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“What's taters, precious, eh, what's taters?” asks Gollum.

“Po-ta-toes,” explains Sam. “The Gaffer's delight, and rare good ballast for an empty belly.”

(Along with tobacco, apparently—anachronistically—potatoes have somehow managed to make it over to Middle Earth from the Uttermost West. Go figure.)

They're in Ithilien, heading for Mordor along with Frodo and the Ring. Gollum has just snagged a couple of rabbits, which Sam is about to stew up with herbs. Herbs you can find in the wilderness; potatoes, alas, not so. His mention of the toothsome tubers was nostalgia, pure and simple.

(Maybe they'd come over with the men of Westernesse, after the fall of Númenor. After Gollum's time, anyway.)

Poor Gollum. Imagine: life without potatoes.

NOT a Review of the HBO Series

A local dungeon daddy once invited me over for a tour of the chamber.

"Well, why not?" I thought.

I'll spare you the details. I left having learned two things.

First—as expected—bondage doesn't really interest me.

Second, that my friend Paul was absolutely right in his characterization of BD/SM as essentially an elaborate and extended form of foreplay.

Now, I like foreplay as much as the next guy, but I have to admit that, at several points during the encounter, I couldn't help thinking, “Um...can we just screw already?”

Let's just admit it: House of the Dragon is Silmarillion to Game of Thrones' Lord of the Rings.

It's an old question: why did the gods make the world? The answer, as any artist can tell you, is that making is the best drug of all.

If making is a drug, then world-making must be the most addictive drug of all. Alas, both Tolkien and Martin fell  prey to traps of their own making, forgetting what—say what you will about Narnia—C. S. Lewis never did: that, no matter how intrinsically interesting the world, the story always has to come first.

That's why GoT and LotR are both such romps, and HotD and the Silmarillion such bores.

Could it also maybe have something to do with the fact that, while the former are suffused with gentle humor, the latter are, by contrast, utterly humorless?

Or is that just the nature of story vs. history?

Hearing fans effuse about the first season of House of the Dragon always leaves me wondering just exactly what I was missing. The show always seemed to be building to a climax that somehow never came.

I kept being reminded of those bad pagan rituals of the 80s and 90s in which you were supposed to stand in an interminable line, waiting for your one-on-one with a (supposed) deity.

Spoiler alert: it's never worth the wait.

No wonder pagans like Middle-earth so much.

Let's face it: one of the guilty pleasures of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is that Middle-earth is a world without organized religion.

No churches, no bibles, no street-corner preachers: really, it sounds kind of idyllic, doesn't it? No Judaism, no Christianity, no Islam. This is a world in which the two major holidays—Midwinter and Midsummer—are largely (if not exclusively) secular celebrations. In Middle-earth, we find a world of unmediated experience.

No wonder pagans like Middle-earth so much.

But wait, there's more. On a recent read-through, I noticed that there is in fact a deity in Middle-earth, one invoked with surprising frequency throughout the entire trilogy, especially in moments of direst danger. (Guess what: she always comes through, too.) And guess what: She's a goddess.

Forget the Silmarillion. Forget Tolkien's made-up pantheon of not-quite-gods, the usual poor monotheist's masturbatory fantasy of polytheism.

Judging from the trilogy alone, there's one god in Middle-earth, and her name is Elbereth.*

A new book has come to the shire filled with all the wisdom one could want to live a Hobbit-like life. It's called, Wisdom of the Shire: A short Guide to a Long and Happy Life, by Noble Smith. At first glance it looks like another marketing ploy to get a piece of the Tolkien money-pie, but with a second glance, you can see Smith delve into the principles of a good life that Tolkien envisioned, that can ultimately be evoked today. 

For the Pagan audience, it's a treasure of ideas to continue cultivating a connected life with the natural world, for eating local foods, for gardening and sharing in community and honoring the seasons.