And my TBR pile of scholarship that I haven't had time to read this fall while I wrangled my thesis into shape, lol. Still, having time to read stuff that has nothing to do with work will be pretty cool.

I think you once told me something alone the lines of, "If Tolkien his legendarium was perfectly congruent with Catholic orthodoxy, the Holy Office might have something to say about that!" I come back to that often, lol

Yeah, I had Flieger in the back of my mind while writing this thread, as I often do when writing about Tolkien.

Tolkien's Roman Catholicism could offer explanations, but that only goes so far when you're in pain. In Arda, though, he felt safe to ask the questions to which he already had "answers" in the Primary World. Arda doesn't have to conform to the Primary World. It's "only fantasy," after all.

Death as the Gift of Men is so obviously Tolkien trying to square the brutal reality of loss with his Christian belief in Death as the wages of sin. For 60 years he wrestled with what might be humanity's greatest existential problem. He offers back, not a religious answer, but a religious question.

I love the wild digressions in Les Mis. They are 100 percent Necessary.

Thank you! It won't be ready for others to read for a while yet, but this round of revisions is finally turning it into the book I've wanted it to be for a long time.

It's fascinating to experience something, then instantly think of my characters, how these splinters of my psyche would respond—*have* responded, even—to that same experience in fiction. Reading my life through my story. Some people have an internal family system. I have an internal fantasy system!

Verlyn Flieger suggests that, by the end of his life, JRRT had spent so much time in his Secondary World, it began to fuse with his Primary World. The two "double-exposed" on top of each other so that he interpreted the one through the other. That's definitely been my experience of writing fantasy.

"'By the Waters of Anduin We Lay Down and Wept': Exilic Theology in the Akallabêth," began, like the other essays in the book, as a paper at the Tolkien Society Seminar 2023. I later expanded it into an article in the journal Mallorn with a very similar title. You can find a PDF over at my blog!

Tolkien Studies is locked behind a paywall, so if you'd like to read this article, or any other for that matter, let me know and I'm more than happy to give you a hand with that. ;)

Seems like a good time to pick up Interrupted Music and A Question of Time then, since I was relying library copies...