Tiredness and trolls

Still under par and in need of sleep. I hate this. Still, I made the most of the day, tinkering a little on poems this morning, and so on. Reading books this afternoon, and sleeping again heavily. I finished off a book called The Idle Traveller, that Rosie got me for my birthday. Quite an interesting read, although the second half was mostly a retelling of ideas he had from reading other books. I also read The Story of Kullervo by Tolkien. I have a nice new first edition hardback of this from Anton as a kindly given birthday present.

The tale itself, based on Finnish folklore, is unfinished and uncorrected. So for example the same character has different names. It is the first draft of something that Tolkien decided wasn't worth finishing. Although it was a stepping stone towards later marvellous stuff and so for Tolkien completists is a must have. There are also two versions of the same talk he gave about Finish folklore, which is slightly more worked up in the second version, with important notes from the editor saying things like he spelled Litterature like that in the first version and then Literature in the second, etc.  It has made me want to revisit Middle Earth again through the Lord of the Rings book. It has been a long while.

Showed Charlotte a couple of poems I've been working on, and got some highly useful feedback. Robin posted on her site a something about reading from memory. Someone tweeted her to give her a hard time about being 'ableist', and not thinking how discriminatory she was being. I said to Robin, if being able to remember your poems is ableist (rubbish word) then every stage actor in the country must be too. Trolls aren't just found in Tolkien.



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