Leonardo > Recent Status Updates

Chocolate is a great remedy. I’m glad Rowling knows her natural medicine.

Once more I ask myself how Ed can make all these disparate character threads intersect when I know darn well he can. Probably sumpthin’ to do with the Red Wizards. Pausing again since I got the next Harry Potter from my friends.

Finished the Augsburg Confession!

Pausing this since I only picked it up to occupy space between Potter books.

Ding dong the dragon’s dead

“Thus it is that through Eriol and his sons the Engle (i.e. the English) have the true tradition of the faeries, of who the Íras and the Wéalas (the Irish and the Welsh) tell garbled things.”

I take it back. The greatest tragedy of all is Tolkien never putting down any version of a full prose narrative of Eärendel’s story.

I’d forgotten how closer to the Norse conception of dwarves Tolkien’s original dwarves were in how malicious they are.

I think it is a shame most of all that Tolkien never finished a proper rewrite of the Fall of Gondolin narrative. I would have loved to see how he’d have handled the description of the Eldar houses arrayed for war when Morgoth’s forces arrived.

Victory lap part two. I didn’t realize Grendel had a dragon-skin purse.

Turin’s story is tragic no matter which version. I do wish Tolkien had left enough of his role in smacking Melko with his black sword at the end of days to make it into the Silmarillion though.

It really is about your mother.

I know making the eye of Sauron a cat eye in the movies probably wasn’t a reference to Tevildo lord of cats, but I will now choose to associate the two.

TIME TO BRING BACK THE THEW COUNTER FROM THE CONAN STORIES! Beren is stacked.

I’d forgotten about the rainbow road.

Tolkien really wanted to make the Man in the Moon work in Middle-earth.

Ding dong the Grendel is dead and gone to hell.

Definitely enjoy what was eventually published in the Silm about the coming of the Eldar than this particular early draft.

Didn’t remember the oyster deep lore.

Not Tolkien putting the doctrine of Purgatory into early drafts of what would become the Valaquenta.

Made it to Rumil’s first appearance in the legendarium. Before that, it’s interesting to ponder how Tolkien may have directly connected Middle-earth to our world via the character of Eriol, who was an Anglo-Saxon before he vanished from the story.

Klavan is one of the only non-physicists I’ve heard who brings up the ultraviolet catastrophe, although he missed out on a cool section name by not using it as such. He wanders further afield with how materialistic the popular conception is before reining it back to what was discovered via Quantum Mechanics.

A lot has definitely been glossed-over in how the philosophy of the late-middle ages developed the scientific method of Bacon, but I think it’s a workable overview. I think Galileo gets a bad rap here in some of the motivations, but then I have not read Galileo’s works because I know how to read neither Latin nor modern Italian.

I’m gonna say right now I think this VR game is gonna be involved in the murders.

Finished the poems about the gods and monsters. Up next are the heroic poems.

Finished Havamal. Decent book of wisdom, I’d say. My favorite verse was probably 76.

Cows dies,
Family die,
You will die the same way.
But a good reputation
Never dies
For the one who earns it well.

I’m nearly a third through the book I tell ye. I spent most of my time today reading over forty roman numeral numbered pages of introductory material before getting to Voluspa, which was very well translated into the readable English which is Dr. Crawford’s goal.

Plato was so right about democracy.

Btw, the Allegory of the Cave is about Jesus.

Now it’s time for the most misunderstood allegory in history.