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Tolkien’s eagles rescue the party from certain death by wargs and goblins. Though morally ambiguous—stealing sheep while helping heroes—they function as Tolkien’s ultimate plot-fixing device when characters face impossible situations.

October 20, 2025

Bilbo’s underground riddle contest with Gollum became the archetypal Dungeons & Dragons scenario—a lone adventurer solving puzzles to escape danger. We also see Tolkien’s pre-scientific worldview with Lamarckian evolution (“the more you use it the bigger it gets”) and Platonic light-emitting vision.

October 13, 2025

Goblin Town mirrors the chaotic Victorian Birmingham of Tolkien’s youth—a dark maze where inhabitants love machines and inventive cleverness but create only weapons and torture devices. The bow-legged, squint-eyed goblins resemble rickets-ridden factory workers who rarely saw sunlight. Their rhythmic songs echo industrial machinery.

October 6, 2025

Rivendell introduces Elrond’s crucial moon-map revelation — divine intervention or “you create your own luck by taking action.” The dwarves started their quest without complete information, yet moving forward allowed essential details to emerge naturally.

September 29, 2025

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an employer with a job to fill is in search of a candidate with a diploma in exactly the skills he is looking for. But is this in fact the case?
Why are coders out of work and what should they do about it?

colin
September 28, 2025