The Fëanor piñata takes some more hits as The Man of the West welcomes Don Marshall, the Obscure Lord of the Rings Facts Guy, to the Prancing Pony Podcast just in time to answer some really obscure questions! From Narya’s chain-of-custody to Goldberry growing tired of trochaic tetrameter, our listeners do their best to trip us up. Alan gets choked up over a Húrin passage – surprise – and we agree that this Tolkien fellow is pretty good at writing.
Recommended Reading:
The Silmarillion
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Christopher Tolkien, ed.) (Mariner Books, paperback)
The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Mariner Books, paperback)
The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of The Lord of the Rings
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Mariner Books, paperback)
The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Mariner Books, paperback)
Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Christopher Tolkien, ed.) (Mariner Books, paperback)
OUR OWN BOOK: Why We Love Middle-earth
Sisto, Alan & Marchese, Shawn (Mango, paperback)
Re. Feanor committing his sons and his people to destruction in what he knew to be a hopeless quest:
Shades of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, who bound his ship and crew to his own obsessive, self-destructive pursuit of an object (the white whale) that had untimely become more of an overarching symbol — one might even say a god or conjured demon — to him than a mere entity in the material world.
The pursuit of their (Ahab’s and Feanor’s) objects of obsession are then more about their own internal world, more about perpetuating their own identity, than about actually achieving the goal (killing the whale or retrieving the Silmarils).
In fact, we might have reason to presume that no longer having anything to pursue may have shattered all meaning for the obsessed protagonists and left them utterly bereft (à la Albert Camus’ Sisyphus).