Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with
thetolkienist.com
thetolkienist.com
Incidentally, I have lived in two of the cities that Tolkien did: Leeds and Bournemouth. As a post grad at Leeds University, the small office (just east of the current Student Union building) that I shared for a while had reputedly been used by Tolkien long before I was born. We joked that it was the inspiration for the damp, dark, twisty caves of the goblins in the Hobbit.
[Edit - just checked - Tolkien explicitly references his Swiss walking tour as an inspiration for parts of the Misty Mountains]
There is also the case of Livreria Lello, in Porto, Portugal, who spent years claiming JK Rowling visited it and got inspired for Hogwarts (they seem to have a similar staircase). They even held a Harry Potter event with signed books (most of them fake, probably the bookshop didnt know it, but they didnt do their dilligence).
Fortunatelly, Rowling denied knowing that place at all on Twitter [1], but as far as I know, the Livreria keeps telling its visitor about Rowling connection.
The same happens in Edinburgh (JKR city for the last 30 years), where if you do a tour, the guide will try to make a Harry Potter connection on every corner. Which is not completely true.
[1] https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1263377779338481665
Hmmm. Not heard this one. That said, I've read quite a lot of Tolkien biographic material, and I'm not aware that he ever visited southern Poland before writing the Lord of the Rings. He wasn't particularly well travelled before he became famous, and as far as I know he had only visited South Africa (where he was born and left as a very young child), Switzerland (walking holiday) and France (WW1) before the bulk of the LOTR writing occurred. After 1939 a trip to Wieliczka would have involved him entering a WW2 war zone or crossing the Iron Curtain, something I'm certain he didn't do before LOTR was published in 1955.
Again, I don't think so. I just re-read the relevant chapter in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien. The 1911 Switzerland trip (when he was aged 19) was just that; and the group of 12 returned to England as soon as the walking was done.
But there is AFAIK no record of JRRT himself visiting there and Poland would be a very untypical vacation destination of a British guy in the interwar period.
14 years later, the graphics are a bit dated, but still very pretty. Moria remains my all time favorite zone in an MMORPG. The atmosphere, the scale ... its just _is_ Moria.
If you're a Tolkien fan, I highly recommend at least checking out some of the youtube videos - or even better, give the game a try (it has a free to play option).
If this is accurate or not is another question, but a google of "Tolkien Drakensberg" certainly shows that it is widely known.
Tolkien returned to England with his mother aged 3 and never went back. Tolkien himself claimed "to have few memories of South Africa, except for a vivid encounter with a large spider, an experience he put to good use later in his writing. The grave of his father, Arthur Tolkien, is still identifiable in Bloemfontein’s President Brand Cemetery" [0] So probably not a big influence, if any.
[0] https://www.southafrica.net/gl/en/travel/article/jrr-tolkien...
Goes to show how sceptical we must be when reading things online, even when they sound plausible. As the late great Abraham Lincoln once said according to something I read recently... "The problem with quotes found on the internet is that many simply are not true".
At the beginning of this century, speechwriters for a struggling British Conservative Party leader gave him the line "do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man" to try to turn his dullness into a virtue. Media generally found it amusing, he was greeted on his return to Parliament by shushing from the opposition, and within the year he'd been replaced without even being given the chance to lead his party into an election.
But it was a pithy enough line to find its way onto inspirational quote lists, and fifteen years later was improbably adorning the Twitter profile of Colin Kaepernick (complete with correct attribution to a politician Kaepernick almost certainly hasn't paid any attention to, never mind been inspired by). Can't wait for British civil rights icons to be inspired by the words of Jeb Bush!
"When the Women's March feminist organisation tweeted "Rest in peace and power, Barbara Bush" to mark the 2018 death of the conservative political matriarch, Twitter users criticised the organisation harshly for abandoning its radical beginnings"
* ᵇʸ ˢᵒᵐᵉᵒⁿᵉ ᵒᵗʰᵉʳ ᵗʰᵃⁿ ᴬᵇʳᵃʰᵃᵐ ᴸⁱⁿᶜᵒˡⁿ
Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."
-Apocryphal
The following line from the linked blog post stood out to me: "As a Tolkienist I would love [for] many cities A, buildings B or persons C to have some sort of link to my favourite author…"
That reminded me of the hoax surrounding a purported 1862 meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, which came to light in the early 2010s.[0] The story gained legs because of how badly many Dickensians wanted to believe it. It was a less sentimental Dostoevskian who took it upon himself to unravel the whole thing.
There has been some discussion on HN of the Dickens-Dostoevsky affair.[1]
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/07/true-sto...
How many syllables in “fire”?
How do you pronounce “again”?
Huzzah!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061637
Coincidence?
> It simply isn’t an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons
...since, you know, Lord Of The Rings does not feature any dragons! (The "fell beasts" that Nazguls ride are not dragons, not even close)
- Voltaire (or Einstein)And I don't want to hear your fake news about how I have no body. Fake! ... Now, the folks at One Guldur Network, they're the kind of people know how respect a leader.
And if you spite me, I will summon my loyal Nazgul: The Witch-King, Khamul and Covfefe.
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(... Things I was expecting to read at the link.)