1. I’m extra late this week. I wish I could say it was for a good reason, but it isn’t.

2. My class finished reading The Hobbit this week (I pretty much gave two whole periods to almost nothing but reading because I’m realizing how little time is left in the first semester). As always, I notice new details and excellencies every time I read it.

3. For instance, notice how the Dwarves immediately begin rewriting history after Smaug’s defeat. In the second version of their Over the Misty Mountains song, the first stanza goes:

Under the Mountain dark and tall
The King has come unto his hall
His foe is dead, the worm of dread
And ever so his foes shall fall.

Which rather makes it sound as though Thorin had killed Smaug (as opposed to being too scared to even go near him and instead paying a hobbit to do anything dangerous). This is one of those deceptively subtle pieces of psychology that Prof. Tolkien sprinkles throughout his works.

4. I also love how the theme of plundering treasure is revisited one last time by Bilbo coming home to find his goods being auctioned off. Which is the same idea as the marauding dragon or the plundering goblins, just in a Hobbiton (or pre-war British) milieu. Generally speaking, Prof. Tolkien gets a lot of mileage of doing the same idea in different social dialects, so to speak.

5. By the way, I’ve mentioned before that I suspect Tolkien may have taken inspiration for the Lonely Mountain from Mt. Fuji. Then I found this painting of his and now I’m pretty much certain of it:

6. I hate YouTube ‘shorts’. I mean, content is as may be, but I hated that I can’t scroll down without starting a different video, and I hate that the stupid things automatically repeat (why on earth would anyone want a video to auto-repeat by default?), which sometimes makes it tricky to know when they’ve actually ended.

7. Re-reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time in a while (we’re doing West Side Story for the school musical, so I figured I should refresh myself). It’s better than I remember it; it had never been one of my favorites, but I’m liking it more this time around. I think I have a harder time with it than others because I’m never sure how seriously to take the intense teen love affair in the middle of it. Sure, Shakespeare uses love-at-first-sight all the time, but here it’s preceded by Romeo being head-over-heels for a different girl, whom he immediately forgets about upon seeing Juliet (as several characters point out), and the fact that the play is so heavily dependent upon their love makes it stand out more than, say, Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest. In any case, I’m enjoying it.