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posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 02:55pm on 30/06/2002
I'm going to briefly revisit old news, especially for the benefit of my recently rediscovered old friends.

Back in December, I did my first turn as an "expert" on something, on the technology of Middle Earth for the Discovery Channel. You can see the website for it and the videos here. (I'm day three)

Also, in case you're a graduate student in a medieval subject, in the mood for applying to give a paper, Vagantes' second occurrence is coming up next spring, with an application deadline of October 1st for papers. Yes, a long ways off, but you're forewarned. Vagantes is co-sponsored by the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and Cornell University. It's a fun gathering and, even if you don't want to give a paper (or unfortunately are turned down), it's still worth attending. Based on last year, there should be a fair chunk of the audience not giving papers.
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posted by [identity profile] littleowl.livejournal.com at 09:06am on 03/07/2002
Dang:) I'd meant to watch that special and missed it what with one thing or another. I would have dropped my TV snacks all over myself with excitement if I'd seen you on TV;)

I like the commentary -- I hadn't thought about the books from that perspective before and it's quite interesting that there really is a blend of different levels of technology across the landscape of Middle Earth.
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posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 09:43am on 03/07/2002
Every months or so I still hear from someone else I know in Toronto, that they saw my 5 minutes on TV, so Discovery is still playing it, at least here. I don't know if it was ever played in the US. I'm happy you had a chance to see it! I had a good experience doing the interview - it took about an hour of actual talking, plus another 2 hours of getting random extra footage for it. So they had plenty of material to work with to boil it down to a few minutes. The research for it was good too: I had to do an emergency rereading of the books with something like 3 days warning. I hadn't read them since I was about 11 before that, but reading them with such a specific agenda made me pay so much more attention to the details.

My favorite observation which they didn't include in the clip: another way to tell Tolkein was writing at least post-1850 was that Bilbo has a wastepaperbasket. To have one of those, you need to be able to waste paper.

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