My 'little' brothers Neil and Al (bassist and drummer, respectively) have a new video out, and they've got it onto YouTube!
I love this tune - its harmonies and chord changes remind me so much of vintage REM, and this video has so much wistful sunlight in a derelict Johannesburg railway station, it's a real treat!
Tim O'Neill runs the History for Atheists blog, which I have a link to on my sidebar.
He has a long, 3-video series of a single interview with Thony Christie about the Galileo business, which I found absolutely fascinating. Thony Christie is a Germany-based historian of science who has his own blog, Rennaissance Mathematicus. His knowledge of the history of science seems to be encyclopedic, and the interview is a treat. The interview paints a kaleidoscopic picture of the labyrinthine politics of the period, replete with fawning scholars desperate for a buck and a steady patron, absolutist monarchs, academic backstabbing and mathematics professors making a living as astrologers. And somehow - somehow, all this produced the cosmology we know today, in a process that simply wasn't as black and white as modern mythology would have us believe.
It's a long interview, but well worth it.
I came across an interesting artefact of Google Earth's street-view data gathering. At the junction of the R560 and the R563 in Gauteng Province near the border with North West there's a corner we used to turn east on, when we were going to the Sappers Club in Skeerpoort on holiday. On Google Earth, they took the images for the north-south R563 in summertime; but the footage for the east-west R560 was taken in winter.
At that latitude and altitude, winter is cool and dry, while summer is hot and wet (you hope!). The summer pictures show lovely wet soil, heavy cloud and thick, green grass and leafy trees. The winter, cloudless, dusty skies, with the roadside dry sand and the grass dry and yellow, the trees bare and bristling with thorns. These two pairs of shots show the seasonal differences in stark contrast.
Summer time:
A big part of worldbuilding is always map-making. The epic back-story of the Eladi of the Sunlands takes place on a huge continent stretching from the northern tropics to the southern temperate zones. It's taken too long to get this map into digital format, straighten out the details. This is what it looks like now, before I've put the place-names (i.e. without lettering).
The horizontal line through the lower part is the southern tropic (Capricorn in this world). I've added so much, the detail is eye-watering. Maybe it needs a complete re-drafting, at a much smaller scale.
American author John C Wright (whose blog is on my blogroll) has penned a remarkable series of YA fiction, which just happens to incorporate a slew of very old west European mythology. The mythology is that of malevolent elves, which are neither the superhumans of Tolkien nor the pathetic fairies of the 19th century (drinking dewdrops from acorn cups and living in toadstools). He introduces them as powerful magicians, exploiters of man and mortal enemies of Christendom, and given their proclivities in these stories, I can see why our ancestors were terrified of them, and how Christianity acted to calm those fears.
The Swan Knight Saga is a great introduction to the Perilous Realm of legend (including its taxonomy), the Arthurian cycle and the principles of Chivalry, which (mostly!) tamed the bloody urges of the barbarians that swamped Rome and turned them into Gentlemen.
Gilberic Parzival Moth is a strange and lonely boy who has grown up without a father, raised by a single mother who moves from town to town in fear of something she will not name. His only friends are animals, with whom he has always been able to speak. But when he awakens one night at the Thirteenth Hour, and sees for the first time the cruel reality of the secret rule of Elf over Man, he begins to learn about his true heritage, the heritage of Twilight.
And when his mother finally tells him the terrible truth of her past, he must choose whether to continue running with her in fear, or learning how to fight against ancient powers that are ageless, soulless, and ultimately damned. SWAN KNIGHT'S SON is the first book of THE GREEN KNIGHT'S SQUIRE, the first volume of MOTH & COBWEB, an astonishing 5-book series about magical worlds of Day, Night, and Twilight by John C. Wright.
The first book in the series is on Amazon, here.
But, as they say in the shouty ads, That's Not All!
The series is also being turned into a web comic by Arkhaven Comics. JCW has heartily approved of the illustrations, and there is no higher accolade.
Read and enjoy!
As a follow-up to their previous post about The Glorious Death, Br lawrence talks to my fellow-traveller Dan Cote Davis again. In this episode, they talk about the Catholicism ofThe Lord of the Rings, the mystical worldview it assumes, and why it does a surprisingly good job of introducing people to faith.
The podcast is available here.
I am growing besotted with this song (link):
This arrangement by The Tolkien Ensemble has the quality of Arresting Strangeness. It should be listened to at high volume. Scored for Alto solo, male voice backing, harp, double bass and marimba, its harmonies are at once close enough to Christian tradition to be recognisable, and very alien! The melody goes to strange but lovely places.
I also think this arrangement shows why Howard Shore wasn't quite right to score the Elvish themes in the Peter Jackson movies for female voices only. Listen to the male voices doing the backing harmonies in this! Somehow they manage to convey the ancient grandeur, the power and the depth and the profound mystery of the Eldar in this song.
Using Marimbas is something I would not have thought of doing myself, but it makes sense - the sound is woody, and what are Elves but woodland folk? And, the orchestral harp is also true to the air.
The language is light, liquid and thick with alliterative touches - laurië lantar lassi súrinen, like gold fall the leaves in the wind; Tintallë, the Kindler; hísië, mist. Thank God The Professor survived WWI, that the 'image of beauty' he and his friends had was not lost to the world. None of his old school friends returned ever from Flanders' fields.
The song is a lament, of someone who saw the greatest beauty in all Arda, the created world, and lost it through misplaced loyalty to a clan leader who though gifted above all others, was brought low by pride and grief and vengeance. She never sought the West, as she was supposed to, and now doubts that she will be accepted; but after passing the test of being tempted by the Ring, she is allowed to see that she will.
The Tolkien Ensemble was a Danish group, who created music for a whole series of the verses in LotR in the 90s, and toured around until the late 00's. This song was performed at Tolkien's old college, Exeter, in 1998. His daughter Priscilla was in the audience, and she said after the performance that "It was like Galadriel was among us".
I couldn't agree more.
Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,
Yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!
Yéni ve lintë yuldar avánier
mi oromardi lisse-miruvóreva
Andúnë pella, Vardo tellumar
nu luini yassen tintilar i eleni
ómaryo airetári-lírinen.
Sí man i yulma nin enquantuva?
An sí Tintallë Varda Oiolossëo
ve fanyar máryat Elentári ortanë
ar ilyë tier undulávë lumbulë;
ar sindanóriello caita mornië
i falmalinnar imbë met, ar hísië
untúpa Calaciryo míri oialë.
Sí vanwa ná, Rómello vanwa, Valimar!
Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar.
Nail elyë hiryva. Namárië!
I'm a big fan of the YT channel Clamavi de Profundis, I've featured at least two of their songs here previously. However, I've recently discovered another channel that also does amazing interpretations of The Professor's material, the Tolkien Ensemble. While Clamavi did a bang-up job of arranging 'The Dragon is Withered' from the Hobbit (completely redeeming it in the process, IMHO), the Ensemble group is a lot more clasical in its sound, and their arrangement of Tom Bombadil's song is just sublime. They also did an exquisiste job on Galadriel's Song of Eldamar, which deserves an epic video all on its own. Their version of 'A Merry Old Inn' is really good, and Sam's Troll Rhyme is strangely close to the tune I imagined for it - which is wondrous strange.
Have a listen to their album 'An Evening in Rivendell', which has all those tracks, and more besides. Link
From their channel description:
The Tolkien Ensemble is a Danish ensemble which aims to create "the world's first complete musical interpretation of the poems and songs from The Lord of the Rings". They published four CDs from 1997 to 2005, in which all the poems and songs of The Lord of the Rings are set to music. The project was approved by both the Tolkien family and HarperCollins Publishers. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark gave permission to use her illustrations in the CD layout. Permanent members are Caspar Reiff and Peter Hall, Signe Asmussen, Øyvind Ougaard, Katja Nielsen, and Morten Ryelund Sørensen. The Ensemble has toured Europe in 2007, combining their own works with soundtrack pieces from Howard Shore's soundtrack to the film trilogy as well as live narration by Christopher Lee.
Now that I've finished serialising chapter extracts from The Ironwood Staff on Subscribestar, I'm serialising some of the backstory to the two books. This stuff was written down longhand all in a rush over the course of a few days, once I'd heard Mike Oldfied's Music of the Spheres. I have absolutely no clue how or why it sparked that in me, but I am a long-standing Oldfield fan, since my early 20s.
We had our origin the Place of Awakening, before the Sun and Moon. There are none now who remember it, the chances of the World have taken them all.
My grandfather’s grandfather lived in the ages of starlight. He remembered the Place, and how he and so many others fled at the coming of a being of light and power. Some stayed, and none know what became of them.
Of those who escaped, many were lost. There were shadows beyond the hills of the Place, and they came for the eladi in the dark. It was a time of terror, when one heard screams and pleading, sometimes cut short, sometimes the screaming and weeping would fade as the eladi were taken away. There were children then who lost their parents as they lay hidden, shaking in terror. As they lay in the bush, too scared even to breathe, Father Dorwin appeared, seeking the scatterlings. He had fled with them, but was strong and agile enough to fight off the nameless things that sewed the dark into a trap, and cut through it all. Father Dorwin saved so many in that time.
It may have been that he wished to return to the Place; but it was surrounded by forest, haunted by the Things In The Dark, but he perceived them and took them south.
Read the whole thing here. I'm having work done on a second edition as well, which should hopefully make the book more marketable and easier to read.
A fellow member of the Bard School, Dan Cote Davis, is interviewed at The Myth Pilgrim.
Dan has an amazing vision for young people (he's a teacher IRL), which includes using the Tolkien vision of beauty as a means of drawing young people into the church. He started the Silverion camps in New Zealand, and there's a great promo for them here.
A shocker, I know!
OK, I have a bit of a retraction: I'm back on minds.com, for better or for worse. I suppose you can't expect enterprise-level support for a small social media site. So I'll put up with them, because I'm a putton for glunishment. I responded to another writing competition by a channel called DanielandAngel, with a modified version of this post I made on Subscribestar. The prompt was 'I am going to die', or 'I was going to die'
What was nice was, the channel gave me an Honourable Mention for that week, and said,
"This is a very well done story, the action is better written than a fair number of published novels I've read..."
So, if you're here and haven't seen my Subscribestar yet, have a look! Swear and profanity alert, due to the subject matter (1st person perspective of an Infantry grunt).
The redoubtable Gene Wolfe weighs in on a forgotten scandal.
This is a map - of tunnels under a nursery, the existence of which had 'been debunked'. Remember that next time someone uses that phrase.
The Satanic Panic of the 80s is a byword of mass hysteria, where innocent people were victimised by Christians on a (literal) witch-hunt. Unfortunately, according to his research, it seems they were right!
Read the whole horrible thing here.
