It is with absolute pleasure that I am able to finally announce the Blog of Mazarbul’s new project – a work of analysis so audacious, so comprehensive, and so important, that it may very well change the face of Tolkien scholarship forever.
I, like many of my tens of readers, enjoy listening to the occasional podcast, watching a video essay, or reading some piece of analysis on Tolkien’s works. There are, of course, many brilliant and worthwhile discussions, reviews, analyses and classes available online for those interested in studying Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and other associated works. But I think we can all agree on one, crucial and absolute truth.
All of them are far too shallow.
Each and every one of these otherwise worthy projects cuts corners, skims material, blithely disregards swathes of the text in favour of pushing the latest episode or post out. Not one single one of these otherwise admirable analyses goes far enough, in short. Even those few that study the work sentence by sentence are lackadaisical and uncomprehensive in their approaches.
No longer. No sir. That is not what we at the Blog of Mazarbul stand for.
As such, I am proud to announce The Daily Word of the Rings, the new daily blog post series, which will study the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. Word by word.
Each day, we’ll take a single word from Tolkien’s magnum opus (working, of course, from the beginning and in order) and we will study that word. We’ll examine its etymology, its history, and its prevalence. We’ll consider synonymous words Tolkien might have used, and scour the text to highlight other occurrences of the word.
We’ll consider whether that word appears in drafts of the passage or not, and discuss the actual meaning of the word, as well as any peripheral or secondary associations it may carry. We’ll discuss appearances of that word in historical literature, and what may have inspired Tolkien to use that word in that place…with due consideration also paid to the details of Tolkien’s biographical matter.
By the conclusion of this project, it will be the single most (and arguably the only) truly comprehensive study of Tolkien’s great work of fantasy. Speaking as a part-time amateur blogger with no formal training in philology, history, or literature, I know I am uniquely well-suited to fulfilling this extraordinary task.
As calculated by the LOTR Project, The Lord of the Rings has a mere 481,103 words. According to my calculations, this means that The Daily Word of the Rings will be complete as of June the 3rd, 3341 AD. Hence, this project will not just be my legacy, but will be an ongoing legacy for generations of future Tolkien scholars to refer to.
Given that I expect to die some time in the next hundred years, that also means that I have a lot of work ahead of me. It is of critical importance that I prepare and schedule all four hundred and eighty-one thousand, one hundred and three blog posts for publication before my death. Naturally, I will also need to pay the blog’s hosting costs in advance, and also hope that the Internet, written English, and my hosting provider survive the coming millennium. But I am confident that if they do so, then The Daily Word of the Rings will be celebrated as being one of the things of all time.
So join us tomorrow as we analyse the very first word in The Lord of the Rings, “Concerning.” From its history to its current usage, and its recurrences throughout The Lord of the Rings, we’ll consider “concerning” as it has never been considered before. Plus, we’ll finally answer the question that literally nobody has ever asked before – does Tolkien mean that we the reader are to be concerned with the Hobbits, or that the Hobbits themselves are concerning?
These critical questions, and many more, will be finally answered within the coming centuries, in The Daily Word of the Rings.
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- Admin update: Owing to a variety of administrative difficulties, we regret to inform you that The Word of the Rings has been put on hiatus with immediate effect. These difficulties include but are not limited to: Furious and irreconcilable disagreement between the Blog of Mazarbul’s dedicated team as to whether chapter titles, footnotes, and/or the Appendices should be included in the project; a critical lack of funding to be put toward hosting costs across the coming 1,317 years; and the inescapable metaphysical issues of this post being an April Fool’s joke. But once these issues have all been resolved, we look forward to realising this truly unbelievable project!
…This post is dedicated, with much, much love, to each and every author, essayist, and podcaster to have ever enriched our understanding of Tolkien’s works. I can but hope that the silly thing will be taken in the wryly loving spirit with which it is intended.
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