What are /r/Silmarillionmemes' favorite Products & Services?

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Suggestions: Find yourself a map of Beleriand (Fonstad's "Atlas of Middle-Earth is the best thing ever), also consult the family tree of Finwë when needed.

It's the whole tale from The Silmarillion, but expanded and told in actual story form instead of the history book-like way it's told in Silm. It's absolutely incredible, and the audiobook is narrated by Christopher Lee!

https://www.amazon.com/Children-H%C3%BArin-J-R-R-Tolkien-ebook/dp/B007978NKG?ref_=d6k_applink_bb_dls_failed

Here's a decent article explaining it: http://www.openculture.com/2018/05/j-r-r-tolkien-expressed-a-heartfelt-loathing-for-walt-disney.html

But tl;dr he didn't like that fact that Disney took the fairly-tale genre and morphed it into something only suitable for children.

While The Hobbit was originally a story told to his children, he doesn't dumb down any of the languages or themes to make them more child friendly.

His fear was that Disney would acquire the rights to his works and then dumb them down for children.

See "Dwarves Are Not Heroes": Antisemitism and the Dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien's Writing by Rebecca Brackman:

> I argue that "Dwarvishness" in The Hobbit involved several traits, recognizably drawn from antisemitic stereotypes, that, according to the narrator, exclude the Dwarves from the heroic ethos that is the hallmark of the book's value system. Tolkien's later recognition of this, perhaps, caused him to sharply alter his presentation of Dwarves in The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954-55, and to continue this revision in his later unpublished works.

For Brackman, Tolkien makes a conscious effort to revert the "negative" stereotyping into "positive' stereotyping after the Holocaust, but this isn't a proper 'fix' as it still flattens Jewish people to a mere image, or trope. This reading has been countered, but ultimately I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I don't think he was an avowed antisemite, but neither was he a perfect anti-racist.

Tolkien was a complex character, as anyone is, and while Tolkien is rightfully considered one of the greatest authors of all time, and I would argue idolizing him is to ignore his capacity to err as a human being and thus is patronizes him. His work is great enough to warrant real critique and interpretation.

There is a great Atlas from Karen Wynn Fonstad that Includes virtually every map about every place in Middle Earth with detailed description. It was even edited by Christopher Tolkien.

Heres a link to an Amazon page.

You can ofcourse buy different versions/not at Amazon.