Fantastic to see you -- and great stuff! (I'll need to go read your blog posts that you link to at a future date--am deep in copyediting the anthology).
Only one minor quibble: I adore Sam, but I get a little grumpy at the hopefully fading trend in Tolkien scholarship to try to identify the One True Hero. I think that one of the radical aspects of Tolkien's book is MULTIPLE "heroes" (so much so that the Epic Hero Conan Macho Toxic Masculine trope) is deconstructed, or at least undercut! But Sam is unique, and deserves more love!
(I still remember a lovely event from the first Tolkien class my partner and I taught--the only way we could team-teach was to have it a very large class [university didn't want to pay TWO faculty salaries unless there were X number of students--they were into the "faculty must learn X amount in state funding so cram those courses full then]. So it was in an auditorium and hard to get discussion going. But one brave young man in a discussion on favorite characters vs. hero etc. declaimed a praise-song about Bill the Pony who, he said, was the True Hero of the story!).
Whenever I’ve taught LOTR I ask the students to name their favourite character. Sam always gets the most votes. Curiously, Gollum usually comes in second. Great first post, welcome to Substack!
Fantastic to see you -- and great stuff! (I'll need to go read your blog posts that you link to at a future date--am deep in copyediting the anthology).
Only one minor quibble: I adore Sam, but I get a little grumpy at the hopefully fading trend in Tolkien scholarship to try to identify the One True Hero. I think that one of the radical aspects of Tolkien's book is MULTIPLE "heroes" (so much so that the Epic Hero Conan Macho Toxic Masculine trope) is deconstructed, or at least undercut! But Sam is unique, and deserves more love!
(I still remember a lovely event from the first Tolkien class my partner and I taught--the only way we could team-teach was to have it a very large class [university didn't want to pay TWO faculty salaries unless there were X number of students--they were into the "faculty must learn X amount in state funding so cram those courses full then]. So it was in an auditorium and hard to get discussion going. But one brave young man in a discussion on favorite characters vs. hero etc. declaimed a praise-song about Bill the Pony who, he said, was the True Hero of the story!).
Whenever I’ve taught LOTR I ask the students to name their favourite character. Sam always gets the most votes. Curiously, Gollum usually comes in second. Great first post, welcome to Substack!