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free my girl she did all that shit but the fandom is mischaracterizing her for it

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In an undated letter written in the late 1950s, reproduced in THE LETTERS OF JRR TOLKIEN, Tolkien alludes to the legal difficulties Sam faced after returning from the Grey Havens at the end of LORD OF THE RINGS:

When Master Samwise reported the ‘departure over Sea’ of Bilbo (and Frodo) in 1421, it was still held impossible to presume death; and when Master Samwise became Mayor in 1427, a rule was made that: ‘if any inhabitant of the Shire shall pass over Sea in the presence of a reliable witness, with the expressed intention not to return, or in circumstances plainly implying such an intention, he or she shall be deemed to have relinquished all titles rights or properties previously held or occupied, and the heir or heirs thereof shall forthwith enter into possession of these titles, rights, or properties, as is directed by established custom, or by the will and disposition of the departed, as the case may require.’

You can see how the residents of Hobbiton might have seen Sam's return as the premise of a kind of Agatha Christie mystery plot: favorite servant of eccentric middle-aged local resident departs on an unexpected journey with his master; returns home alone two weeks later; and then conveniently produces a copy of said eccentric local resident's new will, naming the servant the heir to all his property — and the only account the servant can offer of his master's whereabouts is a preposterous story about Elves. Suspicious! Very suspicious indeed!

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Do you ever think about how Tolkien’s vision of the greatest evil in the universe was something he referred to as “The Machine” which was his way of talking about accelerated industrialism and mass surveillance and he wrote multiple books where the main villains were a dragon who sits on a huge pile of treasure that he never intends to use but incinerates anyone who comes near it, a man in a giant tower who’s wrecking the environment with his factories, and an evil being who uses what’s essentially a listening device to control the citizens of middle earth. And now Amazon is making a Tolkien show. Do you ever think about that.

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Learning about plants has made my biopunk novel much more complicated like damn now I have to think about all the species and stuff

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A great question to get at this is: Did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail? If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would.  If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time.  The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.  Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.  The final form of Descartes’ published synthesis was self-censorship—self-censorship very deliberately cultivated by an outside power.

-Ada Palmer, Tools for Thinking About Censorship

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Virtual reconstruction of Emperor Hadrian's villa .

By: Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, Indiana University.

The Digital Hadrian's Villa Project.

Stunning

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An extraordinary Acheulean handaxe knapped around a fossil shell circa 500,000-300,000 years ago.

The maker appears to have deliberately flaked around the shell to preserve and place it in a central position. As a result this handaxe has been described as an early example of artistic thought.

From West Tofts, Norfolk.

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Courtesy Alison Fisk

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“middle aged women shouldn’t participate in fandom” and you think it’s teenagers that are writing those brilliant, incisive 100k fics of your favourite characters

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really enjoying this series

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Rogier van der Weyden - Portrait of a Lady (ca. 1460)

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Courtesy of Stephen Moss/Photosm

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Waistcoat

c.1620-1625

England

The high waistline and narrow sleeves, open at the front seam, are characteristic of women's waistcoats of the early 1620s. The blackwork embroidery is of exquisite quality and is worked in a continuous pattern throughout the body of the garment. A group of interlocking curling stems enhanced with a garden of roses, rosebuds, peapods, oak leaves, acorns, pansy and pomegranates, with wasps, butterflies and birds, make up the embroidery design. The extremely fine speckling stitches create the shaded effect of a woodblock print. This style of blackwork is typical of the early seventeenth-century and thought to have been inspired by the designs from woodblock prints that the embroiderers were using. The waistcoat is unlined and embellished with an insertion of bobbin lace in black and white linen at the back of each sleeve, and a edging of bobbin lace in the same colours.

The Victoria & Albert (Accession number: T.4-1935)

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Face of a man who died in 1361 during the Battle of Visby in Swedeп, one of the wildest of Eυrope.

More: https://artifactsmuseumhistory.blogspot.com/

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turin saw fingon and his lords passing the bridge

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Aboard Galdor’s warship, Glorfindel returns in triumph from a dangerous expedition deep into enemy territory. He has found Elrond’s missing son, but all is not well: the Elf-child that was abducted by the Corsairs of Umbar is now a Man grown. War and darkness have left Elrohir deeply scarred, and he is not the mission’s only casualty.

An alternate universe for the Under Strange Stars series, in which Elrohir goes with Glorfindel instead of running away from him after the events of Under Strange Stars. This story covers the events of ‘Northern Skies’, but it can be enjoyed without having read the original.

Many thanks to Grundy for all of her excellent beta-reading and brainstorming.

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Aboard Galdor’s warship, Glorfindel returns in triumph from a dangerous expedition deep into enemy territory. He has found Elrond’s missing son, but all is not well: the Elf-child that was abducted by the Corsairs of Umbar is now a Man grown. War and darkness have left Elrohir deeply scarred, and he is not the mission’s only casualty.

An alternate universe for the Under Strange Stars series, in which Elrohir goes with Glorfindel instead of running away from him after the events of Under Strange Stars. This story covers the events of ‘Northern Skies’, but it can be enjoyed without having read the original.

Many thanks to Grundy for all of her excellent beta-reading and brainstorming.