Middle-earth is Now Unplugged and Online at Xenite.Org

You have no idea of how many requests I have received through the years for new essays on Middle-earth. Much as I appreciated the thousands of readers who enjoyed my essays at Suite101, I have to admit that I was really burned out on Tolkien and Middle-earth for a while. After you write 200 essays you get to the point where you feel like you cannot say anything else.

Naturally, as time has rolled by I’ve found myself occasionally drawn into some interesting Tolkien-related discussions. For example, a couple of years ago I engaged with the Endor mailing list in a project that discussed both “Beowulf” and “The Iliad” (and their connections to Tolkien’s works) in detail.

Still, writing something NEW about J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth has not been easy. I’m kind of sick of the old Middle-earth essay style. But a few weeks ago it occurred to me that I could take a different approach, one that should make the essays both more entertaining and enlightening at the same time.

The biggest problem with picturing Middle-earth is picturing Middle-earth. It’s not like you can hop on an airplane and fly over the ocean to Beleriand or Gondor and start snapping up photographs, is it?

And yet, Tolkien’s writing is so compelling one feels sure that he imagined the places and things he described with great clarity. In fact, he attempted to paint some of those places and things, but Tolkien’s artwork is stylish and fantastic. While colorful it is not as realistic as his stories.

So I felt the real challenge in looking at Middle-earth lay in finding real-world examples of the kind of things Tolkien described. It has taken a little work but I have now composed several essays in what I hope will become a lengthy collection that I have dubbed Middle-earth Unplugged.

The Unplugged concept combines some styles I experimented with in the old Suite101 essays (which are no longer available at Suite101 but which you can read here as they are published on the Xenite Middle-earth site at a rate of 2-3 per week).

What is most important to me is that I give the essays a fresh voice, a non-Michael Martinez voice that is nonetheless unique and familiar. I decided to write the articles as narratives in the style of anthropological journalism, such as you would find in magazines like The National Geographic and The Smithsonian. The Middle-earth Unplugged articles are not quite as long as the articles in those esteemed publications but I think they come closer to achieving that style than anything else I have seen.

Other than the imagery which accompanies them, these essays strive to use as little invention as possible. People sometimes mistake the extrapolations I have offered as me substituting my own ideas for Tolkien’s (in fact, these “mistakes” more often than appear to be cheap shots lobbed by people trying to tarnish my reputation). I have always tried to make it clear where I was extrapolating in the essays but some people just don’t resonate with that style.

This new series of essays strives to express necessary extrapolation through the visual medium. The creativity is thus expressed separately from the facts (other than the style of the narrative itself). The facts may nonetheless be obscure but except for a few place-names I may introduce from time to time, everything written in the essays will be based on something published in one of the Tolkien books.

I don’t expect this series of essays to please the toxic vampires of Tolkien fandom any more than anything else I might try, but all I ask is that you ignore the occasional poison pen comments peppered around the Web and read the essays for yourself. You don’t have to agree with anything. The purpose of Middle-earth Unplugged is not to start or win any arguments — it is to encourage people to think and to imagine in new ways.

The first essay is titled “The Eldar Get Their Game On” and it looks at how events might have played out in Hithlum leading up to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. My goal is to publish a new essay every Wednesday but admittedly these essays are not easy to produce. At some point I may start missing deadlines.