What 📔book are you reading right now?

[Goku da Silva]

I'm reading Children of Dune, doing a recap before the feature film!

 

[Barliman]

It's that time of year, so I'm doing a leisurely re-read of LotR. I've just left Bree.

Don't be a stranger and hurry back.

 

[Barliman]

I'm reading The Battle of the Huertgen Forest by Charles McDonald.
Realizing how easy the Hobbits had it.

 

[Goldilocks Gamgee]

I'm reading the "Unfinished Tales" by J.R.R. Tolkien. Also, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" translation by Simon Armitage (I've already read the Tolkien translation).

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Salem's Lot by Stephen King

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

The Idea of Nature, by R.G. Collingwood.

And feeling like a right dunce.

 

[Olorgando]

After having plowed through my coffee-table slabs on "Old India" and "Old Mexico" (actually Mesoamerica, excluding northern Mexico but including northern Central America), I'm now having a go at the slab "Old Greece". 🥵

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

I'm now having a go at the slab "Old Greece". 🥵

That reminds me -- I need to clean my oven.

 

[Olorgando]

I'm now having a go at the slab "Old Greece". 🥵

That reminds me -- I need to clean my oven.

?????

 

[Matthew Bailey]

Consolidation of Philosophy and Tractus of Theology by Boethius; The Ecclesiastical History of England by The Venerable Bede; Grace and Free Will, The Predestination of the Saints, and Civitas Dei (aka: The City of God) by St. Augustine; The Histories (Public and Secret) of Procopius; The Alexiad by Anna Komnenos; Church History and The Life of the Constantine by Eusebius¹; The Hobbit; and The Nature of Middle-earth (again, because it is freaking PAINFUL to get through the first part of the book, and it reveals a turmoil in Tolkien that is hard to “watch” him go through with his earlier life being so wrapped-up in Vatican I, while trying to accept Vatican II, and seemingly shredding his earlier work in spite of the Church having “betrayed” Tradition to Modernity with the “revelations” of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council — i.e. “Vatican II”) alongside the latter three volumes of The History of Middle-earth.

And also re-reading Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren, and Babel-13.

And several works of Kabbalistic Demonology that deal with the “War in Heaven” which is related to Middle-earth in the rebellion of Melkor (and Sauron) beginning in the Ainulindalë, and continuing with the first Three Ages of Middle-earth (Which begin with the return of the Noldor to Middle-earth, or, rather, with the return of Melkor/Morgoth to Middle-earth. The earlier Ages are not the Ages of Middle-earth, but are the Ages prior to History).

I’ve been slowly collecting the various contents of the Academic Journals on Tolkien Studies, which since the 00s have had some rather specious and tenuous works published regarding Middle-earth that reveal that the authors are nearly wholly ignorant of the below cited quote from HoM-e, Vol. X, never mind the works to which they refer, and thus they miss the most relevant parts of Tolkien’s canon of work that more than a little falsify their respective theses.

But even with the tenuous works in the Academic Journals, there is still a larger body that dives pretty deeply into the respective Theology and Metaphysics (some of it too deeply, as many of the Christian Tolkien Scholars tend to apply forms of Christian Ideology that were themselves pretty repugnant to Tolkien along with Modernity and the various things he associated with it).

I am hoping to get another look into a book that I used to own by an English Theologian from the 17th Century who was ridiculing the then popular paranoia over “witches:” The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft by John Webster. I used to own one of the only three Manuscripts of the work (there are printed copies, but there existed a dozen written and illuminated Manuscripts. I used to own one of the three surviving manuscripts). But despite Webster being a Protestant, his Theology and respective Metaphysics had a parallel in Catholicism that was a part of the Ecumenicism of the Vatican I Catholic Theology. Both were/are reactions to the Sciences beginning to overturn the Augustinian’, Aquinas’, and other Catholic Theologian’s claims that “God made the Universe to be Knowable, and the Sciences will reveal that ‘Truth©™®‘.” Only the Sciences began revealing that the claims of the Catholic and Christian Churches were rather less than “True,” and resulted in a receding “God” who began to vanish into the gaps in our Epistemic Knowledge of the Universe.

But Webster’s ridicule of the Witch-Hunters and the Malleus Maleficarum is highly pertinent to Middle-earth, as Webster also was a deeply committed Astrologer and Alchemist, who studied what he called “Real/Natural and Infernal Magic.” He was famous for his defense of the Occultists John Dee and Méric Casabon, and claimed that the former had succeeded in discovering the “Lost Magicks of the Ancients.” Which was rather an irony given his ridicule of Witchcraft.

But Webster’s work is highly pertinent to Tolkien in that he defined the ideas and philosophies that surround Tolkien’s (and Catholicism’s) views on “Magic,” as being essentially “Satanic,” and thus Necromantic as well, while what we think of as ‘Magic’ that is associated with what Webster called “The Natural Magicks” is really an innate ability that is refined like the arts, or any respective “craft.”

It is from he, Dee, and Casabon that the term “The Craft” came to be associated with “Magic.” But Tolkien’s comments in Letters on the confusion of Elvish Magic, which he puts into the mouth of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings was first stated in those terms by Dee, Webster, and Casabon, whereby Tolkien points out that “The Elves do not do ‘Magic’;” ‘Magic,’ as Tolkien points out, is a “Device of The Enemy,” and thus would be shunned by the Elves or Maiar.

Anyway… Just some typical “reading.”


1. I should point out that I am not Christian, but Tolkien was, and a pre-Modernist, Vatican I Catholic Christian at that, who was not just Pre-Modernist, but actively Anti-Modernist, as the First Vatican Ecumenical Council declared Catholicism to be in 1868), and the respective Theology (and Metaphysics) associated with Catholicism, and the particular “flavor” of Catholicism practiced by Tolkien (one that is nearly extinct now) is woven into the fabric of Middle-earth.

Continuing to read the Primary Sources again-and-again-and-again-…-and-again becomes rather vacuous after a while without having the references to specific terms use by that form of Catholic Theology and Metaphysics, where, as Carl Hostetter points out in The Nature of Middle-earth, with the quote from page x of The History of Middle-earth, Vol. X: Morgoth’s Ring:

Meditating long on the world that he had brought into being and was now in part unveiled, he had become absorbed in analytic speculation concerning its underlying postulates. Before he could prepare a new and final Silmarillion he must satisfy the requirements of a coherent theological and metaphysical system, rendered now more complex in its presentation by the supposition of obscure and conflicting elements in its roots and its tradition.

I personally have quoted that passage so many times that I can recite it from memory.

But note: … he must satisfy the requirements of a coherent theological and metaphysical system …

That says that without knowing what the Theological and Metaphysical Systems in question even are, you cannot know their requirements, NOR can you know what is affected by those requirements, and how they are thus affected, at that.

 

[TrollinSun]

Hatreds Kingdom, How Saudi Arabia supports the new global terrorism

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

I'm reading The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff - adventures in Roman Britain focussing on the legion that went missing. Supposedly a children's book but then so is The Hobbit (and LOTR?)

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

There's a movie based -- loosely, as you might expect -- on the novel: "The Eagle", IIRC.

 

[Endrasil]

I'm currently reading LotR (again ) and The Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer. What about you guys?

2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano

 

[Culaeron]

I'm on a Larry Niven kick. Just finished The Mote in God's Eye, by Niven and Jerry Pournelle

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Interesting -- if cold -- book.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

In going through boxes of old books, I came across some from the Centaur Press, a tiny* publisher from the 1970's that reprinted fantasy and adventure stories that had appeared originally in the Pulp magazines of the 20's and 30's, by writers such as Robert E. Howard and Talbot Mundy. I was happy to discover them, and reread this one, about adventures among the Indian tribes of South America:

That was the first of a series of four, and I'm currently in the middle of the second:

Rip-roaring stuff, which I thought had been lost or destroyed long ago. The covers of these two were by Jeff Jones, BTW.

* So tiny, in fact, that I only ever saw them on sale in one place: in a spinner rack at a small Mom-and-Pop grocery store in Maryland. I happened to be going up there regularly at the time, and always tried to drop by and pick up two or three. Considering what a few of the rarer ones are going for these days, I wish I'd bought multiple copies. 😀

 

[Olorgando]

* So tiny, in fact, that I only ever saw them on sale in one place: in a spinner rack at a small Mom-and-Pop grocery store in Maryland. I happened to be going up there regularly at the time, and always tried to drop by and pick up two or three. Considering what a few of the rarer ones are going for these days, I wish I'd bought multiple copies. 😀

This sounds familiar ... 🤔

 

[Phantom718]

One of the things my ADD takes over on is reading. I'm almost ALWAYS reading multiple books at once because I tend to read in spurts. Even those books that I "can't put down" I still shift gears to another story for a bit, and then back to the other one. Currently, I'm going through these:

Skimming through the new LotR illustrated edition
Song of the Saurials
All the Light We Cannot See
Will Haunt You
Goblin

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Reading HP Lovecraft for some Christmas cheer 🐙