3. Manwë, You’re Not My Dad!

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Jared’s choice of topic: Melian. The wife of one of the three original Elves in the legendarium, she herself is not an elf but a Maia, one of the divine figures in that universe. So what exactly does that make her? An emo kid with a fondness for dark forests? An alien figure looking around at all the Children of Iluvatar that surround her? Or does she really just like nightingales a lot?

Show Notes.

Jared’s doodle this episode: Melian.

Need to know more about Bryan Cogman? Here’s a recent Vanity Fair profile.

C’mon, surely you know John Cho. But if you need to know more about Daniel Wu…

The Maiar hold an interesting role in the legendarium. Another famous Maia: Gandalf!

The Lady of the Lake—not just a Monty Python reference and joke.

Big Little Lies in Valinor could be a thing, sure.

Meet cutes! You know them even if you’ve never heard the term.

“Take My Breath Away”—for two hundred years, though?

Game of Thrones and decapitation—it was a thing.

‘Amarth’ is ‘fate’ or ‘doom’ in Sindarin—thus an alternate name for Mount Doom, Amon Amarth. Which a Swedish band picked up on…

The Sidhe (pronounced ‘shee’) are not to be trifled with.

I still love that the original version of Sauron was, indeed, a big black cat named Tevildo.

“My thoughts are not your thoughts,” aka Isaiah 55:8.

Not that we want to brush up on totalitarianism if we didn’t have to, but here we are.

Nightingales! They like to sing, you see.

And yes, Keats sure had a thing for nightingales.

The Valar and gender—this essay also contains the passage Oriana reads.

Homosociality in Tolkien will definitely be a subject for future episodes, trust us.

Like I say, read “Aldarion and Erendis” and the associated material for the next episode if you can via a copy of Unfinished Tales.

Revolutionary Road was first a noted novel critiquing the then-just-departed American 1950s, then a noted film some decades later. Either way, you want social, domestic and romantic angst to the full? You got it!

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