Are you familiar with the following exchange between Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli?
ARAGORN: If an Ent falls in the forest, does anyone hear it scream?
LEGOLAS: If an Adan tells a bad jest, does anyone stay my hand from slaying him?
GIMLI: Now, good Elf, what was wrong with the jest?
LEGOLAS: I deem it unkind to the trees.
ARAGORN: What, and not to the Ent?
LEGOLAS: It is the trees which must endure the screaming Ent, Aragorn. Do you know how long it takes an Ent to yell for help?
I laughed out loud when I read this earlier today. I wrote it more than 10 years ago and had forgotten all about it. This is an excerpt from the first essay in a small collection I called Findegil’s Insider’s Guide to The Lord of the Rings. My original plan was to write a new essay every week but my schedule at the time did not permit that. After producing a fourth essay several weeks late I abandoned the project and there it languished for many a year.
This month I have found myself with both the time and the energy to devote to a task that has long needed tending: performing maintenance on the Xenite.Org network. This is the kind of boring tedious laborious work that content creators like me leave until the very last possible moment.
Unfortunately the consequences of not keeping all sections of a large network of Websites up-to-date are severe: you end up with a patchwork quilt pattern of design styles and themes. Worse you leave in place many old scripts that have long since stopped working.
As of this writing I have updated around 38-40,000 pages of content and I am still not finished. People who visit these pages would for the most part not recognize what I’ve done — although I have fixed hundreds of broken links replaced hundreds of dead links and put up placeholder pages for hundreds of missing URLs that (maybe) I might have a chance to republish somewhere in the future.
So what does all this have to do with Tolkien? Well among other things I have updated the old Tolkien Forum archives for Xenite.Org (that are now hosted on SF-Fandom). One of the biggest problems with those archives has been that the index pages were almost impossible to read. Thousands of people visit those pages every month and not one person sent me a word of complaint.
Alas! I oft-times feel like a Ranger patrolling the wilds of Eriador.
Which brings me back to Findegil. The Insider’s Guide has been given a new look and all the broken code is gone. The very first essay is loaded with my oddball sense of humor. Some of the influences are pretty obvious (such as an exchange between Aragorn and Barliman Butterbur I based on the famous “Who’s On First” Abbott and Costello skit).
You can read that funny first essay here.
Findegil was not afraid to take on controversy. In the second essay Soaring With the Eagles the old King’s Writer poked holes in the “why didn’t the eagles just fly Frodo to Mount Doom?” line of reasoning. If you still want to ask that question after reading this piece you have more fortitude than an Elf a Dwarf and a Ranger….
On the Elves of the Fourth Age engages in some of that unbridled speculation I have oft been accused of. It captures some of the historical analysis I used to offer regularly on Suite 101 but without the burden of having to back it up with citations (which I could have included but that would have detracted from the style of the essays).
The last essay in the series looks at the lost books of Arnor and Gondor. I sometimes wish I could have continued writing the Insider’s Guide but it was a task beyond my free time.
Nonetheless I think many people have enjoyed reading the essays and now it should be easier than ever to enjoy them.
By the way if you do see any broken links in the Xenite network please consider contacting me with a friendly pointer. I’ll appreciate the help — as will I am sure many thousands of other people who visit Xenite.Org’s network every month.