Frodo and the Ring

 Still immersed in homeschool planning and making good progress, I may add!  I have already blocked out the year for the two younger boys and am working out the courses for the high school senior.

I just wanted to take a moment to express the deepest gratitude to Tolkien for having Frodo fail to resist the Ring's power at the last moment!

I was listening to this excellent podcast from the Aquinas Lecture series:   Fr Albert Trudel on Tolkien.    He mentions that Tolkien got a lot of letters complaining about this.

I had sort of a terrible vision of how THAT would have worked.   I am still shivering in horror.   I am interested in how Tolkien answered those letters.  I know from reading Flannery O'Connor's letters several times over the last three decades what she thought of people who misunderstood her work so catastrophically.  An example is here.

In our reading life this summer, we finally got to the end of The Two Towers.   We have a new summer tradition, Paddy and I, of sitting out on the deck to read when it is not too hot or too cold.    The readings are often interrupted by nature sightings as various members of the avian and sciuridae clans appear hoping to eat seeds from our railing.  Their behavior is endlessly interesting and sometimes interferes with the drama of the book but I am OK with that because I plan to read the series every 2-3 years to Paddy until he gets a driver's license in self-defense.

I haven't been listening as much to podcasts because of the intensive planning, and because Kevin is home from Oregon, so I have been going on walks with him rather than alone.