parboiled by the janitors of hell

[tchaikovskaya]

jkasjdkasjksajfdasfdsafd goodbye

[tchaikovskaya]

“there are two types of americans:

1) i am from bumfuckville south pennsylbumfuckia, you of course know this great city

2) im not sure if you’ve heard of this place called miami?”

[penny-anna]

The Valar: sooo how’s defeating Sauron going

Saruman: everything is going according to plan, don’t worry about my giant fortress and the army I’ve amassed, they’re for an unrelated project

Radagast: I named this hedgehog Sylvester :)

Gandalf: I’ve started a side business making and selling fireworks

The Blue Wizards: 

[programmerhumour]

Just Developer Thinking!

[30-minute-memes]

me irl

[mysharona1987]

[suchacomfycloset]

[embessie]

When the dwarves dug too deep

Woke a demon from sleep

That’s a-Moria

[haxyr3]

I love this meme! It is so absurd, gloomy and silly at the same time!

Captions: I’d love to go to Syzran… But I have to take my fish for a walk. And do the floors. It’s like I live someone else’s life. And this fish… It is so awkward, I don’t know.

[historical-nonfiction]

Darwin Was Wrong (About Bees)

In his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that bumblebees are the only pollinators of red clover. In 1862 he discovered that this is wrong. Honeybees also pollinate red clover well.

He wrote to his friend John Lubbock, “I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees.”

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

being an adult is just. you wake up and tell other people your back hurts

[scripttorture]

"Remember Bulgakov: manuscripts don’t burn." What does that mean?

So one of the greatest Russian novels of the modern era (and the only one I’ve tried whose work I’ve thoroughly enjoyed) was Mikhail Bulgakov who wrote The Master and Margarita. 

Bulgakov wrote during Stalin’s reign. Censorship was…something special and artists of all kinds were heavily pressured to toe an ever changing party line. Censorship, constant criticism by government bodies and constant refusal to have his work published took a massive toll on Bulgakov. 

His career was deliberately ruined twice. He was living in an era where what he wrote could have gotten him killed.

He burnt The Master and Margarita at least once. 

In his book the titular ‘Master’ is a struggling writer, suffering from depression in a mental health institute that’s more like a prison, oppressed by the authorities. He’s burnt his book.

Towards the end the Devil hands his book back to him with the line ‘Didn’t you know, manuscripts don’t burn?’

I read this book during a riot.

The Master and Margarita was published, in a heavily censored form. Until a censor with enough brains to understand satire read it at which point it was banned. Black market copies of the uncensored version circulated for years. Some of them had been copied out by hand.

I was partly schooled in the West. Which meant that when I went home for the holidays I had to smuggle my homework past border security. I had to hide books and drawings regularly because if found they would have been destroyed.  

There is much more to The Master and Margarita than a passionate argument on the pointlessness of this kind of censorship, it’s about the fear and hypocrisy of living in a totalitarian state. 

But it’s also, in part, about the power of stories to help us through. About how fiction can sustain and how great works endure.

I believe in the power of fiction. And I don’t just mean the kind of dark, often serious, works that people come to me with questions about but all of it. The lighthearted, the fun, the frivolous. Everything.

The right story can keep someone alive.

And, as we find more species using tools, language in dolphins, empathy in rats, liars among crows- fiction may be one of the few things that is uniquely human.

Manuscripts don’t burn. Because the effect they have on us, the things they leave us thinking and feeling, is something no regime can destroy. 

Disclaimer

[shrewreadings]

How to tell you are Old in Russian class.

You’re discussing The Master and Margarita.

Your teacher asks if you had a printed copy or a самиздат (samizdat) copy.

One of your classmates asks “Что такое ‘самиздат?’” Or, “What the hell is samizdat?!?”

Instructor responds by asking how the hell they got to 4th year Russian without knowing what samizdat is.

I answer “The same way she didn’t memorize how to decline tovarich. It’s 1999, and she started learning Russian in 1995.”*

Then I defined samizdat, and the rest of the class just stared.

Not, mind, at the idea of typing out a book to copy it….

But doing it on a typewriter.

With carbon paper.

And that having to do that to get at books that were, by their standards, incredibly uncontroversial, was such a fact of daily life in the then-former Soviet Union that they had a word for it.

Personally, I found it less surprising. Not because I’d encountered the idea in school in Fahrenheit 451, or grown up with hand-typeset zines,

But because Russian is the language that boils the chorus of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” down to a personal pronoun and a single word verb.**

It is also a language whose literature gave form to the statement, “Ideas are bulletproof.”

*I started in 1991. It’s astonishing how much Russian you forget when you’re not in class for 3 years.

** Я улечу. I am flying away, whether I am returning is unclear. The jet plane is understood. Personally, I think the imperfective scans better with the tune, but that’s a Steve Miller song.

[sabacc]

Happy Halloween by Art. Lebedev Studio [process]

[haxyr3]

Health and Beauty

The book title is “Vodka and Moonshine Treatment”

[mirkwoodest]

One of the ballsiest things Tolkien ever did was write 473k words about some hobbits called frodo, sam, merry, and pippin and then write in the appendices that their names are actually maura, ban, kali, and razal. 

[mirkwoodest]

This just in: Eowyn and Eomer’s names actually start with the letter “L.” [source for other nerds] 

[mirkwoodest]

#wait so they have hobbitish names and common names?

No, they have Westron names and English names.

What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us. 

There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign? 

“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”

Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down: 

In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder). 

“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing. 

“Banazîr” is Westron for “half-wise, or simple.” In Proto Germanic, the prefix “Sam” means half, and wise is obviously a word we still use. 

“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because  “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”

“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match. 

Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine. 

I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently). 

The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn”  is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss). 

“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L. 

The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron. 

The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.

Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud. 

Further Reading: 

Rohirric , Westron 

[sparklypurplerock]

Stuff like this is EXACTLY why I feel like there’s so much room for more diverse, inclusive reinterpretation of Tolkien’s work. Because if you look at the way Tolkien’s contemporaries translated real writings from real historical cultures, there’s a lot of assumption of whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity that isn’t actually in the text. Going with the concept that Tolkien was translating the mythohistory of an existing culture, it makes sense that a white Catholic Oxford don born in the Edwardian era would take for granted that all beautiful highborn people are white, all male relationships are platonic, all marriages are heterosexual, most people in conventionally male roles are men, and everyone is cisgender. So it’s totally in keeping with Tolkien’s premise, I think, to approach his Middle-earth writings like, “Okay, what could be the real story here as opposed to how a white English dude born in 1903 would have translated it?”

[afloweroutofstone]

[mirkwoodest]

Imagine the relationship between Pippin and Sam when they’re older and Pippin is the Thain and Sam is the mayor. Sam is moving up in the world and trying to take his job seriously but Pippin never stops being Like That.

[mirkwoodest]

Each time Sam and Pippin need to have a serious meeting about serious Shire business:

[mirkwoodest]

#don’t forget merry would be master of buckland while this was going on

[cursedwithgloriouspurpose]

My friend, on seeing carnival row trailer: Orlando Bloom went from legolas to daddy.

@antivanruffles

[kamibanani-archive]

@uminoko it's you lmao