Saturday 24 June 2023

Tolkien Trewsday Week 17: Faërie – Tuesday 20th June 2023

Week 17: Faërie – Tuesday 20th June 2023
#TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday #Tolkien

Welcome to #TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday.

The hub for this Twitter-based event can be found here.

Tolkien Trewsday (the Hobbit name for Tuesday!) invites the #Tolkien community to form a fellowship to collectively tweet about a pre-selected theme about Tolkien, his works and his life.

Each week a new theme will be selected, often via a poll or by a guest host/curator, and together we will build a collective outpouring of creativity, knowledge and love for J.R.R. Tolkien and the adaptions based on his works.

The inspiration for this comes from the highly successful #FolkloreThursday which engaged lovers of Folklore, academics, artists and more to use Twitter to discuss it.

We only ask that if you are joining in, please do so with courtesy and kindness in your tweets. This is a positive-action community event, open to all and supportive of fan diversity. Intolerance, racism, bigotry have no place here.

💬 This week’s theme
Week 17: Faërie – Tuesday 20th June 2023

The realms of "Faërie" appear across Tolkien's works and are present in the early concepts of his Elves. Tolkien famously gave his "On Fairy-stories" lecture in 1939 which was then published it in various books. 

How to contribute

We are keeping it very simple. All you need to do to join is tweet something about the current week’s theme and use the following hashtags in your tweet:
#TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday #Tolkien

Your tweet, besides following the theme, can be anything.

"Faërie" can be from across the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and can include Elves (and their kingdoms) in Middle-earth.


“Shores of Faery” by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Week 17: "Enchanted by Faërie: Lost in dark and perilous Mirkwood" supplementary material

This week’s blog post is a supplementary reference guide to an essay thread on Twitter I have written for this week’s Tolkien Trewsday theme of ”Faërie” . I ran out of time unfortunately on this week’s theme, so wasn’t able to write everything I wanted, but I will return to the theme again at a later date.

You can find the thread here: 

⭐✎ “Enchanted by Faërie: Lost in dark and perilous Mirkwood" Twitter 🧵


📜 Supplementary material for “Week 17: Faërie”

📌 Tolkien Gateway references:

I use Tolkien Gateway as a reference point mainly because it is accessible to everyone (for free) though I would recommend getting hold of the following books for reference:

📗 Foster, Robert: "The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: Tolkien's World in The Lord of the Rings and Beyond" (2022: new edition)
📗 Tyler, J.E.A.: "The Complete Tolkien Companion" (2022: new edition)  


📌 Encyclopaedia of Arda references


📌 The Lord of the Rings Online WIKI references


📌 Journal articles

📜 Barkley, Christine: “The Realm of Faërie” (1996) from Mythlore (Vol. 21 No. 2). Link.

📜 Lionarons, Joyce Tally: “Of Spiders and Elves” (2013) from Mythlore (Vol. 31 No. 3). Link.

📜 Long, Josh B: “Two Views of Faërie in Smith of Wootton Major: Nokes and His Cake, Smith and His Star” (2008) from Mythlore (Vol. 26 No. 3). Link.

📜 Markos, Louis: “The realm of Faërie, and the shadow of Homer in Narnia and Middle-earth” (2009) from Mallorn (No. 47). Link.

📜 Orth, John V: “Mirkwood” (2019) from Mythlore (Vol. 38 No. 1). Link.

📜 Post, Marco R.S: “Perilous Wanderings through the Enchanted Forest: The Influence of the Fairy-Tale Tradition on Mirkwood in Tolkien's The Hobbit” (2014) from Mythlore (Vol. 33 No. 1). Link. 

📜 Faerie Magazine #42, Spring 2018. Link 1, Link2, Link 3.


📌 Website articles, blogs and resources

📜 Birzer, Bradley J: “Tolkien: Entering Faerie” (2020) on The Imaginative Conservative website. Link

📜 Dunning, James: “A passport to Faery” (2013). Link.

📜 Kelley, Christine: “Mirkwood (Part I: The Woodland Realm)” (2022). Link.

📜 “Mirkwood (Part II: Rhosgobel)”. Link.

📜 “Mirkwood (Part III: Dol Guldur)”. Link.

📜 La Porte, Chris: “Lord of the Rings Places: Mirkwood Forest” (2021). Link.

📜 Oslen, Corey: “The Tolkien Professor: Faerie and Fantasy” (2011). Link.


📌 Books

📗 Flieger, Verlyn and Anderson, Douglas A: "Tolkien on Fairy-Stories" (2014)

📗 Foster, Robert: "The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: Tolkien's World in The Lord of the Rings and Beyond" (2022: new edition)

📗 Rateliffe, John D: “The History of the Hobbit Part One: Mr Baggins” (2008)

📗 Tolkien, J.R.R.: “The Monsters and the Critics and other essays” (“On Fairy-stories”)

📗 Tolkien, J.R.R.: “Tales from the Perilous Realm”

📗 Tyler, J.E.A.: "The Complete Tolkien Companion" (2022: new edition)  


📌 Miscellaneous material

On Tinfang Warble:

  • Tolkien Gateway: Over Old Hills and Far Away. Link.
  • Tolkien Gateway: Tinfang Warble. Link.
  • Walls-Thumma, Dawn: “Tinfang Warble” (2022). Link.


📌 Relevant quotes

“The period is the ancient time between the age of Faerie and the dominion of men, when the famous forest of Mirkwood was still standing, and the mountains were full of danger.”

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, First printing (September 1937) – publisher’s text on dust jacket. Source.


“The motif of elves living in caves not only harkens back to the ancient folklore tradition of fairy-mounds but was firmly established part of Tolkien’s elf-lore: the great woodland realm of Doriath, the oldest elf-realm in Middle-earth and the closest analogue to the older legendarium to the wood-elf realm of Mirkwood, was ruled from the great underground hall known as ‘the Thousand Caves’”

-- John D. Rateliff, “The History of the Hobbit Part One: Mr. Baggins” (p. 325)


“Tolkien depicts Mirkwood in ways that conjure up not one but two archetypes: The Dark Wood and the Enchanted Forest”

-- John D. Rateliff, “The History of the Hobbit Part One: Mr. Baggins” (p. 395, “The Vanishing People”)


“Legolas in Mirkwood” by Donato Giancola. Source.

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