Recent content by Harnuth

  1. Harnuth

    Aragorn and Sleep

    Aragorn's sleep patterns might come from Tolkien's time as a soldier, where sack time can be a rare commodity. Soldiers learn to nap in the most surprising circumstances, even while marching. All those little 30-second catnaps count in clearing lactic acid from the brain. Even Thomas Edison...
  2. Harnuth

    Aragorn not approaching sooner

    My guess: Aragorn did not to attract attention by approaching the hobbits out on the public street, and he wanted to observe them before committing himself.
  3. Harnuth

    Field trip

    Game-play note: When you're doing a chicken run to Rivendell, the two most dangerous foes are two stealthy lynxes who attack from ambush: (a) next to the campfire, and then (b) just in front of the elves guarding the entrance to Imladris. You can see and avoid nearly everything else along the...
  4. Harnuth

    Field trip

    For the record: The adventure in question was a run from Bree to Rivendell on the Anor server. Anor is one of the two "legendary" servers, where characters are level-capped at 50, Moria has not yet opened, characters earn experience at only 65% of the normal rate, and you must be a current...
  5. Harnuth

    Cast vs. Forged Sword Blades

    Awesomeness! This video shows the technique I was talking about, although they did start with foundry steel. (Amusement: Crystal noticed that the Sauron costume appeared to be worn by a very mammalian woman, even before I did! Golly. I never though of Sauron as a gurl.) Good swords really...
  6. Harnuth

    Cast vs. Forged Sword Blades

    Before the invention of the blast furnace, smiths made steel by sprinkling carbon on the hot iron, then folding and banging away at it. Repeat to create multiple layers. That's how Damascus and Japanese steel swords were made as well as the Vikings' "Ulfberht" swords. And it looks like Al...
  7. Harnuth

    Cast vs. Forged Sword Blades

    This technical note could be more important to the Simfilm project than Exploring the Lord of the Rings, but I'm guessing this might be a good spot to post one of my pet peeves. It's something they kind of got right in LOTRO, and completely wrong in the films. In both The Lord of the Rings...
  8. Harnuth

    Who doesn't like hemlock umbels?

    Hmm, as I read it, that line describes the glade, not the trees... “The leaves were long, the grass was green The hemlock-umbels tall and fair And in the glade a light was seen, Of stars in shadow shimmering. Tinúviel was dancing there To music of a pipe unseen, And light of stars was in her...
  9. Harnuth

    Ceci n'est pas une pipe

    For what it's worth: I, too, believe that the correct interpretation of Tolkien's work is in the text that was published during his lifetime. We can only guess what he might have done with any other stories which existed only as drafts but were eventually published, edited by someone else...
  10. Harnuth

    Malory and the prefix "be"

    I have always been bemused and sometimes befuddled by that delightful word construction. A brief consultation with a German speaker whose native tongues are Dutch and Russian suggests that the English "be-" is primarily a shift in pronunciation of the German "ge-" that occurred after some...
  11. Harnuth

    Ceci n'est pas une pipe

    Yes. Until Corey mentioned the idea, it had never occurred to me that there might have been a real piper there. I had always imagined the scene to be of a girl dancing to music that existed only in her own mind.
  12. Harnuth

    Malory class -- Legends Summarized: King Arthur

    I agree; it was a very informative and entertaining survey in all the variations on the Arthurian legends. Her videos are rather like trying to drink from a fire hose, but a lot of fun!
  13. Harnuth

    What'cha reading?

    Oh neat! Steve Gould's "Jumper' is one my favorite SF stories. He's an Aggie, y'know. And of course I'm quite fond of "Fish Tank," bein's't'how I wrote it. (Anyone who might be interested can read it free if you have Kindle Unlimited. It's a hard-SF story; totally rivets.) Thanks for...
  14. Harnuth

    Hearth and Table will be offline for a while

    Addendum: We're back! The problem was a bad boot sector, which turned out to be irrecoverable. I ended up doing a low-level reformat on my hard drive and reinstalled Windows 7. See you on Landroval tomorrow night!
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