Quotes

But Húrin mourned openly, and he took up his harp to make a song of lamentation; but he could not, and he broke his harp, and going out, he lifted up his hand towards the North,crying: ‘Marrer of Middle-earth, would that I might see you face to face, and mar you as my lord Fingolfin did!’

The Children of Hurin, by J. R. R. Tolkien (via crocordile)
Source: emerwenaranel

[Sauron] loved order and co-ordination and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction. It was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him.

Text VII, Myths Transformed, Morgoth’s Ring (via survivingrealitywithoutnormality)
Source: survivingrealitywithoutnormality

Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.”
 
And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.

John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via pornosophical)
Source: mightygodking.com

A Musical Instrument

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
   Down in the reeds by the river ?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
   With the dragon-fly on the river.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
   From the deep cool bed of the river :
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
   Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
   While turbidly flowed the river ;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed
   To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
   (How tall it stood in the river !)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
   In holes, as he sat by the river.

This is the way,’ laughed the great god Pan,
    (Laughed while he sat by the river,)
The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.’
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
   He blew in power by the river.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan !
   Piercing sweet by the river !
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan !
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
   Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
   To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man :
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, —
For the reed which grows nevermore again
   As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(via theotherwesley)

When George handed Tolkien the tape recorder, his skepticism towards it as a machine was deeply rooted in his personality. Because the machine could record and play back a human voice, Tolkien joked around that the tape recorder was possessed. That was why he began a recording session with exorcizing any demons living inside the machine. He did this by recording himself reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

But Tolkien didn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer in English. Neither did he recite it in Latin, which would have been expected considering that he was a devout Catholic. No, Tolkien being Tolkien, he recited the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic.

from J.R.R. Tolkien and the Exorcism of the Tape Recorder
(via bookriot)
Source: bookriot
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