Abby Epplett, Historian

Once more continuing my mini series within a series on the Appendixes at the back of The Lord of the Rings, Part Three: Return of the King , I move along to “Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (iv) Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion”. While last week’s section focused on the northern kingdom on Anor after the empire of the Númenóreans divided, this week’s section focuses on the southern kingdom, Gondor. Much like last week, this section is mostly about the Númenórean descendants having a rough time, often because of their own bad choices. Peoples opposing Gondor included the Black Númenóreans, the Men of Harad and Khad, Corsairs, Sauron and his orcs, Wainriders, and themselves, with each group paralleling people in real-world history and mythology. Fortunately, after pages of violent fighting, the conclusion of this section was satisfying and directly connected to the dialogue portion of the books. Color Symbolism, Black Númenóreans, and Men of Harad Black Númenóreans was

Do you enjoy reading convoluted histories of transcribed and translated documents with discrepancies between surviving copies and a missing original manuscript? Then look no further than The Red Book of Westmarch , also known at The Red Book of Periannath , which is the fiction origin of The Hobbit , The Lord of the Rings , and possibly other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, including parts of The Silmarillion . A highly detailed explanation concerning the creation of this manuscript and its early copies is given in “Note on the Shire Records”, the final section of the Prologue found in The Lord of the Rings: Part One The Fellowship of the Ring . While the confusing contents of this two-and-a-quarter page explanation have been reviewed elsewhere, I will take a few paragraphs to explain what fictitious books were presumably used in Tolkien’s “translation”, the framing device for the work. Then, I will cover a few rediscovered works in the real world, along with several historical hoaxes

A major motif in The Lord of the Rings is the presence of large bodies of water, especially rivers and the Sea. In the Prologue “1 Concerning Hobbits”, the narrator explains that Hobbits had developed an antagonistic view of this type of water, along with the exploration and cultures associated with it. Hobbits of the Shire and the neighboring settlement Westfarthing lived not far from three Elf-towers located in the appropriately named Tower Hills and believed “one could see the Sea from the top of that [tallest] tower… no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it… the Sea became a word of fear among them, and a token of death”. (8) This passage also describes their dualistic relationship with Elves because of that Race’s association with the Sea. Although Hobbits admired, even envied, Elf culture by appropriating their crafts and a variant of their writing system, along with being ruled by the Elf-like or Elf-descended Fallohide Hobbits, as discussed in my post last week , at t

On Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. EST, I watched the latest installment of AIA Archaeology Hour, a webinar series hosted by the Archaeological Institute of America . Dr. Anne Austin , who teaches of anthropology and archaeology in the History Department at the University of Missouri—St. Louis and works as a bioarchaeologist at Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale [French Institute of Oriental Archeology], presented her talk Ancient Ink: Discovering the Tattooed Women of Ancient Egypt . Her presentation focused on tattoos on mummies found at Deir el-Medina , a village for workers in Ancient Egypt who built the infamous Valley of the Gods. Dr. Ulrike Krotscheck , who leads the Puget Sound chapter of AIA and works as a professor of archaeology at Evergreen State College , moderated the event. Dr. Austin began the talk by explaining how archaeology is currently in “the golden age for finding evidence of tattooing in archaeological contexts… [with] more pub

A few months ago, I received a perfect gift, the revised and expanded second edition of Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East . Few other readers will be quite so pleased by the book as I was, but for those who are interested in mythology from Egypt, the Akkadians, and other ancient cultures, this is an easy-to-read primer. Authors Dr. Victor H. Matthews of Missouri State University and Dr. Don C. Benjamin of the Kino Institute of Theology wrote the book with the intention of creating “a readable, affordable, and portable anthology of ancient Near Eastern law and stories”, beginning with their first edition published by Paulist Press in 1991. I read the 1997 edition, which includes black-and-white illustrations and runs about 380 pages in length. Along with this book, the authors co-wrote The Social World of Ancient Israel 1250-587 B.C.E. in 1993, while Dr. Matthews published Manners and Customs in the Bible in 1988. I knew a considerabl

On January 18, I listened to “The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World”, a talk given by Dr. Kara Cooney , a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA , which was hosted by the Northern Alabama chapter of the  Archeological Institute of America (AIA) . Cooney hosted Out of Egypt on the Discovery channel in 2009 and published the book The Good Kings in 2021, which covered the reign of five Egyptian kings. Cooney focused on three of these kings during her talk: Khufu Akhenaten, and Ramesses II. Cooney emphasized a key difference between the Greek and Roman empires versus the Egyptian dynasties. While Greeks and Romans divinized rulers after death, setting up emperors like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Marcus Aurelius to become gods, the Egyptians divinized rulers during their lifetimes. Cooney noted how Americans “divinize” their favorite presidents like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Before