Welcome to Litsy!

"Tolkien, serving as an Army signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers, was posted to France in June [1916] and saw himself in action on the Somme. In November 1916 he was invalided home with 'trench fever', a bacterial disease which almost certainly saved his life: before the war's end, his battalion was all but annihilated."

Although I'm now out from under, Skye is determined to be a book model today! #CatsOfLitsy

I've included a Chunkster Challenge for my 2026 reading, and I'm starting with this three-volume box set of Tolkien's poetry, with sage comments by scholars Scull and Hammond.

Across the three books, that's cxvi+1501 pages, so I'm unsure that I'll get to the other chunksters on my list, but it's the taking part that matters 🙂

Merry Festivus everyone! 🕯️🎁🎄🕯️

My #Christmas #BookHaul Pride of place to The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien, a three volume box set edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond ❤️📚❤️
Christmas Mouse was crocheted by my son, and has interchangeable clothes for year-round adventures. They look like a Clanger to me 🌛🌝🌜😊

@Gissy Thank you so much for the lovely Jolabokaflod gifts! This is a book I‘ve truly been looking forward to along with delicious chocolates, hot cocoa mix, bookmarks, ornaments, and this most adorable little cat calendar. I am headed to church now but will absolutely be perusing the sections of this book a bit when I get home later tonight.

#JolabokaflodSwap

Random book from our personal library.

It was a particularly stinky week IRL but there was still joy to be found.
1. While walking in the woods, I ran into someone I knew, and we noticed this sweet little flower next to the path.
2. The library held Tolkien Reading Day event with the editor of the tagged book.
3. The PetSmart cashier and I were both singing along with Bruno Mars on the PA.
4. I had shepherd‘s pie with Impossible “meat,” and it was delicious. ⬇️
#5joysfriday

This is a lovely little book, covering Kilby's stay with the Tolkiens in the summer of 1965, invited by JRRT to give him "editorial and critical assistance", and an impetus to focus on his authorial task at a time when age and the distractions of a fame to which he was ambivalent combined with a natural dilatoriness and a tendency for his interests to be "Like butter that has been scraped over too much bread". His personal impressions of ?

Next up, a memoir of Kilby's summer assisting JRRT with his Silmarillion materials, after which he was asked to read the manuscript prior to publication. Kilby's book was published 1976, the year before The Silmarillion, so his impressions will be personal & unaffected by its general & critical reception.
Kilby was an Inkling scholar, with several academic books about Tolkien, Lewis and the others, so I'm also expecting it to be well-considered.

Chiasmus: a figure of speech in which the grammar of two parallel phrases is inverted

#WeirdWordWednesday #WeirdWords #FellowshipOfTolkien #MedievalTolkien

From “Speech and Silence in The Lord of the Rings: Medieval Romance and the Transitions of Eowyn”

#FellowshipOfTolkien #MedievalTolkien