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A Maia or an Eldil would be the Tolkien or Lewis equivalent of a Power or Authority, a non-corporeal personal intelligence, known in from the Greek "messenger" as an Angel, near the middle of the nine choirs in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's De Coelesti Hierarchia, On the Celestial Hierarchy.Eru as God is properly called Eru Iluvatar in Tolkien's Silmarillioin.In Tolkien's Silmarillion and Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet, these intelligences worked to heal the deliberate destruction of the populated worlds by the very powerful, corrupted intellect, which Tolkien names Melkor/Morgoth, and Lewis seems not to name. That latter, evil being is...

What better way to celebrate #TolkienReadingDay than to hear from the author himself? Each year on March 25, Tolkien fans around the world mark the day by reading one of the many works penned by the popular Catholic author. According to the Tolkien Society, the annual event “has been organised by the Tolkien Society since 2003 to encourage fans to celebrate and promote the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien by reading favorite passages.” Read more: Tolkien’s Middle-Earth love story, Beren and Luthien, to be published in 2017 The date of March 25 has special significance to fans and Catholics...

I was an atheist until i read “The Lord Of The Rings” by Fredric Heidemann December 16, 2016 I grew up in a loving, comfortable atheist household of professional scientists. My dad was a lapsed Catholic, and my mom was a lapsed Lutheran. From the time that I could think rationally on the subject, I did not believe in God. God was an imaginary being for which there was no proof. At best, God was a fantasy for half-witted people to compensate their ignorance and make themselves feel better about their own mortality. At worst, God was a perverse delusion...

On an early Sunday morning, September 20, 1931, three 30-something English professors took a stroll together on Addison’s Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford: 32-year-old C. S. Lewis (Fellow and Tutor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford), 39-year-old J. R. R. Tolkien (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford), and 35-year-old Hugo Dyson (Tutor and Lecturer at Reading University). Their time together had begun the evening before at dinner, but their conversation went late into the night.

Next month one Brooklyn theater will explore that question in a Monty Python-esque comedy entitled The Beatles Present ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Musical.” The writer and director of the show wanted to explore, in a comedic way, what might have happened had Tolkien given a green light to the original project proposed by The Beatles.Well before Peter Jackson took on the weighty task of bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s realm of Middle-Earth to moviegoers, The Fab Four had approached the Catholic author in hopes of filling the roles of Frodo, Gandalf and company.During the 60s and 70s the highly successful...

IN the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled J. R. R. Tolkien. “Parting from my wife,” he wrote, doubting that he would survive the trenches, “was like a death.”

Google has fixed a bug in an online tool after it began translating "Russian Federation" to "Mordor". Mordor is the name of a fictional region nicknamed "Land of Shadow" in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books. In addition, "Russians" was translated to "occupiers" and the surname of Sergey Lavrov, the country's Foreign Minister, to "sad little horse". The errors had been introduced to Google Translate's Ukrainian to Russian service automatically, Google said.

124 years ago today, on January 3, 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein Africa. Forty-five years later, in 1937, his book The Hobbit, was published which he had written for his children. Together with its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, it launched generations of readers on adventures through the invented world of Middle-earth that would impact many of us for the rest of our lives.

Turkey once again showed it can't take a joke, as a Turkish court ordered a panel of experts to assess the character of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings - to decide whether a doctor who compared President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the figure should be jailed. Dr. Bilgin Ciftci of Aydin is accused of "insulting" Erdogan by posting images online comically comparing Erdogan and Gollum, the fantasy creature with a personality split between good and evil who became a fan favorite for pining over the One Ring - better known as "my precious." The experts will determine whether...

The artifact provides an amazing insight into Tolkien's mind - including his observation that Hobbiton is on the same latitude as the city of Oxford. It also suggests that Ravenna in Italy is the inspiration behind Minas Tirith, a fictional city that became the heavily fortified capital of Gondor. And it references Cyprus, Belgrade and Jerusalem.

An important, and frankly amazing Tolkien document has emerged, recently discovered loose in a copy of The Lord of the Rings once owned by illustrator Pauline Baynes. The Guardian reports that Baynes removed the map from a previous version of the novel as she was working on a then new color map for a new edition that was published in 1970. The map then had “copious” notes made by J.R.R. Tolkien in green ink and pencil. Baynes then made her own notes on the map. It is essentially a map annotated by Tolkien himself.

On Thursday JRR Tolkien's early story The Story of Kullervo will be published for the first time. The dark tale reveals that Tolkien's Middle Earth was inspired not only by England and Wales… but also by Finland. "Hapless Kullervo," Tolkien called him. Kullervo, an orphan boy raised into slavery, a tragic hero who commits incest in the dark forests of Karelia and hurls himself on his own blade.

As a person who has written on Tolkien for almost fifteen years and read Tolkien for thirty-six years, I am often asked about his political views. In a sense, this is a funny question, as Tolkien really despised most politics. In fact, he really thought of himself as very anti-political. His few statements on the matter reveal just how unpolitical and apolitical and anti-political he could be. It is also, however, a natural question for someone to ask about the great man, as we live in a highly politicized age. So, what do we know? First, Tolkien was a conservative...

J.R.R. Tolkien, the British author best known for The Hobbit and his epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, was an astute critic of socialism and utopianism and a passionate defender of liberty, says Jay Richards, co-author of The Hobbit Party, which he calls “a study of the political and economic implications of Tolkien’s thought.” “Certainly anyone that’s seen The Lord of the Rings, for instance, at the movies knows that he was deeply concerned about the dangers and the temptations of absolute power. "The symbol of the one ring, of course. It’s not just a symbol of the sort...

Peter Jackson has said he won't be making anymore movies based on J. R. R. Tolkien's work, because the estate won't let him. SNIP The writer's son Christopher, who was appointed by his father as his literary executor, said that he was disappointed by the way the movies had diluted the artistry of the novels. He told Le Monde in 2012: 'Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time. 'The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work and what it has become has overwhelmed me. The commercialisation has...

JRR Tolkien in 1967 (Photo: PA) Books blog: Dr Holly Ordway's Not God's Type recounts a fascinating and uplifting journeyI have been reading Dr Holly OrdwayÂ’s Not GodÂ’s Type: an Atheist Academic Lays Down her Arms (Ignatius Press, or Gracewing in the UK). It is always uplifting to read books like this, not in a triumphalist way but because it is a reminder that underneath all the glaring human weaknesses in the Church as an institution, which we all know so well, there are still people out there who are searching for answers to fundamental questions and then finding...

This past summer my junior honors theology students read The Hobbit in preparation for their morality class this fall. While reading, I discovered why so many enjoy The Hobbit. We can connect so well with Bilbo Baggins and the other characters because they are so real, so like us. One can also find many “hidden� parallels or analogies to the Catholic Faith if they are truly sought out. What draws so many readers to The Hobbit is this central Christian message: there is a Bilbo Baggins inside of us who is faced with a decision whether or not to...

Sixty years ago today, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” part one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterwork, “The Lord of the Rings,” was published in the United Kingdom. Tolkien conceived of the novel as one book, not three. He would have preferred for its approximately 1,200 to 1,500 pages (depending on the edition) to appear between just one set of covers. But his publisher, George Allen & Unwin, decided to mete out the fantasy narrative and release it as a trilogy over 15 months. “The Two Towers” came out in November, 1954, and “The Return of the King” hit bookstore shelves the...

'The Hobbit' Part 3 News: Climax Of 'Battle of Five Armies' 'Sets Tone' For 'What's Going To Happen' In 'Lord of the Rings' Trilogy Letteri went on to speak about how the ending of this movie would lead into and help fans better understand the Lord of the Rings trilogy. "Yeah because it is the climax, and you really just need to know that there is another battle for Middle-earth," he said." The whole extension of The Hobbit's story has really been to get us to the point where we understand when we leave it what's going to happen when...

A Glendale, Ore., man decked out for battle and allegedly high on LSD thought he was fighting the evil ‘Morgoth,’ but really, he was stabbing a woman’s car in a Portland, Ore., intersection.