Platypus of Truth

Some time ago, my friend Josh came to me with an idea for a web comic.  It never really got off the ground, but he's posting the three pages that we collaborated on over here .  Sometimes things work out, and sometimes things don't, but creating new stuff is something we humans are bound to do.  To paraphrase Tolkien: we make because we are made.

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...

I first encountered the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf in my senior year of high school.  Being the dutiful little Tolkien fan that I was, I promptly checked out The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays from the local library.  The Monsters and the Critics set my feet on the right path and I've loved Beowulf ever since. Flash forward.  This is the fourth year I've taught Beowulf .  Over the past summer, I was beginning to worry that my understanding of Tolkien's argument had gotten a little rusty.  I'd studied the poem as part of a larger course of study in Anglo-Saxon history during college and all sorts of things had crept in from other authors -not to mention my own meager thoughts on the poem.  With the help of the extended kinship network, I got my hands on a copy of The Monsters and the Critics , but some family friends were also able to track down Beowulf and the Critics for me. Beowulf and the Critics is a scholarly edition edited by Michael...

And so we come to the end.  It's appropriate that this final post on the first seven books of Terry Brook's Shannara series should come in October.  That's about the time I finished my first read through the The Talismans of Shannara all those years ago.  Without further comment, then, let's get down to the finale of the Heritage Series. *Spoilers and such* We last left our heroes back at chapter XXV out of a total of XXXVII.  That's a lot of ground to cover.  Coll has to be recovered and his role among the scions of Shannara made clear.  Wren has to face her betrayer and triumph.  Par must succeed in taming the Wishsong and resisting the advances of First Seeker Rimmer Dall.  Walker has broken the siege of Paranor, but his final objective still must be made clear.  Minor characters like Damson, Morgan, Padishar, and Matty Roh still have their stories to tell.  Over all this still looms the question of how the Shadowen can be defea...