Tag: Lord of the Rings
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The Sack-Pie Treaty of Mordor
I’ve been reading The Man Who Created the Middle East by Christopher Simon Sykes, a fascinating—and frankly bewildering—account of how a couple of diplomats, armed with little more than pencils, whiskey, and a vague sense of geography, managed to redraw an entire region. It’s the kind of history that feels so absurdly implausible that it…
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Aragorn, Paul and Luke
Aragorn is the archetype of feudal nostalgia, the Good King myth resurrected to keep the dream of divine right alive. A cipher for the eternal yearning for a fatherly hand on the sword and a just heart on the throne. In Aragorn, feudalism is psychedelic—his lineage the mystic bloodline that encodes the sacred geometry of…