Abby Epplett, Historian

Tolkien wrote his legendarium from the 1930s to the 1970s, and while he was ahead of his time in many aspects, he could not have anticipated modern understanding of mental health. He experienced significant childhood trauma and two world wars, which are known to cause mental health disabilities. This installment will not speculate on the state of Tolkien’s mental health and its potential effect on his work. Instead, I will study the text as if it was written by in-universe characters describing themselves and those they know. This will serve as the basis for case studies reviewing explicitly stated symptoms along with the history behind the diagnosis.

On Thursday, April 10 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., I watched the fifth and final Parked at Home webinar of the 2025 season. This is the fourth year of the Parked at Home series of virtual talks hosted by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BLRV) and other sites in the National Park Service, along with the third year of summaries appearing on my blog. The presentations this year are interpreted into American Sign Language (ASL) by Sherrolyn King. The hour-long webinars will be uploaded to the BlackstoneNPS YouTube channel and available to view at any time. The last installment to this year’s series was Saint Croix Island International Historic Site featuring park ranger Karin Magera.

This is the final essay before I begin my analysis of the dialogue portion of The Lord of the Rings . I hope to begin moving more quickly through the text now that I have laid a solid foundation and framing to my metaphorical house, but seeing as I tend to overanalyze, I cannot promise any amount of speed. Today I discuss Hobbiton, the famous hometown of Bilbo Baggins and possibly his father, Bungo Baggins. This was not the hometown of Frodo, as he was born in Buckland, but he was permitted to live in this area after Bilbo made him the heir to Bag End. I will cover the ownership, architecture, and layout of Hobbiton while comparing it to real-world history before providing the first animatic of the project.

For the second part of Appendix E, Tolkien focused on the writing systems used for Middle-earth languages. Real-world languages use a wide range of systems that can be grouped into “families”, including those descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs, such as variations on the Latin alphabet; East Asian systems based on Chinese characters; Indian and Southeast Asia systems based on the ancient Brahmi script; pre-Columbian languages from Mexico and Central America; and writing systems created by Indigenous Americans to preserve their own languages after European colonization.

On March 27, 2024 at 8:00 p.m., I attended the webinar AIA Archaeology hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America . Kisha Supernant , the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology , professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta , and a citizen of the Metis Nation of Alberta, led the talk entitled, “Finding the Children: Using Archaeology to Search for Unmarked Graves at Indian Residential School Sites in Canada”. Supernant began this work in 2018 and is dedicated to making sure her work meets the needs of the community. She opened by acknowledging that archaeology is often viewed in a colonial context, where archaeologists extract the belongings and knowledge of Indigenous descendant communities and excluded them from conversations about how their culture will be represented. Supernant collaborated with three other scholars to edit the book Archaeologies of the Heart , which advocates for a diff...