Station Zero

Jonny Hibbs as Sir Ruan, testing out the Globe’s projection facilities… …and waiting for the lights to go down. Last Thursday our film Gwenevere had its first proper showing on the big screen, courtesy of the Chagford Film Festival. I wasn’t sure what it would look like or how it would go down, but all was well: Sarah Reeve’s photography looked gorgeous, and there were laughs and gasps in all the right places from a packed audience at the Globe Inn.  Some of the packed audience - Maria Loftus, Stuart Pyle, and Sarah McIntyre We weren’t able to reassemble the whole cast and crew, but about half the team were present. Here’s Alan Lee, Rosanna Lambert, Arran Hawkins, Laura Frances Martin, Sasha Innes, Sarah Reeve, me, Stuart Pyle, Tessa Arrowsmith-Brown, Sarah McIntyre, and Steve Arrowsmith-Brown. Local hero Alan Lee got a definite murmur of approval for his brief cameo as a shepherd. And I was glad Elizabeth-Jane Baldry of the Chagford Filmmaking Group was able to come: she was very...

One of the stories in this collection is Leaf by Niggle, an allegorical tale about an artist in which Tolkien is plainly expressing his anxiety that his work of creating Middle Earth will never be finished and that what fragments he does manage to produce will be ignored by most people and eventually forgotten altogether. It’s quite affecting, and I suppose he never did finish it, but there seems little danger of it being forgotten, since all his notes and half-finished stories are now available as pricey books. This one, Tales from the Perilous Realm , comes with a beautiful Alan Lee painting of a hero confronting a dragon on the front, perhaps designed to nudge the unwary purchaser into thinking they’re buying something Lord of the Rings related. What they’ll actually be taking home is an anthology of short tales which were mostly available as separate small volumes when I was a young ‘un, bulked out with Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Tales . Farmer Giles of Ham is the central story, ...

  UPDATE: I wrote this post back in 2020 after a second reading of The Silmarillion left me unimpressed and fairly baffled. I've done a bit more reading around the subject since then, and on a third reading recently the book finally started to come into focus for me. I might try to blog about it at more length at some point. So I no longer stand by a lot of what I've written below, but I'll leave it here anyway. PR, 2025   When I was nine or ten I started to notice that a lot of my favourite authors claimed The Mabinogion as an important influence. So I ventured forth across the wilds of Queen’s Park even unto the Kemptown Bookshop and picked up the Everyman paperback edition, only to discover when I got it home that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Obeying no narrative structures that I’d encountered before, and sometimes consisting of little more than long lists of names, the Welsh legends collected in The Mabinogion contained little on which my imagination coul...

When I started re-reading The Lord of the Rings recently I thought I might get a blog post out of it, or maybe even two. Now, nine posts later, we finally draw near to the Grey Havens. If you have been, thanks for reading... Alan Lee So Sauron has been defeated, the War of the Ring is ended, the might of Mordor is destroyed, and Aragorn has taken his rightful place as king of Gondor with Arwen as his queen. Yay! And yet the the tone of The Return of the King becomes tinged with melancholy almost as soon as the Ring is destroyed. For its destruction doesn't just mean the end of the Dark Lord: it also heralds the end of the age of the Elves and the Ents, the age of magic. John Boorman, moving on from his abortive 1970s Lord of the Rings adaptation to direct the Arthurian epic Excalibur , gave Merlin a line which Gandalf or Galadriel might have said (and perhaps would have, if his version of Middle-earth had reached the screen). ' Our days are numbered. The old ways ...

The first post in this little series got a lot more attention than I had expected, so I’ll start this one with a word of explanation: I’m not a Tolkien scholar (or any other sort of scholar). I don’t know very much more than the bare facts about J.R.R Tolkien’s life, and not only have I never read his letters or essays, and I don’t know his books beyond The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (there’s a good reason, I think, why  he never published The Silmarillion and the rest in his lifetime.) But I’ve been reading and re-reading The Lord of the Rings since I was about ten, and these posts are just a record of some idle thoughts that occur to me as I go through it again now that I’m about fifty. The gate of Moria, by Alan Lee By the time we reach the second half of The Fellowship of the Ring we have already walked a long way in the hobbits’ furry footsteps. Book One was packed with incidents, characters and details, and rose at the end to a gripping climactic chase , so Boo...