5,993 words
The year was 939 AD, the setting near the city of Simancas. Count Fernán Gonzalez, a commander of free Spain, rode at the head of an army whose mission was to strike a blow against the Saracen invaders of Al-Andalus. Still, they were outnumbered and desperate. Fortune, it seemed, would favor the Moors on this day. But as the Count’s troops prepared to clash with their foe, a miracle occurred. (more…)
1,275 words
As recent American political events have demonstrated, the modern political Left can no longer be seen as making any legitimate contribution to philosophy, culture, politics, society, and so on. (more…)
3,018 words
The singer Édith Piaf famously, and throatily, regretted nothing about anything. But the poet John Betjeman wished that he’d had more sex. And the economist John Maynard Keynes that he’d drunk more champagne. Me? I regret two things much more important than recreational sex or champagne. (more…)
“Off with her head!” An original illustration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1864)
7,655 words
The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.
— D. H. Lawrence
A question, readers: what is the most profound of all human activities? With the previous sentence, I’ve already provided the answer, for it is the question itself — the thing that drives all exploration and philosophy. How can philosophy (or any knowledge) exist without first the riddle, the profound need for the answer? (more…)
500 words
“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)
1.469 ord
En af mine foretrukne dele af Ringenes Herre er Sjette Bog, kapitel 8, ”Rengøring i Herredet”, det næstsidste kapitel i Kongen vender Tilbage. (more…)
Robert Plant (left) and Jimmy Page (right), Chicago, 1977.
2,100 words
Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair
— “Going to California”
Led Zeppelin’s back catalog already includes songs like “Ramble On” from the rocky Led Zeppelin II and the melancholic classic “Tangerine” from the flower-powered III. (more…)
3,323 words
Owen Barfield
History in English Words
New York: Doubleday & Company, 1926
In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty.
— Owen Barfield (more…)
185 words / 59:55
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Greg Johnson talks to Morgoth of Morgoth’s Review on the web, Bitchute, and YouTube about White Nationalist culture jamming, the Eternal Anglo vs. Tolkienism, Arts & Crafts, and Aestheticism, Roger Scruton, whiteness in classical and pop music, the 2019 UK General Election, (more…)
1,480 words
Tolkien world experienced two huge events this month.
Amazon announced last week the diverse cast for its new Lord of the Rings series. Shortly thereafter, Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien’s editor and the guardian of his father’s legacy, died. (Hopefully, there was no connection between the events.) (more…)
1,287 words
“Few now remember them . . . yet still some go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness, guarding from evil things folks that are heedless.” (Tom Bombadil, “Fog on the Barrow Downs,” The Fellowship of the Ring)
In memory of Christopher Tolkien (more…)
Christopher Tolkien
760 words
J. R. R. Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher, died on January 15 at the age of 95. Even in old age, Christopher cut a striking scholarly figure, sitting as he did in a green cardigan before a log fire. His reedy voice, occasionally crackling like the dry wood in the stone hearth at his feet, carrying with it subtle wisps of academic gravitas, as smoky shadows curled like grey-blue snakes around a towering bookcase filled with leather-bound tomes (more…)
Arthur Rackham, Alberich and the Rhine Maidens, 1910-1911
1,323 words
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?
— Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass (more…)
2,268 words
“Tolkien knows more about Chaucer than any living man.” — John Masefield, Poet Laureate (1930-67)
John M. Bowers’ book Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (Oxford 2019) finally puts paid to the recently concocted mythology propagated in spurious articles like The Telegraph’s September 2009 piece “J.R.R. Tolkien Trained as a British Spy” and Elansea’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Codemaker, Spy-Master, Hero: An Un-Authorized Biography (2015), that the creator of Middle-Earth was some kind of tweed-jacketed Indiana Jones, (more…)
488 words
“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)
Geoffrey Bache Smith
1,432 words
Dark is the world our fathers left us,
Wearily, greyly the long years flow,
Almost the gloom has hope bereft us,
Far is the high gods’ song and low:
Sombre the crests of mountains lonely,
Leafless, wind-ridden, moan the trees;
Down in the valleys is twilight only.
Twilight over the mourning sea;
Time was when earth was always golden,
Time was when skies were always clear;
Spirits and souls of the heroes olden,
Faint are cries from the darkness, hear!
1,206 words
One of the advantages of reading biographies is that even if they’re not very good, there remains the consolation of having learned something. Sadly, this is one of the few positive things that can be said about the recent biopic Tolkien.
Biographies can be tricky to adapt for the screen. Filmmakers will want to adhere to the truth as much as possible while still being able to tell a coherent and thematic story. How much artistic license is too much? (more…)
471 words
“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)
1,085 words
J. R. R. Tolkien (Christopher Tolkien, ed.)
The Fall of Gondolin
New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018
The Fall of Gondolin is Tolkien’s final posthumous publication and the third of his “Great Tales,” alongside The Children of Húrin and Beren and Lúthien. It was compiled and edited by his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, and contains multiple versions of the story, (more…)
1,550 words
Among the vast array of sources that influenced Tolkien in the creation of his legendarium was the Kalevala, a collection of Finnish folk poetry compiled and edited by the Finnish physician and philologist Elias Lönnrot. Much scholarship exists on Tolkien’s Norse, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon influences, but his interest in the Kalevala is not as often discussed. (more…)
446 words
“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)
6,052 words
“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West.”–“Stairway to Heaven,” Led Zeppelin IV
It was with the advent of Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) that a direct link was first made between national culture and the simplicity of peasant life. (more…)
3,171 words
We owe a great debt of gratitude to J. R. R. Tolkien, who embodied the medieval bardic tradition, and penned his epic tale in rebuke of mechanized modernity. I doubt even Tolkien could have predicted that some fifty years later, his story would look more like prophecy than fable. Then again, Tolkien probably sensed Europe had entered its twilight. The Great European Civil War of the twentieth century, which Tolkien fought in during its first phase, impressed upon him that modernity, with its unrelenting industry (capitalism) and hi-tech weaponry, was destroying the West. (more…)
446 words
“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)
537 words
Translated by Margot Metroland
We are in an epoch in which numerous religious, ethnic, or sexual groups are risking community-implosion by trying to impose their own values on everyone else. A time in which a certain politician we shall not name (more…)
743 words
Like many in the Alt-Right, I am quite suspicious of the American entertainment industry and its effects on our subconscious assumptions as a society. As Joe Biden stated, “gay marriage” is a consequence of “Jewish leaders in the [entertainment] industry” and their “immense influence” over our culture. Biden’s statement was discussed so widely because all who heard it recognized that he was speaking a seldom-voiced truth: that the progressive social degeneracy of the last 50 years is due in large measure to Hollywood and a certain class of studio moguls and filmmakers. (more…)
446 words
“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)
446 words
“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)
688 words
In his remake of King Kong, Peter Jackson dragged out the big ape’s death so long it felt like a lifetime. At the time, it merely seemed like a lapse of taste. In hindsight, it seems like the beginning of a whole new career characterized by megalomania, greed, one-upmanship, self-indulgence, and bad taste. It was just the first symptom of the dragon sickness that has now consumed him.
The Battle of Five Armies begins with Smaug giving Laketown the Dresden treatment, (more…)
435 words
“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)