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New Stonehenge Visitor Centre
Gary of the Celtic Myth Podshow has posted a thoughtful article about the new visitor’s center at Stonehenge.
In December 2013, English Heritage unveiled its new visitor centre to the public. The Telegraph reports that it has been decades since visitors to Stonehenge were able to experience what Neolithic man did when he first set foot inside the gigantic stone circle. With tourists and day-trippers barred since the late Seventies from entering the circle in order to protect the stones from damage, there has been a fierce and long-running debate on how the site should best be displayed.
But on Wednesday a new £27 million centre opened at Stonehenge with a 360 degree cinema at its heart where visitors can “experience” standing in the ancient circle. Builders and landscape contractors have been putting the final touches to the Visitors Centre, built one and a half miles from the stones, which can be revealed for the first time here.
Very interesting! Especially the ongoing debate about how best to treat the human remains discovered at or near the Stonehenge site.
Tolkien Geek’s Review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Gary, the Tolkien Geek, gives the latest installment of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit a very positive review.
Is the World Ready for a Harry Potter Stage Play?
Looks like it’s coming whether we’re ready or not.
Do the Forces of Evil Suffer from Vitamin D Deficiency?
I still don’t quite know what to think about this report from Marc Alpin at Fantasy Faction: “Medical Science Reveals Why Gollum & Smaug Lost to Hobbits.” Yes, apparently an article has been published in the Medical Journal of Australia contending that one of the reasons the good guys win in Middle Earth is because of the bad guy’s poor diet and lack of sunlight. According to the abstract,
Objective: Vitamin D has been proposed to have beneficial effects in a wide range of contexts. We investigate the hypothesis that vitamin D deficiency, caused by both aversion to sunlight and unwholesome diet, could also be a significant contributor to the triumph of good over evil in fantasy literature.
Design: Data on the dietary habits, moral attributes and martial prowess of various inhabitants of Middle Earth were systematically extracted from J R R Tolkien’s novel The hobbit.
Main outcome measures: Goodness and victoriousness of characters were scored with binary scales, and dietary intake and habitual sun exposure were used to calculate a vitamin D score (range, 0–4).
Results: The vitamin D score was significantly higher among the good and victorious characters (mean, 3.4; SD, 0.5) than the evil and defeated ones (mean, 0.2; SD, 0.4; P < 0.001).
Conclusion: Further work is needed to see if these pilot results can be extrapolated to other fantastic situations and whether randomised intervention trials need to be imagined.
NORAD’s Annual Santa-tracking Mission
I found it delightful that NORAD (actually, CONAD, its predecessor) first started tracking Santa on Christmas Eve because of a misprint in a Sears Roebuck newspaper ad.
That day, Shoup would later learn, a local newspaper ran a Sears Roebuck ad inviting kids to contact Santa.
“Hey Kiddies!” the ad read. “Call me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night.” The ad listed Santa’s direct line, but the number in the copy was off by a digit. Instead of connecting to the special line Sears set up with a Santa impersonator, kids wound up calling a secret air defense emergency number.
After a few more Santa-related calls, Shoup pulled a few airmen aside and gave them a special assignment. They would answer the phone and give callers—barring the Pentagon, we assume—Santa’s current location as they “tracked” him on their radar.
Ho ho ho, indeed!
The Leukrokottas
Faith M. Boughan at Fantasy Faction has the lowdown on the leukrokottas (or crocutta, corocutta, krokuta, etc.), an obscure creature from Classical mythology. I seem to remember the creature from D&D, and I know some of them show up in one of the Percy Jackson stories.
According to Pliny the Elder’s Natural Historyfrom the 1st-Century A. D., the Leukrokottas lives in Ethiopia and is about the size of a donkey, with the haunches of a stag, the breast/neck/tail of a lion, a badger’s head, cloven hooves, a mouth so enormous that it opens up all the way back to its ears, and bone ridges instead of teeth. In fact, he describes that the monster’s mouth is an unbroken ridge of bone in each jaw that forms a “continuous tooth without any gum” that is “shut up in a sort of case.” (And if you can make sense of that, you’ll be safer than the rest of us!)
It’s a quite obscure creature that doesn’t seem to figure at all in mythology. It’s just out there, apparently accepted as an ordinary—albeit terrifying—beast. Faith suggests the leukrokotta may be what happened when people saw a hyena for the first time and struggled to find words to describe it.
Interactive Map of Odysseus’s Journey
Gisèle Mounzer has created an interactive map of Odysseus’s itinerary in Homer’s Odyssey. You can read about the project in The Journal (Ireland) or go explore it for yourself. (H/T: Rogueclassicism)
Hobbits Have a Kentucky Connection
Apparently, J. R. R. Tolkien was somewhat taken with the Bluegrass, as Alan Cornett of Pinstripe Pulpit reveals:
But it was a chance encounter [Tolkien scholar Guy] Davenport had in Shelbyville, Kentucky with a former classmate of Tolkien—a history teacher named Allen Barnett—that changed Davenport’s perspective about his former professor’s clever tales. To Davenport’s amazement, Barnett had no idea that Tolkien had turned into a writer, and had never read any of the adventures of Middle Earth.
“Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that,” Barnett told Davenport.
“And out the window I could see tobacco barns,” Davenport writes. “The charming anachronism of the Hobbits’ pipes suddenly made sense in a new way….Practically all the names of Tolkien’s hobbits are listed in my Lexington phonebook, and those that aren’t can be found over in Shelbyville. Like as not, they grow and cure pipe-weed for a living.”
Pretty cool.
Tolkien’s Myth-Making
Dan Berger has produced a wonderful and provocative article at Mythic Scribes titled “J. R. R. Tolkien: Myths that Never Were and the Worlds that They Became.” He explores Tolkien’s motivation for writing The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and why he first wanted them to be published together as a set. It all had to do with what he perceived as a mythological deficit the English suffered when compared to the other great cultures of Europe. Tolkien wrote,
I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing in English, save the impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing (Carpenter, Humphery. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 144 Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
This thought got Berger to thinking about mythology for Americans, who if anything are in an even poorer state with respect to our myths. He then goes on to explore some possible mythic themes that might resonate with Americans and even fleshes out how these themes might be developed in a fantasy setting. It’s all quite interesting, and well worth the read.
Beowulf
Ryan Howse has provided a excellent brief summary of Beowulf and his contribution not only to Western culture but to fantasy fiction. The piece ends thusly:
Beowulf is one of the most influential texts in history, and it has a particular relevance for fantasy. John Gardner, the famous writer, wrote a take on the novel from the monster’s point of view, called Grendel. In this, Grendel was a figure of existentialism and angst who dies at the hands of the hero. Gardner also used Beowulf as a key text in his writing guide, The Art of Fiction: Notes on the Craft For Young Authors.
Michael Crichton wrote Eaters of the Dead, later turned into the film the 13th Warrior. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary wrote a script forBeowulf that streamlined the narrative so that it followed causality, rather than the third tale being separate from the other two.
But of course, the most important reason that Beowulf is important is J.R.R. Tolkien. His love of Beowulf influenced Middle-Earth. Smaug is a literary descendant of Beowulf’s dragon, right down to the single piece of stolen treasure awakening him.
Do read it all. It’s short, and you’ll be better for it.
Darrell J. Pursiful 