Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame (not the name of a law firm)

I was out sick yesterday, but the following is audio I recorded this morning about ideas of redemption and recreation in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, especially as goes for beings and characters such as Melkor/Morgoth and Sauron and the like.  It’s a bit meandering, I fear, and it’s longer than other recent stuff has been, but please let me know if you find it interesting, and if you have any comments on the subject(s), or on such audio posts in general, I would be glad to receive your feedback. I’ll probably be turning it into a “video” eventually, for YouTube.  I don’t know, are those easier to partake of than the audio here on the blog?  Certainly the storage availability on YouTube is functionally unlimited, but I’m not yet anywhere near the limits of my personal storage here on WordPress yet, anyway.

This probably almost would count as a podcast, though I don’t know whether I feel comfortable arrogating that status to my measly ponderings.

Let me know what you think, please, and thank you.

Addendum:  Here is the link to In Deep Geek.  

I also highly recommend Nerd of the Rings.

My heroes have always been villains, Episode II: Sauron, lord of Mordor

It’s the second Thursday of the month and, as promised, this is the second installment of “My heroes have always been villains.”  Today, I discuss one of the greatest villains in modern fantasy literature:  Sauron of Mordor, the title character of The Lord of the Rings.

Peter Jackson’s amazing LotR movies (and the slightly less amazing The Hobbit movies) have brought Sauron to the attention of the population at large to a greater degree than ever before, but he was hardly a shrinking violet to begin with.  Millions upon millions of us met him in the books, after getting teased by him as the Necromancer in The Hobbit. Continue reading