can offer. The trilogy had combined budgets of six hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and during their initial theatrical releases the films netted approximately three billion dollars (to say nothing of profits from home video and merchandising). As the Dark Lords of the boardroom can tell you, each zero in those immense grosses is a veritable Ring of Power in itself.

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Talking Tolkien: A Tolkenian Defense of Monsters by James McGlothlin

Talking Tolkien: A Tolkenian Defense of Monsters by James McGlothlin

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Up this week is another of my fellow Black Gaters. James most recently took us through those classic The Year’s Best Horror Stories anthologies. Back in May, Fletcher Vredenburgh wrote about Tolkien’s Beowulf. While Middle Earth and The Lord of the Rings are Tolkien’s most famous works, Beowulf is a classic of English literature. So, as we start July, James also talks about that epic saga. And if you’ve never actually read Beowulf (or only seen The Thirteenth Warrior), maybe you’ll want to after reading James’ and Fletcher’s essays. 

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In 1936 J. R. R. Tolkien gave the annual Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy. This talk was later published as the essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in the book The Monsters and Critics. The primary point of this lecture was to offer a defense for studying the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf as, primarily, a poetic work. That proposition may sound obvious; but Tolkien was convinced that it needed to be re-emphasized because the way Beowulf had been largely studied in his day seemed to forget or obscure the point. Tolkien memorably characterizes the situation in what he called the “whole industry” of Beowulf criticism with the following allegory:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea. (pgs. 7–8, The Monsters and the Critics).

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray and The Diamond Wager Caper – Not Dashiell Hammett?

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray and The Diamond Wager Caper – Not Dashiell Hammett?

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand makes its first-ever Friday appearance as Will Murray takes us down some Mean Streets never explored before. And he’s gonna need a blackjack and a roscoe in hand for this one. I’m not gonna spill the beans about Dashiell Hammett’s “The Diamond Wager”, but you’re definitely going to want to read on to find out the real truth behind that story. Take it away, Will!

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Recently, friend and fellow researcher Evan Lewis posted on Facebook the text of a story that first appeared in the October 19, 1929 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly entitled “The Diamond Wager.“ This was featured in a blogpost he originally posted in June, 2013.

The story ran under the byline of Samuel Dashiell. According to Evan, it is widely believed to be the work of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, and constitutes Hammett’s only contribution to Detective Fiction Weekly.

“The Diamond Wager” is a 7,600 word yarn of a gentleman thief set in Paris. For a tale purportedly written by the author of The Maltese Falcon, it’s underwhelming. Opinions on the story’s worth do not vary much. When compared to Hammett’s oeuvre, it’s an oddball outlier, a tongue-in-cheek relic of the Golden Age of mystery stories.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Down those Mean Streets in 2023

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Down those Mean Streets in 2023

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Talking Tolkien takes a one-week break, as we are into summer – though Ohio’s pleasantly cool weather might belie that. And since 2018, summer Mondays at Black Gate mean it’s pulp time with A (Black) Gat in the Hand.

Talking Tolkien has pushed the start back later than usual, but I’ve been doing pulp reading and writing to gear up for another great run. I have two introductions over at Steeger Press, ready to come out before the end of the year (I hope). I’ll post both here at book release time.

Talking Tolkien will be back next week, but I want A (Black) Gat in the Hand to make a June appearance again this year – we’re almost at 100 essays in the series! Not bad for an award-winning fantasy and sci-fi site. With me, expect the unexpected (to paraphrase from a Monk episode).

CASS BLUE

I’d not read any John Lawrence, but I picked up Steeger’s first ebook of Cass Blue. The second (and final) volume is in the works. These are different. The settings for the first three of four are more Agatha Christie than the mean streets of Chandler. A country estate with a seance, or  mansion on a secluded island.

The tone and plot are more weird menace than typical hardboiled, while Blue himself plays rough. The fourth story is a serial killer hunt in the city, that is a mix of weird menace and robbery heist.

I liked, but didn’t love, these. They are definitely a change of pace, which is nice. I will be checking out his Marquis of Broadway stories. They seem to be about a police squad who are brutal thugs, in NYC’s theater district.

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Talking Tolkien: A Magical Tolkien Celebration – by David Ian

Talking Tolkien: A Magical Tolkien Celebration – by David Ian

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Rarely a day goes by that I’m not listening for at least a few minutes to a radio play or an audiobook. They have become weaved into the fabric of my life. David Ian of Unchained Productions recounts a live performance of The Hobbit at a Middle Earth Convention. This is SO neat! Read on.

“In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit,” the narrator Cindy McGean begins at the microphone. Flanking her on stage is a phalanx of microphone stands where actors, script in hand, play the voices of Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin Oakenshield, Gollum, the trolls Tom, Bert & William, and many other characters of Middle Earth. On the floor in front of the stage, sit two long tables filled to the brim with sound effects props. They will provide the sounds for cracklings fires, clopping ponies, booming thunder storms, creepy spiders in the dark forest, and the drip, drip, drip of Gollum’s cave. The former elementary school gym now turned to small stage theater is filled with audience members, hobbit fans of all ages, and some even dressed up as if they came directly from Middle Earth.

This is the scene at the McMenamin’s hotel and pub housed in a former elementary school in Portland, Oregon, on the weekend closest to JRR Tolkien’s birthday (which is January 3rd). The building is transformed for a day into a Middle Earth convention, which includes Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit films played in the auditorium, and in the gymnasium, a local audio theater troupe, Willamette Radio Workshop, performs a live rendition of Tolkien’s original classic, The Hobbit.

A half-dozen voice actors hold scripts in hand, and play a wide cast of characters famous to the “There And Back Again” tale of Bilbo, the dwarves and the dragon. The sound effects operators bring the scenery backgrounds of Mirkwood, Gollum’s cave, and Smaug’s lair to the mind by using only sound. They also make the clamoring chaos of dwarves eating up Bilbo’s larder, the mighty fury of Smaug’s attack on Lake Town, and the huge vast scope of the Battle of Five Armies.

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Talking Tolkien: Tolkien’s Evil Magic Sword – Anglachel

Talking Tolkien: Tolkien’s Evil Magic Sword – Anglachel

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Talking Tolkien is back for another installment, and I’m bringing back one of my essays.

Today’s essay is about a magic sword named Anglachel. It is really a minor element of the book, but the story of it weaves in and out of many other parts. That’s one of the true wonders of The Silmarillion. It’s a vibrant, interconnected history of Tolkien’s world. There are just SO many characters and stories throughout it.

I’m in that weird, small group which cites The Silmarillion as their favorite Middle Earth book. It is essentially a mythology and history of Tolkien’s world. While I love Robert E. Howard’s Hyboria, for me, Tolkien set the fantasy standard for world building. The Silmarillion is really several long stories combined into one book.

John Ronald Ruel Tolkien, creator of Middle Earth, was a master storyteller. The Hobbit, with its tale of plucky hobbits and dwarves, a wizard, a magic ring, and a dragon, made what has been termed high fantasy appealing to a large audience. And The Lord of the Rings is an epic saga of good versus evil and of never giving up on what is right, no matter how daunting the odds.

Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings included bits of Middle Earth history. Gimli sang ‘The Song of Durin’ as the fellowship traveled through Moria and Aragorn sang a song of Beren and Luthien early in his travels with the hobbits. It was the history of Middle Earth and events of the First Age that were always dear to Tolkien’s heart. He tried for decades to get The Silmarillion published and he constantly revised and added to his creation.

Of course, magic swords are one of the most popular tropes in fantasy (and role playing games). The appeal can probably trace its roots back to King Arthur’s legendary blade, Excalibur. Bilbo was given the elven dagger named Sting in The Hobbit. Aragorn’s Anduril (the sword formerly known as Narsil) is an important symbol in The Lord of the Rings, while Gandalf bore Glamdring (Hey Gary Gygax, who says wizards can’t use swords?), a sword that traced its lineage back to Turgon of Gondolin. As does its ‘mate,’ Orcrist, which found its way to Thorin as he sought to reclaim Erebor for Durin’s folk.

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