Ephemera

Of course everyone can order a personal replica of Arwen’s pendant or Aragorn’s sword these days.  But some Lord of the Rings fans have generated quainter ephemera.

Paper dolls looking for lovely elf and hobbit dresses are now in luck.

Those who live in dollhouses might wish for something to read by the miniature fireplace.

Baked goods and other eatibles presumably taste better with Hobbit names.

Gondor never looked more appetizing.

And nothing would be better than a Tolkien quilt to curl up in while reading his works and eating the aforesaid goodies.

 

Chapter 10: Strider

Having determined henceforth to spy mostly upon plots, and not characters, I find it ironic that my very next post should be about a particular character.  This could not be helped, however.  Tolkien clearly signifies the importance of this character by naming an entire chapter after him, and by devoting that entire chapter to the problem of justifying him.

The problem is simple.  Out of the clear blue, or rather, out of the crowded mustiness of a common room at an inn, a character appears who seems to know all about Frodo’s doings and who wishes Frodo to take him as a guide.  Granted the setting—the disappearance of Gandalf, the threat of Black Riders, the suspicious behavior of everyone in the inn—why in the world should this character be trusted?

What is interesting about this problem of character, however, is that Tolkien does not (properly speaking) handle it as a problem of character as such.  He handles it (1) as a problem of argumentation, of rhetoric, and (2) as a problem of plot.  At the end of the chapter, the ultimate justification for any trust that we as readers may have in Strider, springs not from a direct manifestation of his character, but from a technically argumentative and deliberate plot structure throughout chapter 10.  In short, we end up believing Strider not because of what we see him do, but because of what he says and what other people do.

Tolkien’s justification of Strider progresses mostly with argumentation.  First, there is an initial dialectical exchange with Frodo and Sam, which ends in an impasse.  Second, Butterbur interrupts and precipitates a short rhetorical skirmish.  Third, Gandalf’s letter alters everything.  Fourth, a series of factual verifications and a strong argument from psychology clinch the point.  Finally, Merry’s brush with the Black Rider lends a sort of confirmation to the reader’s provisional trust.

First, then, for Strider’s arguments regarding himself.  The reason he must argue instead of act is that there is no time for anything else.  Strider cannot, in the present instant while sitting comfortably in a chair, prove his character by deeds, as characters in a novel would be required to do.  Instead, he has only words at his disposal, and his first apparent skills are those of a rhetorician trying to create assent in his audience.  His basic argument runs as follows: “If you want to get to Rivendell, you must take me as a guide.  You do want to get to Rivendell—I know that because I know all about your secret Ring and the Black Riders.  Therefore, you must take me as a guide, because I’m the only one who knows a way to Rivendell that the Black Riders are least likely to intercept.”

Sam’s counter-argument is a classic instance of prejudice in the Burkean sense:  “He comes out of the Wild, and I never heard no good of such folk”!

This brings things to an impasse.  Sam demands further explanations and proofs from Strider.  Strider points out the fundamental (epistemological) problem with such a request:  “Why,” he asks, “should you believe my story, if you do not trust me already?”  Any explanation can be doubted, and further explanation is useless without an initial element of trust.

Conveniently, however, the plot structure of the chapter defeats this impasse by catapulting Butterbur into the Hobbits’ room, with a yet more conveniently forgotten letter from Gandalf.  Butterbur’s own opinion of Strider, by the by, is even less argumentatively coherent than Sam’s.  At least Sam’s deduction about men from the Wild had two premises and an implied conclusion.  Poor Butterbur never makes it so far.  “If I was in your plight,” he puffs to Frodo, with a mere personal assertion, “I wouldn’t take up with a Ranger.”

Fortunately, however, the plot is twisting underneath Butterbur’s feet, and the letter from Gandalf forces Strider into a new light.  (It is most amusing, by-the-by, that the best method of justification that occurs to Tolkien the Oxford don, at this moment, is to provide Strider with a letter of reference!)  When Strider begins to independently verify certain facts about himself that are also contained in the letter—for example, quoting the verses that go with his name, or drawing the broken blade—we get something in the way of empirical justification.  But, in my opinion, the clinching argument is not empirical but logical and psychological.  In response to Sam’s accusation that he is only pretending to be the real Strider (a genuine empirical possibility), Strider rebuts with the syllogism:

“If I had killed the real Strider, I could kill you.  And I should have killed you already without so much talk.  If I was after the Ring, I could have it—NOW!”

What this argument sets up is a classic modus tollens:  If P then Q, but not Q, therefore not P.  In other words, Strider has not killed the Hobbits; therefore, he did not kill the real Strider.  He is not currently taking the Ring from Frodo; therefore, he is not after the Ring.  Psychologically, the argument seems sound because we know that the desire for the Ring does involve the ability, and even the overpowering compulsion, to steal the Ring; and the physical ability to kill the real Strider would imply the physical ability to kill little Hobbits as well.  Strider could have been a logic professor.

What remains after this argument is only further confirmation.  Strider dramatically draws his sword, only to show that it is broken.  He affirms that he is prepared to defend the Hobbits and especially Frodo at all cost.  After Merry comes running back from his near escape with a Black Rider, Strider capably takes charge of the situation in his first real instance of action.  The Hobbits bunker down for the night, and the reader anxiously awaits a final proof of Strider’s trustworthiness—by deeds.

 

Back to the Drawing Board

Drumroll, please!  After a full year off from the Lord of the Rings, I’ve decided to celebrate by blogging again.

But first, an account of my doings in the meanwhile.  What books were magnetic enough to pull me away from the greatest literary achievement of the 20^th century?

Well, Dante’s Inferno, to be sure.  It can be read as an instructive Traveler’s Guide to Mordor, with supplementary material on the Habitat and Behavior of Orcs.

Then there was Jane Austen’s Emma.  A thousand pages from the complete works of Adam Smith.  George Eliot’s Middlemarch.  And lastly, Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.

In his Postscript to “The Name of the Rose”, Eco makes some remarks about the importance of plot in a narrative:

“Unquestionably, the modern novel has sought to diminish amusement resulting from the plot in order to enhance other kinds of amusement.  As a great admirer of Aristotle’s Poetics, I have always thought that, no matter what, a novel must also—especially—amuse through its plot” (60).

Tolkien himself had made similar remarks in his Essay on Fairy Stories, noting that the rise of both Drama and the Novel had tended to exalt character at the expense of plot.  Continuing his discussion of plot in the Postscript, Eco mentions Tolkien himself.

“I believe there are three ways of narrating the past.  One is romance, and the examples range from the Breton cycle to Tolkien, also including the Gothic novel, which is not a novel but a romance.  The past as scenery, pretext, fairy-tale construction, to allow the imagination to rove freely.  In this sense, a romance does not necessarily have to take place in the past; it must only not take place here and now, and the here and now must not be mentioned, not even as allegory.  Much science fiction is pure romance.  Romance is the story of an elsewhere” (74).

I believe part of my dissatisfaction last year with The Lord of the Rings, and my ability to do the unthinkable—that is, not touch it for a year—stemmed from the fact that I had recently imbibed a great deal of Shakespeare and Jane Austen.  The plays and novels of the latter undoubtedly pack their punch more with the force of character than with sheer plot and scenery.  But in the romance, the situation seems to be reversed.  So in my new attempt at picking up the threads of The Fellowship of the Ring, my perspective glass will be set primarily on plot.  I will try not to view Tolkien’s trilogy as a novel blemished by plot, but as a romance touched up with a bit of character.  For surely, despite some criticism to the contrary, Tolkien’s characters are more than stock characters; and the beings with which he peoples his plot come alive as fully as the confines of the genre allow them to do.

 

The Problem of Pleasure

As a first encounter with the world of Men, Bree is not too painful. To be sure, Tolkien weaves in plenty of uneasiness at the beginning of the chapter—the strange attitude of Harry the Gatekeeper, the unfamiliarity of the dark buildings, and the presence of Southern Men in the common room—but he manages to disarm each oddity fairly quickly with good food, good ale, and good cheer. The fact is that the hobbits have a constitutional weakness —a fondness for comfort and good cheer—and Tolkien simply exploits it.

Consider that, only the day before entering Bree, the Hobbits are lulled off their guard and lulled quite asleep by the cool shade of a harmless-looking stone. A few days before that, they are likewise lulled to sleep by a whispering stream. Several days before that, Pippin merrily bursts into loud song in the woods outside Hobbiton. (Perhaps this would not have been such a bad thing, if not for the convenient fact that it was dusk and a Black Rider was coming up behind. On a related note, it is, to all appearances, simply not a good idea to burst into song in the middle of a forest if one is a Hobbit. Frodo tries the same thing in the Old Forest, and the trees get upset and he is forced to stop.)

In the Inn at Bree, Tolkien develops the easy transition between a Hobbit’s sense of ease and of danger at least thrice, and with amusing detail. The greatest catalyst in this transformation is good food and good cheer (some may argue specifically it is good beer). Observe it happening no fewer than three times:

First, in the Hobbits’ decision to quit their room for the common room. This decision, as Tolkien tells us quite plainly, was prompted by the fact that they felt “so refreshed and encouraged” at the end of “three quarter’s of an hour’s steady going” at their supper. A chapter later in his conversation with Strider, and with the advantage of 20-20 hindsight, Frodo acknowledges this choice to have been rather foolish.

Second, in Pippin’s story-telling in the common room. He starts off with a comic account of the collapse of a roof in Michel Delving; and, when greeted by merry applause, is prompted to give an account of Bilbo’s birthday party. As Tolkien says (from Frodo’s perspective): “Pippin was evidently much enjoying the attention he was getting, and had become quite forgetful of their danger. Frodo had a sudden fear that in his present mood he might even mention the Ring.” Remember, it was Pippin who had serenaded the Black Rider earlier in the forests outside Hobbiton.

Third, in Frodo’s attempt to intervene. One would think that Frodo, at least, would be well on his guard, after having seen Pippin let down his. And, in fact, he starts off well by spouting off some nonsense to distract Pippin’s audience, and then responding quickly to a call for a song. The problem is that the course of the song itself, and the applause it arouses at the end, and (no doubt) another drink of ale, and the attempt to make the song merrier and better the second time—all of these distract Frodo from his danger, and lead to the evening’s colossal disaster. Apparently, singing in an Inn is as dangerous as singing in a Forest.

In short, Tolkien moves these particular bends in the plot along by having the Hobbits make mistakes very much in keeping with their amiable and convivial nature as Hobbits. It shows, perhaps, that he is not above exploiting the very characteristics that he makes lovable.

 

The Prancing Pony (or, The Post That Should Have Come Before “Black Riders”)

First, the Hobbits leave Hobbiton. Then they cross the Ferry from the Four Farthings into Buckland. Then they leave the Shire through a gate in the wall, and wander for a time in an Old Forest and across the downs. Finally, they enter the world of Men through another gate in a wall, and Tolkien repeats his familiar plan of attack.

In a quasi-historical manner quite similar to what he used when the Hobbits were crossing into Buckland, Tolkien gives us a brief description of Bree and its origins, and then (widening his scope) a brief account of its socially mediatory status between the Shire and the rest of the world. The most important difference between the history of Buckland and the history of Bree is that Bree goes back quite a bit further—the Breelanders consider themselves “descendants of the first Men that ever wandered into the West of the middle-world.” In homely Bree, home of the Prancing Pony, we already encounter the flavor of something mythic.

As befits this stage of the journey, however, Tolkien paints Bree in a curious blend of the mythic, the homely, the familiar, and the strange. He does this by adopting for a moment the different perspectives of the Hobbits themselves. To Samwise son of Hamfast (Anglo-Saxon for “Home-bound” or “Home-body”), the houses of Men and the Inn at Bree appear unwelcoming, the likely hide-outs of Black Riders, and generally much too tall. Frodo, however, shares none of Sam’s perceptions and expects the Inn to be “homelike enough inside.” And, indeed, the inside is very Shire-like, complete with round windows and the hallmark of a Hobbit’s being at home—a good supper.

As a first encounter with the world of Men, therefore, Bree is just unfamiliar enough to put the Hobbits well on their guard, and familiar enough to gradually lull them off it.

 

Black Riders

As one of those annoying children who read The Lord of the Rings seven or eight times before reaching high school, it is sometimes difficult to remember what stood out at the first reading. It is very easy, for example, to focus on the meeting with Strider at the Prancing Pony as the most important event in the Bree chapters, because of who Strider turns out to be. However, it strikes me that the reader does not know of this importance, or even really begins to trust Strider, until after the Hobbits reach Rivendell, or (at the earliest) until Strider meets Glorfindel near the Ford. I think that what is really going on in the Bree chapters, and the rest of Book I, has two main currents: pursuit by the Black Riders, and the problem of Gandalf.

The Black Riders are the spoken and unspoken material of the Bree chapters. I had forgotten, until I was puzzling recently over a few passages, how firmly Tolkien assumes that the reader has the fear of the Black Riders in the back of his mind while reading about the Hobbits’ entrance into Bree. Everything, even the occasional oblique reference, caters to it. Here are some of the more obvious ones which, in my over-familiarity with the story-line, took some genuine thought before I realized again that they were obvious:

The gatekeeper is, for some reason, interested in the fact that there are four Hobbits from the Shire knocking at his gate. Beginning with him, there are repeated references—by Butterbur, by Strider, by Tolkien’s description of the people in the common room—to “queer folk being about.” It’s Tolkien’s way of saying that something’s rotten in Denmark. The only “queer folk” concerned with the Hobbits so far have been the Black Riders.

Frodo, however, doesn’t take the hint and instead wonders if Gandalf has been to Bree and is looking for the Hobbits. Sam, poor fellow, is the only Hobbit with Black Riders on his mind as they trot through the lanes of Bree. When the “dark figure” scales the gate after the Hobbits and vanishes into the streets, the reader’s mind instantly goes to the Black Riders, though later we find out that this figure was Strider himself.

Strider makes himself untrustworthy from the start, by dropping hints about Frodo’s name: “I am very pleased to meet you, Master—Underhill, if old Butterbur got your name right.” This brings to mind the name of Baggins, and the reader wonders if any fellows on black horses have been asking for Baggins in Bree. Then, while Frodo is up on the table distracting Pippin’s audience, he feels exactly what he has felt previously in the presence of the Black Riders—the temptation, apparently from outside himself, to put on the Ring.

In short, even before the meeting with Strider, the letter from Gandalf, and the actual attack on the Inn, the Black Riders are everywhere in Bree. The unusual thing about the way Tolkien brings this to the reader’s awareness, however, is that he almost never mentions them directly. (The one blunt exception to this is Sam’s thoughts about them.) Just as the Riders are unseen, they are unspoken; and this adds power to the reader’s fears and suspicions about them. It is Tolkien’s subtle playing with the reader’s expectations that makes them invisibly present even at the merriest moment in the inn’s common room.

Once again there will be a progression with the Black Riders: an unspoken presence in Chapter 9, Strider’s revelation of who they are in Chapter 10, and finally a tour de force of their powers in Chapter 11. Gandalf too becomes an increasingly important matter; but that should be reserved for another post.

 

Two More Themes

As a concluding thought on “Fog on the Barrow Downs,” I think that the end of this chapter introduces two themes that will become important through the rest of the book.  Both themes, interestingly, are integral to the world of Men, on whose brink the Hobbits are now teetering.  The first theme has to do with greed; the second with self-sacrifice.

 

The chief evil represented by the barrow-wight is, oddly enough, not an abstract one but the very concrete evil of goldlust.  This may not be apparent at first, but consider the way in which Tom Bombadil breaks the spell on the barrow after exorcising the wight from it.  He brings out the mound’s treasures and bids them lie there, “free to all finders, birds, beasts, Elves or Men, and all kindly creatures.”  This particular cure suggests that the curse on the barrow originally had to do with the hoarding of gold.

 

This theme is unfortunately very common in Middle Earth.  One remembers the end of The Hobbit, where five armies fight over the possession of a dragon’s treasure.  One also thinks of The Silmarillion, where Feanor’s proud refusal to give up his jewels in order to rekindle the light of the Two Trees initiates a series of disasters, the implications of which continue even down into the days of Frodo and Aragorn.  And, repeatedly, Tolkien casts the appeal of the Ring in terms of its beautiful golden hue.  Greed and goldlust are among the cardinal sins in Middle Earth.

 

Along with the theme of Men’s greediness, however, Tolkien introduces the theme of their nobility.  That is, he introduces the first hint of a line of Men who will become increasingly important to the tale:  the Numenoreans, who have dwindled to become the Rangers.

 

The barrow that trapped the Hobbits is a Numenorean barrow; the knives that Bombadil retrieves from the treasure to give to the Hobbits are the very blades that were forged by the sons of Isildur to wreck ruin on the Nazgul.  When Bombadil gives the knives to the Hobbits, he tells them that their makers “go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness, guarding from evil things folk that are heedless.”  Though the Hobbits do not understand him, they will meet one of these unseen guardians that very night, under the unlikely guise of Strider the Ranger.  The point is that the world of men is full not only of greed but of generous self-sacrifice.  The old kings no longer rule; but they still guard those who cannot defend themselves.

 

And with this introduction to the world of Men—its greed and its sacrifice—the Hobbits set off for Bree.

 

The Barrow-Wight

The claim may (and probably will) admit of some controversy, but with the Barrow-Wight I will begin to seriously press the notion that Tolkien incorporates an Augustinian view of evil in his depiction of evil beings.  The claim will likely grow stronger as the hobbits travel nearer to Mordor, but I want to start pointing out the scraps of evidence early.

 

What I should do first, by all rights, is offer a concise account of what exactly an Augustinian view of evil involves.  This is rather a tall order for me at present, since I need time to think about several passages in Augustine and Aquinas; so for this post I’ll only mention a few things about the Barrow-Wight that may prove interesting in light of future posts on evil.

 

Our first and only description of the Wight himself is that he is a “tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars” with “two eyes, very cold though lit with a pale light that seemed to come from some remote distance.”  The likeness to a shadow seems to be a stock simile with Tolkien when it comes to his especially evil creatures.  The light-like eyes contrast with this, of course; as does the seemingly very corporeal grip that is “stronger and colder than iron.”  I’ll point out that this is an apparently contradictory set of characteristics:  an insubstantial visible form, but a (seemingly) very substantial grip.  There are other ways of pointing out the dichotomy:  darkness and coldness, for example, are privations of light and warmth; but a strong grip isn’t a privation of anything, since it is rather a sort of power.

 

Still on the subject of the grip, one of the most effective things about the encounter with the wight is that fact that, when Frodo is inside the barrow, he gets a close-up view of a hand and arm, but nothing else.  The spectre of the hand—the part that tries to behave like the whole, or the part that is severed from the body to which it belongs, first by description and then by Frodo’s actual knifestroke—horrified me more than anything else as a child (with the exception of the well in Moria).  I emphasize the fact that Tolkien gives us only the hand and arm for two reasons.  First, it is part of the art of ghastly story-telling to recognize that, though corpses are bad, parts of corpses are worse. And second, it is another way of depriving us of any clear and distinct picture of what form this being actually has.

 

Frodo’s experience of the Wight’s dwelling seconds all this.  The barrow is dark and cold; and the strange light, when it comes, seems (inexplicably) to be coming not from the barrow but from Frodo himself.  The wight’s song is a dreary and “formless stream of sad but horrible sounds,” full of words that are “grim, hard, cold… heartless and miserable.”  At least half of these terms (including that most important term “formless”), again, are privative.  Moreover, even when the wight’s words do “shape themselves” and become intelligible, their shape still concerns privations:  coldness, the sun failing, the moon and stars dying, the land withering.

 

Finally, lest there be any more doubt about the matter, Tolkien’s own authorial commentary on the song makes the point about privation explicit:  The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered.

 

All of this, of course, combines to create an impression on the reader that will raise problems here and in many descriptions to come.  Evil is associated with the cold, the dark, with night and shadows, with mutilated forms and parts of forms and deformed forms.  And yet, for something that that is deformed, shadowy, and generally deprived of good things, evil in Tolkien’s world is remarkably stern, strong, and—well, substantial.

 

As I hope to point out later, these are the same classic problems raised by the Augustinian view of evil.  I wish I could say that Tolkien’s narrative and poetic answer to the problem persuasively complements Augustine’s philosophical answer; but as I don’t recall the core passages from Augustine or Tolkien himself clearly enough, that is a series of posts that will have to wait.

 

In the House of… Goldberry

Having now written three posts on Tom Bombadil, I suppose it would only be fair to include at least one on Goldberry.  I do not know if it is significant that Bombadil and Goldberry are the first married couple we meet with any degree of thoroughness in the Lord of the Rings.  Now that I think of it, they are the only married couple, except for Celeborn and Galadriel.

 

This in itself may be odd.  What strikes about the long tale of the Ring is the general and perhaps intentional lack of women, and especially of wives.  Elrond’s consort Celebrian (Galadriel’s daughter) was mortally wounded some centuries before our story starts, and passed into the West.  Theodon’s wife, the Queen of Rohan, we never hear of.  The same goes for Denethor’s lady.  Dwarf women never show up at all, except in Gimli’s scant remarks about them; and Treebeard laments the disappearance of the Entwives.

 

In general, I think this lack of wives—the lack, if you will, of the sources of life and renewal—contributes to an atmosphere of exhaustion and decay in Middle Earth.  Of course, the end of the tale (as for all comedies) brings revitalization and a number of auspicious marriages.  But in the midst of the decay, Tolkien does give us these two glimpses of Goldberry and Bombadil on one hand, and Celeborn and Galadriel on the other.  I am still puzzling over why he does this—it may, in fact, not turn out to be very important to the story—but perhaps it constitutes some reason for dwelling a little on Goldberry herself.

 

Goldberry is a strange combination of a housewife and a great lady.  I call her a housewife because she has no servants and therefore presumably does all the housework herself.  (She prepares the meals and holds washing day and autumn cleaning.)  However, in the House of Goldberry, the work of the house hardly sounds like drudgery.  Even when she and Tom Bombadil lay the table, they do so as if it were a dance.

 

Outside the house, incidentally, Goldberry appears to do little or nothing; she is not one of the doers of great deeds in Middle Earth.  Even in the matter of gathering water lilies, it is Bombadil who undertakes the mission.  Perhaps this is why Bombadil, besides calling her pretty River-daughter and clearer than clear water, refers to her frequently as waiting:

 

Tom has his house to mind, and Goldberry is waiting!

 

In short, Goldberry seems to embody the old ideal of feminine domesticity.

 

Of course, Goldberry is also a great lady.  Her voice is clear, her speech is half-poetic (like Bombadil’s), and she inspires an Elvish wonder in the Hobbits.  When they first see her, she is sitting in her house in the midst of bowls of water-lilies, as if in state.

 

This Elf-like queenliness, when rolled together with the huswifery above, results in the initially paradoxical impression that she is a domestic queen, a princess of the hearth.  In a sense, I wonder if Tolkien is awakening us to something here:  the realization that domesticity and queenhood need not be opposed in Middle Earth.  Goldberry (unlike Eowyn, for example, and perhaps in deliberate contrast to her) lives her life by the home hearth, in elegance and merriment.

 

I bring this up as a counterpoint (though I don’t know if Tolkien intended it so) to those scholars who construct a philosophy of women in which housework and domesticity always function as a sort of oppression.  There is no doubt that many women do love the work of the house; and I think that Tolkien’s portrayal of Goldberry is true to such women.  He has struck, in fact, a role that seems quite natural to many women, while giving it a quasi-enchanted air; and that, no doubt, explains part of why Goldberry is (in Frodo’s words) “deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange.”

 

As a concluding caveat to all this, I do not wish to extrapolate anything about Tolkien’s “view of women,” or views on feminine domesticity, from such a small vignette of Goldberry.  There are too many other things to take into account:  Arwen as the bella donna of courtly romance, Galadriel as fairy godmother, Eowyn as the reincarnation of a Nordic demigoddess.  I would guess that it would be as tricky to discuss Tolkien’s view of women as it would be to discuss his view of literary genres.  I only wish to point out that, in Goldberry, we find Tolkien seamlessly knitting up two qualities that our current age tells us are unreconcilable.  Goldberry is, indeed, both a housewife and a queen.

 

Excuses, Protestations, and Apologies

It does not bode well for my career as a blogger that other people are apparently paying more attention to my blog than I am.

 

As one of my friends pointed out once, it seems a little absurd to apologize for not writing what nobody is obligated to read, or perhaps even desires to read; and especially absurd to assume the arrogance of thinking that anyone would desire to read it greatly enough to merit an apology for its not being written.

 

However, when someone clearly states a time at which something will begin to be written again, and then fails to follow through on it, perhaps it constitutes a moral ground for a categorical apology, whether anyone reads it or not.  I would therefore like to offer a categorical apology, especially to Monica and Maxim, who apparently read this blog more than I; and to make thin and watery excuses about being tied up by schoolwork, and grubbing around in classical economics, and suffering the mundane but curiously distracting affairs of life.

There’s a post on Goldberry forthcoming, and after that, hopefully some stuff on evil.