3. Manwë, You’re Not My Dad!

All about Melian—queen of Doriath, fan of nightingales.

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Jared’s choice of topic: Melian. The wife of
one of the three original Elves in the legendarium, she herself is not an elf
but a Maia, one of the divine figures in that universe. So what exactly does
that make her? An emo kid with a fondness for dark forests? An alien figure
looking around at all the Children of Iluvatar that surround her? Or does she
really just like nightingales a lot?

Jared’s doodle this episode:
Melian.

Need to know more about Bryan Cogman? Here’s a recent Vanity Fair
profile.

C’mon, surely you know John Cho. But
if you need to know more about Daniel
Wu…

The Maiar hold an interesting role in
the legendarium. Another famous Maia: Gandalf!

The Lady of the Lake—not
just a Monty Python reference and joke.

Big Little Lies in Valinor could be a
thing, sure.

Meet cutes! You know
them even if you’ve never heard the term.

“Take My Breath Away”—for two
hundred years, though?

Game of Thrones and decapitation—it was a thing.

‘Amarth’ is ‘fate’ or ‘doom’ in Sindarin—thus an alternate name for Mount
Doom, Amon Amarth. Which a
Swedish band picked up on…

The Sidhe (pronounced
‘shee’) are not to be trifled with.

I still love that the original version of Sauron was, indeed, a big black cat
named Tevildo.

“My thoughts are not your thoughts,” aka Isaiah
55:8.

Not that we want to brush up on
totalitarianism if we didn’t have to, but here we are.

Nightingales! They like to sing, you see.

And yes, Keats sure had a
thing for
nightingales.

The Valar and gender—this essay also contains the passage Oriana reads.

Homosociality in Tolkien will
definitely be a subject for future episodes, trust us.

Like I say, read “Aldarion and Erendis” and the associated material for the
next episode if you can via a copy of Unfinished
Tales.

Revolutionary Road was
first a noted novel critiquing the then-just-departed American 1950s, then a
noted film some decades later. Either way, you want social, domestic and
romantic angst to the full? You got it!

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