Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Tag: Tolkien

  • Parallels in Racial Theory Defensiveness?

    This week Crooked Timber seems to be on a bit of a thanksgiving roll, and has various commentaries on the greats of the revolution and the civil war, mostly negative. In amongst them is a nasty little piece on Thomas Jefferson as prototypical fascist racial theorist, which is stirring some aggressive debate. As always there’s…

  • Tolkien’s Arthurian Epic to be Released

    The Guardian reports that JRR Tolkien’s apparently unfinished Arthurian epic, The Fall of Arthur, is to be released soon. The story is a poem in old-English alliterative style, with passages like these: His bed was barren; there black phantoms Of desire unsated and savage fury In his brain brooded till bleak morning I’m a fan…

  • Style and the Construction of Gaming Worlds

    I have always found it impossible to play magical cyberpunk outside of Shadowrun; I can’t imagine adapting the Shadowrun system to play, say, space opera or high fantasy. Similarly, I can’t imagine playing high fantasy with Traveller rules, or cyberpunk with D&D. Something about these classic games prevents them from being used outside of their…

  • A Post-colonial Rewriting of Lord of the Rings?

    I once ran a campaign in the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, shortly after the war of the ring during the period when it could be reasonably imagined that elves were still present in Middle Earth, and the kingdom of Gondor was still recovering from the war. I imagined that this would be a fairly…

  • Why Tolkien Never Won the Nobel Prize

    The Guardian reports today that the archives of the committee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1961 have been declassified, and one of the nominees was Tolkien. The archives include brief descriptions of the committee’s opinion of the various nominees, though I suspect that the Guardian’s reports are a little limited. The reason given by…

  • Undiscovered Tolkien Artwork

    The Guardian has 6 pictures from an early collection of Tolkien’s sketches for the Hobbit, that were apparently discovered recently. I particularly like number 3, which despite its roughness gives the sky and Smaug a certain vitality.

  • A Post-colonial Reading of Tolkien

    The Guardian has a very cute article about reading Lord of the Rings in Lagos, at age 13, by Claire Armistead. Trapped for 6 months in the sweltering Nigerian capital, her mother set her the book to read to keep her out of trouble, and she has since always associated Tolkien’s world with the mangrove…

  • Let’s Read Tolkien Together!

    The latest nerdrage over the depiction of Dwarves in The Hobbit has really hit home to me something I often suspected about fanboys but never really paid much attention to: they don’t actually know much at all about the text they love. They’re much more interested in their personal, often (usually?) quite fantastic misinterpretations of…

  • The Eternal Dwarf

    There seems to be a lot of nerdrage going on at the moment about the new Hobbit movie, and the depiction of the Dwarves who form the bulk of the characters. The Dwarves actually seem pretty cool to me (you can see them here) and I particularly like Fili and Kili because they actually represent…

  • Bilbo The Pimp

    The Daily Mash has responded to claims that The Hobbit is racist in its typical style. Their commentary on alcohol tax increases is also hilarious.