Dana, that is soooo cool! My LotR-geek co-worker went to the Howard Shore concert in Columbus on Friday, and said it was just fantastic. I think that his concerts are being restricted to just the music written by him, so they don't do Pippin's song or any of the Enya music from FotR.

Sumi, I haven't been back to see the Marquette exhibit since I graduated from there back in '88, and it's been expanded and showcased in the new library, I hear. I've been thinking about making a trip up there, maybe this summer--would you like to come with? I can show you some of the other nice stuff Marquette has on campus (a 14th-century chapel with very cool medieval artifacts inside, a decent art museum, and some pretty good restaurants nearby).

Cereal to add:

Sumi, did you see this over at TORN?

LECTURE: "Adapting Middle-Earth: Tolkien, the Books, and the Movies" by Thomas Shippey (St. Louis University), Saturday, April 3, 2004, 8:00 p.m., Gable Hall, Cavan Auditorium. Thomas Shippey is giving the lecture/ QA session on the campus of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb Illinois.

I might be tempted to go--Shippey's really interesting on both the DVDs and his books.

Yes, it's part of a conference here.

I think it's free.

Yes, it's free -- because it's part of the graduate colloquium series. Want to go?

Sure! Look for an insent in a few minutes!

Was it ever revealed how Denethor's wife died? I'm watching the TTT EE commentary and I was wondering.

Finduilas is born in 2950, marries at age 26, bears two sons 5 years apart, and dies in 2988, when Faramir is five years old and Boromir ten.

Appendix A has a thing to the effect of:

" But it seemed to men that she withered in the guarded city, as a flower of the seaward vales set upon a barren rock." (She was from Dol Amroth, on the south coast. Also, she was married to a kind of stodgy guy about 30 years older than she.)

I love that you know this on the fly. Thank you so much. This is, unfortunately, feeding my desire to write fanfic.

Ha ha ha! I do not know this on the fly. I have the book at my desk with earmarks where each of the appendices begins. One of the appendices is a book of years.

Not that I mind the misimpression that I am an all-knowing genius.

To feed your fanfic desires further, Strider was working under an assumed name in Gondor for most or all of the years that Finduilas was there. The chances are reasonable that they met (he was a general called Thorongil), and if you want to be really fanficcy, he could easily, timewise, be Boromir's or (more likely) Faramir's father. Not that Our Hero should automatically be cast as a huge slut and cuckolder of world leaders, but it's possible within the timeline.

Whoa.

That's...disturbing.

(And I love the book of years; I reread it every few months. I'm on spring break, though, and don't have the book with me. Besides, I figured someone would know...which they did.)

Imagine how that would start out though. wicked fucked up. I love it. (Though it messes with my perception of Aragorn/Boromir slash.)