Every reader of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings eventually asks the same question: if the Great Eagles could swoop in and save the day at Weathertop-adjacent cliffs, the Misty Mountains, and even pluck Frodo and Sam off the slopes of Mount Doom itself - why didn'
Fredegar "Fatty" Bolger is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the hobbit who stayed behind. While Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out toward Mordor and immortality, Fatty kept house at Crickhollow and dropped out of the story. His nickname does him no favors, and the
Arc 1: Beginnings · Genesis 8:20–9:29 The world is empty and washed clean and completely silent, and the first thing the man who survived it does is build an altar. Not a house. Not a field. An altar, first, before anything else - smoke rising off it into a
The Hundred-mile Word Maelor the Sighted · the high place at Rammath · the same autumn Maelor had wept for the king for a year, and the Wright let him weep, and then one grey morning the Wright told him to stop. He was at the high place above Rammath when
Arc 1: Beginnings · Genesis 6:1–8:19 The door doesn't close by a human hand. Noah is already inside. His sons are already inside. Every animal that is going to fit through that door has already gone through it, two by two, seven by seven, and the
Arc 1: Beginnings · Genesis 4 Two altars. Two brothers. Two piles of smoke rising into the same morning sky - and one of them bends, and one of them doesn't, and the brother left standing in the smoke that won't rise is not the one you'
Arc 1: Beginnings · Genesis 3 The tree hasn't moved. The rule hasn't changed. Everything is exactly where it was at the end of the last chapter — the same garden, the same abundance, the same one boundary standing alone in the middle of it. But something is
Arc 1: Beginnings · Genesis 2 The animals keep coming. Lion, then lioness. Ox. Sparrow. Something with too many legs that startles when the man laughs — the first laugh in the history of the world, spent on a bug. One by one they file past him under the fruit trees, and
Arc 1: Beginnings · Genesis 1:1–2:3 Before anything, there is water. Not ocean — ocean has a shore, a floor, a far side. This has none of those. No up. No down. No light to tell the difference. The old words for it are tohu wavohu — wild and waste,
Nikolai Chan had packed for the trip four times, and it still wasn't right. The suitcase lay open on his bed like a patient in surgery. Around it, in neat stacks that had been neater an hour ago, sat everything a thirteen-year-old could possibly need for
In The Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil occupies a few brief chapters and then vanishes from the story, yet he lingers in the imagination far longer than his page count warrants. Critics have long puzzled over his purpose. He is the one figure the One Ring cannot touch — he
Seven Years Ago The first thing Nikolai Chan did not notice that afternoon was the van. It was parked at the far end of Main Street with its engine running, which in Crawford, Nebraska, was two crimes in one. Nobody in Crawford parked at the far end of Main Street