Not directly Tolkien-related, but I think the good professor would appreciate you taking a stand against fascism no matter the odds, don’t you think? 🙂
If you’re in the USA and eligible to vote, give those bastards what for!
I’m at the British Museum today. OMG. What a place. I think I soundly gasped when I saw the Rosetta stone.
Here’s a little 18th century thing: an orrery, or model that showed the way earth and planets moved around the sun.
Orrery, ca. 1750, British Museum.
Our voyage inside this manuscript ends with these very interesting astronomical diagrams, especially of the Earth, in red and black. Once again, we can use this manuscript to dismiss the common notion of the Middle Ages as a period of time during which people believed the Earth was flat.
Here you can find the facsimile and here the video orientation!
“Diagrams, many with moving parts, designed to accompany the work Theoricae Novae Planetarum by 15th-century Austrian astronomer Georg von Peurbach, who taught at the universities in Padua and Ferrara. The diagrams demonstrate increasingly complex planetary motion. An early 17th-century inscription on the first flyleaf refers to an edition of Peurbach published in Venice in 1616.”
I wanted to do a more detailed and nice looking study BUT OH BOY DO I ABSOLUTELY NOT HAVE THE TIME so instead I’m just going to drop all my visual headcanons here in one post so I don’t forget them later.
They Are As Follows:
1) SEXY MESOPOTAMIAN/MEDITERRANEAN GRIFFINS FROM THE BRONZE AGE – in keeping with my Babylonian Mordor aesthetic
2) WHAT IF the fell beasts the Nazgul ride are like the hairless-sphinx cats of the griffin world? WHAT IF THEY USED TO HAVE FEATHERS, OR SOME OF THEM STILL HAVE FEATHERS, OR MAYBE I JUST FORGOT THAT THE FELLBEASTS ARE CANONICALLY NAKED??? Who among us is to say.*
* I forgot I absolutely forgot but now I want to do the hairless skinbeast version of this picture very very badly
3) PEACOCKS.
4) but
5) BLACK LIKE HOW THAT ONE CHICKEN DO, YOU KNOW, THE ONE
This concludes my presentation thank you for coming
Gravestone of Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, died Shawwal A.H. 532/ June/July A.D. 1138Rogers Fund, 1948
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Medium: Steatite; carved
MisbehavingMaiar: Tumblr Archive 