Recommendations: Two Awesome Substacks
Tolkien, Rings of Power, and More!
I just love finding (and knowing) people writing great stuff about the stuff I love greatly!
A quick recommendation for two Substacks I have recently subscribed to and recommend highly for all us Tolkien fans (including but not limited to the aca-types):1
Christopher Lockett’s The Magical Humanist (new, and soon to have a companion YouTube channel): his first post is “Of Elections and Stewed Rabbit.”
Teaser quote:
The ultimate subject of the lecture, you may have gleaned, is Sam himself. There comes a moment for many of us who are in a long-term relationship with LotR when it dawns on us that the hero of the story is not Frodo; nor is it Aragorn, or Gandalf. No, the true hero of Tolkien’s epic is Samwise Gamgee—the gardener, the servant, the most devoted of friends. Sam is there from the start, and he has the novel’s final word. He is honest, true, stalwart, and (mostly) uncomplaining. He is not a deep or subtle thinker but proves often the wisest of those around him. He is, as Tolkien notes on more than a few occasions, blessed with a trove of “hobbit-sense.” All of which makes him, I will always maintain, the novel’s moral center.
Lyta Gold’s Lyta’s List has been around quite a while, and I think I may have seen an earlier post or two restacked/recommended, but a day or two ago, I found her restacked post, “Politics vs. Aesthetics: The Ultimate Showdown, then clicked through to her Stack and started reading more, and more, and found posts on Rings of Power, and subscribed, and kept reading (and bought her book— Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality—and glomped it down, highlighting with reckless abandon and gleeful joy—and will be re-reading soon) because wow. (I perhaps did not get enough sleep last night!).
Here’s a teaser quote from her post about dreading to have to watch S2 and why (and how she wrote about it in her book [see above]): “do elves sleep and other problems of lore” [I must admit I would have loved her original title for the post which was "lore: what is it good for (absolutely nothing)" even MORE!]
Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I have a particular hatred for the Amazon TV show Rings of Power. In fact in my upcoming book I use the first season as an example of the worst IP garbage available, though in the book I focus slightly less on Rings of Power’s many aesthetic failings and more on the way that its superficial diversity is intended to wokewash Amazon, a notoriously racist, sexist, and labor-abusive company.1 Anyway the second season is airing, and I ask you all for your support in this trying time. I’ll have to watch it eventually, if only because I wrote about it in print, and because the badness of the first season still sometimes keeps me up at night. I’ve heard a few people say that the second season is better; this doesn’t surprise me, as it could hardly be worse. But mostly I haven’t run across many people discussing it at all. I’ve seen a few sharp, specific criticisms, and a few rave reviews which are suspiciously vague on details (much like last season). I’ve also run into a couple of posts which repeat the same curious sentiment, basically: “I know the fanboys hate RoP for ignoring canon, but I think it’s enjoyable.”
I’d like to write more about each writer, and their work, and all that, but I have a lot of copyediting to do today, and I know from sad past experience if I don’t get this down now and out, I probably won’t remember, and, well, here you go!