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Tag: History of Middle-earth

‘Goblin Feet’ – Sorrow and Loss in Tolkien’s Least Tale

Having dealt with Tolkien’s Lesser Tales over the last month, there was really only one piece of Tolkien’s fiction that we could possibly turn to as a postscript to this series – what may very well be the Least Tale of Tolkien, as it were. Mention ‘Goblin Feet’ to a Tolkien lover, and you’ll get one of two reactions.  The first (and much more common) is likely bafflement, a “huh?” and subsequent inquiry as to whether this is some sort of evidence about the origin of Orcs?  The rarer, and desired, reaction, is a wry chuckle and a raise of…

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Durin VII, Reincarnation, and the Beautiful Dwarvish Long Defeat

I was flicking through the Appendices of LOTR the other day, on an unrelated mission, when something really curious caught my eye in the Dwarvish genealogy tree.  It’s a really small detail, almost insignificant – but the more I thought about it, the more it intrigued me, and the more intrigued I became, the more I realised that it’s actually a whole lot of details all packaged up in a single detail. Namely, Durin VII.  When was he born?  When did he reign?  And, perhaps most pressingly, how did he obtain that epithet? From the perspective of Tolkien as author,…

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