Episode 10 of The Forge of Tolkien, FALLING WIDE ASLEEP, is now available on #UATV.
What did Frodo mean when he said that returning to the Shire at the end of the hobbits’ journey through Middle-earth felt “like falling asleep again”? What kind of journey had the hobbits been on? In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown reads Night 61 of The Notion Club Papers, following Ramer as he describes his experiments with time-travel—and dreams. Ramer’s exercises are shown to have a curious similarity with T.S. Eliot’s invocation of time in Burnt Norton (1936):
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future.
Thereby raising the question of what Eliot and Tolkien had been reading about the nature of time. As a bonus, we learn what meteorites remember—and why it is dangerous to dream-journey without a guardian.
In other Unauthorized news, the first exclusive episode of The RazörForce Offensive, podcast is now live and available for listening or download to UATV subscribers.