13 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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All such oral societies, ancient and contemporary, have a corporate repository of folk wisdom; a body of inherited material p...

14 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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A man of many names, talents and predecessors, Aragorn is royalty wrapped in a rough-and-ready wardrobe.  In Rive...

15 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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When Celeborn tells the Fellowship that Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see ...

16 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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Because, in Middle-earth, all evil originates in goodness, there are no wholly good or bad people, only shades of corruption. ‘I do not...

17 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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The longing that trees might have the ability to defend themselves had weighed heavily on Tolkien since his schooldays. His childhood d...

18 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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Standalone sentences, especially those with poetic features like Boromir’s rhyming couplet The wolf that one hears is worse t...

19 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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This scope for freewill and creative liberty does not imply that right and wrong are purely relative terms amongst Tolkien’s peoples, or th...

20 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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Hobbits seem particularly eager to learn from the Elven tradition.  Sam memorises and repeats Haldir’s A rope may be a help in...

21 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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This volume could simply be a list of sayings, with comments attached.  Instead, it uses the proverbs of Middle-earth as a len...

22 days to the publication to "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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As with the Ents, the Istari, and the Elves, Bombadil’s ageless longevity (and that of his wife, the similarly mysterious River-daughter, G...

23 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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Only days after the death of the King’s son had forced the Rohirrim to contemplate the possibility of their kingdom’s destruction, the last...

24 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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Unfinished Tales relates an unpublished ‘jotting’ suggesting that during the War of the Ring ‘many Drúedain… came forth out of the caves w...

25 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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As well as a good example of how Treebeard uses proverbs ( Do not be hasty , in altered form, and It is easier to shout stop! than to do it...

26 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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The ideal Saruman – the Saruman perhaps of his first thousand years in Middle-earth – would therefore have been a second (lesser)  Aulë.  He...

27 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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Bilbo has had his life transformed, and though he doesn’t regret that change he is determined to make it clear to those hobbits who would f...

28 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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In correspondence, Tolkien described Sam as ‘a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and rec...

29 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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The wisdom of Rohan is not book-knowledge but oral heritage, primarily expressed in Anglo-Saxon meadhall traditions of story and song.  Thi...

30 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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While some proverbs come into the collective consciousness via the work of an individual – John Donne’s No man is an island , for example,...

One month (31 days) to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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Gandalf declares that the world is too wild to predict or control, so that Even the very wise cannot see all ends. Many proverbial express...

32 days to the publication of "The Proverbs of Middle-earth"

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Having learned to distrust even themselves, the Elves recognise that wisdom is wider than any single philosophy or worldview, however well-...