Is the Tolkien Estate About to Start Aggressively Enforcing Copyright and Trademark?
The Tolkien Estate website recently got a huge makeover, including a much large FAQ section which sent the fandom into a tizzy about how draconian it appeared they would be regarding copyright and tra...
14 Mar 202251min
Fate and Free Will in Middle-Earth vs. “The Adjustment Bureau” | Tolkien & Modern Culture
Rounding out my discussion of fate and free will in Middle-earth, here’s a comparison of how Tolkien handles these topics with the 2011 film, “The Adjustment Bureau.” For a crash course on how Tolkien...
7 Mar 202232min
Tolkien and the Critics, Pt. 2: Epic Pooh (w/ GirlNextGondor)
In a followup to our previous collaboration (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZLce_96994) dealing with various literary criticisms of The Lord of the Rings, GirlNextGondor and I take on the Michael Mo...
28 Feb 20221h 19min
My Thoughts on the “Rings of Power” Controversy
There has been a huge amount of digital ink spilled since Amazon dropped the teaser trailer for The Rings of Power. I have thoughts that I need to unburden, which hopefully will help everyone to have...
21 Feb 202228min
Fate and Free Will in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
The themes of fate and choice are heavy in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and they show us that while many things are outside of our control, our own decisions may have the greatest impact on o...
14 Feb 202228min
What Do The Lord of the Rings Characters Really Look Like?
A viewer asked in the comments if I could do a video on how the book descriptions of characters compared to the movie portrayals, so here’s a video breaking down what the members of the Fellowship (pl...
7 Feb 202235min
Fate and Free Will in the Story of Turin Turambar
In my previous video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIzDndXGRsY) I discussed the general concept of fate vs. free will. Here I explore how those two factors (plus a third!) all shape the narrative ...
31 Jan 202239min
Fate and Free Will in Middle-Earth
The subject of fate is a common theme in Tolkien’s stories, and we can get a good idea of how he thought about its interaction with free will from the stories themselves, but also from an essay in the...
24 Jan 202224min
