April has been a productive month for me and Hawke Robinson. We have managed to record not one but two new episodes of Middle-earth Talk Radio. And Hawke has also finally begun reorganizing his server to improve the performance.

So you can use this new temporary URL (the links should be good for a long time to come, he tells me) to see the new version of Middle-earth Radio: http://new.middleearthradio.com/.

As I write this, I'm able to download Episode 21 (recorded on Sunday, April 25) but I'm still having trouble downloading Episode 20 (recorded on April 1). I asked Hawke to upload Episode 21 without editing (he'll upload a revised version later).

When it starts to work, you'll be able to see the details for Episode 20 and download it here.

You can download Episode 21 right now and listen to all the stupid silliness that normally gets excised from our rants.

I should point out there is a new forum for Middle-earth Radio as well.

Todd Friesen, be sure to listen to this episode.

BTW -- as you listen to the show, my voice fades in and out for a while but I think we got it worked out. You'll hear Hawke (in the raw/unedited version) help me tweak my microphone.

Are you familiar with the following exchange between Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli?

ARAGORN: If an Ent falls in the forest, does anyone hear it scream?


LEGOLAS: If an Adan tells a bad jest, does anyone stay my hand from slaying him?


GIMLI: Now, good Elf, what was wrong with the jest?


LEGOLAS: I deem it unkind to the trees.


ARAGORN: What, and not to the Ent?


LEGOLAS: It is the trees which must endure the screaming Ent, Aragorn. Do you know how long it takes an Ent to yell for help?

I laughed out loud when I read this earlier today. I wrote it more than 10 years ago and had forgotten all about it. This is an excerpt from the first essay in a small collection I called Findegil's Insider's Guide to The Lord of the Rings. My original plan was to write a new essay every week, but my schedule at the time did not permit that. After producing a fourth essay several weeks late, I abandoned the project, and there it languished for many a year.

This month I have found myself with both the time and the energy to devote to a task that has long needed tending: performing maintenance on the Xenite.Org network. This is the kind of boring, tedious, laborious work that content creators like me leave until the very last possible moment.

Unfortunately, the consequences of not keeping all sections of a large network of Websites up-to-date are severe: you end up with a patchwork quilt pattern of design styles and themes. Worse, you leave in place many old scripts that have long since stopped working.

As of this writing I have updated around 38-40,000 pages of content and I am still not finished. People who visit these pages would, for the most part, not recognize what I've done -- although I have fixed hundreds of broken links, replaced hundreds of dead links, and put up placeholder pages for hundreds of missing URLs that (maybe) I might have a chance to republish somewhere in the future.

So what does all this have to do with Tolkien? Well, among other things I have updated the old Tolkien Forum archives for Xenite.Org (that are now hosted on SF-Fandom). One of the biggest problems with those archives has been that the index pages were almost impossible to read. Thousands of people visit those pages every month and not one person sent me a word of complaint.

Alas! I oft-times feel like a Ranger patrolling the wilds of Eriador.

Which brings me back to Findegil. The Insider's Guide has been given a new look and all the broken code is gone. The very first essay is loaded with my oddball sense of humor. Some of the influences are pretty obvious (such as an exchange between Aragorn and Barliman Butterbur I based on the famous "Who's On First" Abbott and Costello skit).

You can read that funny first essay here.

Findegil was not afraid to take on controversy. In the second essay, Soaring With the Eagles, the old King's Writer poked holes in the "why didn't the eagles just fly Frodo to Mount Doom?" line of reasoning. If you still want to ask that question after reading this piece, you have more fortitude than an Elf, a Dwarf, and a Ranger....

On the Elves of the Fourth Age engages in some of that unbridled speculation I have oft been accused of. It captures some of the historical analysis I used to offer regularly on Suite 101 but without the burden of having to back it up with citations (which I could have included but that would have detracted from the style of the essays).

The last essay in the series looks at the lost books of Arnor and Gondor. I sometimes wish I could have continued writing the Insider's Guide but it was a task beyond my free time.

Nonetheless, I think many people have enjoyed reading the essays and now it should be easier than ever to enjoy them.

By the way, if you do see any broken links in the Xenite network, please consider contacting me with a friendly pointer. I'll appreciate the help -- as will, I am sure, many thousands of other people who visit Xenite.Org's network every month.

I'm going to tell you a little story. It probably won't mean much to you but it makes me chuckle.

In my professional life I study the theory of search engine optimization (which is an esoteric profession -- I'm not sure you could count on two hands how many people are paid to study search engine optimization theory). I was glancing at some articles about linking this morning -- that's the sort of thing one reads a great deal about in SEO -- so naturally I was quickly transported to Technorati.

I have no idea how I got there but I realized I had long ago created an account for my personal blogs so I logged in and noticed that I had never claimed this blog for Technorati. Well, that chore is now taken care of but part of the process of claiming a blog allows you to mention up to three other blogs that link to your blog (not that any of this has much of anything to do with search engine optimization, but it's a small corner of the vestibule of SEO).

I honestly have no idea of which blogs (other than my own) link to this blog so I ran a quick search and found The Tolkien Advocate, which seems worthy of mention here on Tolkien Studies on the Web. And how fortuitous was the finding, for by the good grace of excellent timing I clicked through to the home page of the site and found a link to The Festival in the Shire Journal, an online magazine devoted to all things Tolkien.

I should review the site some day, when I find time. Nonetheless, what led me there was a link to an interview article that no longer works (alas! many Web designers don't understand the importance of maintaining link stability).

The articles open up into popup windows (not really the best user experience out there) and I found this Clyde S. Kilby article in Issue 2 (and it's not the article I was looking for).

Naturally, I started reading the article (written by Kilby in the 1960s). There are a number of passages in the article that made me smile. For example, on assessing The Silmarillion Kilby wrote:

Two things immediately impressed me. One was that The Silmarillion would never be completed. The other was the size of my own task. How could I in a few weeks read, analyze and give a critical judgment on such a mammoth literary effort? Actually I spent one entire day on a six-page section of the manuscript.

And this one made me chuckle:

One of my friends had been told by C. S. Lewis that one might ask Tolkien questions but one would not necessarily get the answers expected. One might find him talking on an entirely different topic, to which he had seen a relationship lost to the questioner. I soon found this to be true. Discovering that efforts to discuss portions of the manuscript with him would not succeed, I began to write out my comments and simply attach them to the manuscript.

I was quite reminded of my own voluminous essays on Tolkien's works, which tend to wander the map of the imagination and human experience in an effort to trace or reconstruct all those seeming connections one finds in Tolkien's prose. People have occasionally (okay, frequently) accused me of making it all up. While my work has necessarily entailed considerable speculation, most of the stuff I have been specifically accused of contriving was, in fact, contrived by the Professor himself (which, I suppose, is a rather grim testimony to the appeal -- or lack thereof -- of the workings of my imagination).

But here is what really caught my attention:

When I was with him he once began to read me a passage in Elvish, then stopped, came up close and placing the manuscript before me said that Elvish ought not to be read but sung and then chanted it in a slow and lovely intonation.

I have on a very few occasions spoken about Tolkien's use of song in his Middle-earth mythologies. There used to be an audio file available on the Web of a talk I gave at Dragon*Con 2000 called "Reconstructing Middle-earth" but I believe it has been taken down. I remember discussing song at that convention, and I think it was in that section (because I illustrated a point by singing something like "I am making a powerful orc-slaying hammer").

Song is an incredibly resonant motif in The Lord of the Rings -- it was very important to Tolkien and perhaps became even more important to him later in his life. Song is a medium of expression that conveys emotion much better than simply speaking (not to take anything away from great orators and actors alike, music just lends itself to creating a level of emotional connection that mere speech by itself cannot achieve).

So, Kudos to Colin Duriez and his team at the Festival in the Shire Journal. I think they've done a smashup job of publishing some very interesting Tolkien research on the Web -- and I say that only on the basis of the limited sip I've had on which to judge the taste of their work. I look forward to reading more articles in the near future.

Technorati claim token: EMK47UFTY7AJ

Tad Williams is not exactly a noted Tolkien scholar but he is, without a doubt, one of the most imaginative science fiction and fantasy writers to set his own pace in the wake of Tolkien's monumental shadow. Williams launched his career with the extremely innovative Tailchaser's Song in 1986 and he has been repeatedly breaking the mold for science fiction and fantasy stories ever since.

Like Tolkien, Williams loves to play with the idea of a realm of Faerie that lies just beyond the horizon of human experience. Williams even played a Tolkienesque role as narrator from the Fairie-folk's point of view in his book The War of the Flowers. There can be no doubt that Tad Williams wants to challenge the traditional points of view we consider to be staples of science fiction and fantasy.

So I was pleasantly surprised when Tad's wife Deborah contacted us with an invitation to interview him. Tad's latest book, Shadowrise (which touches on the Faerie mystique again), was just published last month. Our interview should have gone out then but too many other things got in the way.

Still, I'm pleased to say that the entire 3-page interview with Tad Williams is now live. We of course talked about more than just the book (in fact, although the article was inspired by the book's release, we at Xenite.Org figured it would be fun to draw Tad into discussion of many other topics).

So please forgive my using a Tolkien Studies blog to promote an article with a non-Tolkien writer, but if you're at all familiar with Tad Williams' books I think you'll agree there is a certain sensibility in broaching the topic of our interview with him here.

Enjoy!

It's been an interesting day in the scientific news. In case you've been hiding under a rock, numerous Websites have been reporting a major archaeological revelation coming out of the Rhine valley near Basel, Switzerland. Apparently archaeologists working there have uncovered the burial site of an ancient woman who lived in the region about 10,000 years ago (some stories suggest it was more like 12,000 years ago).

The woman, dubbed the "Princess of the Golden Woods", is the sole occupant of a single burial site. However, the archaeology team seems to have found many artifacts buried near her, possibly indicating that an ancient people buried someone very important to them, disassembled their tree dwellings, and then moved.

Some people are speculating that perhaps these people moved east across the river to live inside the heart of the Black Forest (which, if I recall correctly, was Tolkien's inspiration for Mirkwood). Ancient Germanic tribes often retreated into the Black Forest when they were fighting with the Romans.

What is perhaps the most amazing and startling item to come out of the press conference is the suggestion that a fourth human species may have been discovered (i.e., the Rhine princess). You may recall that last week scientists announced a third human species had been identified in Siberia. So now we have word that possibly a fourth group has been discovered (and apparently an extinct one at that).

So if the Rhine princess of the Golden Woods was not a Modern Human, what was she? Scientists from the team are reluctant to speculate pending the outcome of further tests.

Anyway, I leave it you to take a look at these stories and decide for yourself what they might mean.

ON EDIT: Some of these articles include pictures from the excavation sites.

• Archaeologists Announce Stunning Rhine Valley Discovery
• Controversial Archaeologist Stuns Science World with 'princess'
• Rhine Archaeologists Unveil First Photo of 'Princess of the Golden Wood'
• Rhine Archaeologist Tries to Salvage Reputation with New Discovery
• New Discovery Reveals Ancient Tree City, Archaeologists Claim
• Astonishing Find in Rhine Valley Surprises Archaeologists
• French Anthropologist Stakes Her Reputation on Controversial Research
• Rhine Valley Archaeologists Publish Stunning Discovery
• Rhine River Dig Unveils Ancient Princess of Golden Woods
• Prehistoric Rhine Woodland Princess Surprises Archaeologists
• Rhine Archaeologists Suggest Fourth Human Species May Have Lived in Ancient Europe
• Legacy of Dr. Reinhard Van Gelder Lives on
• Scientists discover Rhine valley woodland city

This story struck me as being so important I decided to cover it elsewhere on the Web, too. Here are a few links to my articles:

• Rhine princess burial excavation leads to major discovery
• More news about Rhine princess and her city in the trees
• Three more stories covering the Rhine princess
• International archaeology team announces major Rhine valley discovery
• More news on the Rhine princess from the golden woods
• Another round of stories on the Neolithic Rhine princess
• Major Rhine Valley Neolithic Discovery Announced!
• Rhine archaeology project makes major announcement

And I think I've mentioned the news on a couple of mailing lists as well. So, I hope my enthusiasm for the topic hasn't overwhelmed everyone. I'm just so geeked out over the whole story.

FYI - Hawke Robinson and I will try to record a new episode of Middle-earth Talk Radio tonight to cover this breaking story (and perhaps related topics).