Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.
– Frodo, in The Return of the King
I recently reread The Lord of the Rings for the first time in over a decade. It is also the first time I’ve read the book since we moved from the US to Finland. This line, from Frodo to Sam before his departure from the Grey Havens at the end of the novel, was always a beautiful line, but it hit me harder now.
Eppu and I have always lived a life torn in two. Coming from two different countries on different continents, we always knew that to be together, one of us would have to be far away from the people, places, and things we have grown up with and loved. For many years, she was the one who was far from home, as we lived in the US for my studies and work. Since we moved to Finland a few years ago, now I am the one whose familiar places and people are far away.
You might think that the romance between the human Aragorn and the Elf Arwen would speak to me the most, but their love story plays out on the scope of high mythology, beautiful but too remote to relate to. The simple words of a Hobbit, wishing healing and hope to a beloved friend, struck my heart.
We cannot always be torn in two. Love makes us one and whole.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. Harper Collins edition, 1994, p. 1006.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
Bara bada bastu by KAJ is the song representing Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest 2025, and it’s been shaking things up in Sweden, Finland, and the Eurovision bubble as a whole. If you haven’t been following the run-up to Eurovision 2025, you may not know the story of Bara bada bastu and why it matters so much to so many people. Here’s a short introduction to get you caught up.
Finland, Sweden, and Swedish-speaking Finns
Finland and Sweden have a long and complicated history, grounded in the fact that what is today Finland was conquered by Sweden in the Middle Ages and ruled as part of the Swedish kingdom for centuries. Until recently, Finland was largely a poor and undeveloped area compared with metropolitan Sweden. The elite in Finland were traditionally Swedish transplants or had close social ties to Sweden. As a result, the typical Finnish stereotype of a Swede is a stuck-up, rich dandy, while the Swedish stereotype of a Finn is an uncultured, violent drunk. It is an old joke in Finland to say (of a hockey game, or some other equally serious contest) “I don’t care who wins as long as Sweden loses.”
Relations are not purely hostile. The two countries also have a history of cooperation and mutual support. Sweden supported Finland’s self-defense against and recovery from Russian invasion in World War II, and it has long been a commonplace that Finland is Sweden’s first line of defense. Despite this solidarity, there is still a lingering antagonism. When Finland and Sweden joined NATO in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, it was important to both sides that they join together. It was also important to Finns that Finland was accepted into the alliance first.
Caught in the midst of this sibling rivalry are the Swedish-speaking Finns. Finland has a minority population who speak Swedish as their mother tongue, mostly concentrated in the cities in the south and along the western coast and islands. They make up about five percent of the population. Some are descended from the old Swedish aristocracy, but most of them these days are just ordinary folks, not much different from other Finns. Because of this population and Finland’s historical ties to Sweden, Swedish is the second official language in Finland, and Finnish-speakers are required to learn Swedish in school (just as Swedish-speakers are required to learn Finnish). Many Finnish-speaking Finns resent this language requirement, and some turn that resentment against their Swedish-speaking neighbors. Swedish-speaking Finns are stereotyped in much the same way as Swedes: rich, snobby, and stuck-up. While Swedish-speaking Finns are subject to this sort of low-level resentment and caricaturing at home, they are practically invisible to the rest of the world. Even in Sweden, not everyone knows that some of their Finnish neighbors speak Swedish as their first language.
The Eurovision Song Contest
Leaving aside the world of frosty Finns and snooty Swedes for a moment, let me introduce you to the next thing you need to know about: the Eurovision Song Contest. The Eurovision Song Contest (commonly just called Eurovision) is an annual multinational extravaganza in which countries from around Europe and beyond (G’day, Australia!) compete in putting on musical performances. The exact format and rules have changed frequently since the contest was first held in 1956, but if you’re not up on Eurovision, here are the essentials you need to know.
Every participating country sends one stage act with a song (not longer than three minutes).
Every country chooses its competing act in whatever way it likes. Many production and performance teams are international, and while at least some members of the overall team usually come from the country they are representing, nothing requires the artists appearing onstage to come from or be in any way connected with that country. (Write this down! It’ll be important later!)
The participating acts compete against one another in two semifinals. The viewing audience votes a set number of acts from each semifinal into the four-hour grand final, where they join a small set of acts from countries who get an automatic place by paying the major costs of the broadcast (currently: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom).
After all the acts have performed in the grand final, two sets of votes are collated. In each participating country, a jury made up of music industry professionals awards points to their top ten favorite songs. The top song gets 12 points, the second 10, and rest from 8 down to 1. The viewing audience in each country also gets to vote on their favorite songs, with points awarded in the same way. (Neither juries nor audience are allowed to vote for their own country.)
The points are announced onstage in dramatic fashion, and the country with the most combined points wins.
Traditionally, the winning country each year hosts the next year’s contest, although exceptions are sometimes made (such as in 2023, when Ukraine won the contest, but because of the ongoing war, the runner-up, United Kingdom, stepped in as host).
The Eurovision Song Contest has been a venue for good-spirited competition between nations, using music to foster both national pride and international solidarity in much the same way the Olympic Games use sports. It has also created its own subculture with traditions, factions, customs, and quirks of its own.
One of the long-running truisms of Eurovision is that juries and audiences tend to favor different kinds of songs. Conventional wisdom says that juries like serious songs that demonstrate artistic virtuosity and range, while audiences like wacky stage hijinks, fun gimmicks, and a danceable beat. Neither assumption is entirely borne out by the voting results, but Eurovision acts often try to court one set of votes or the other. The way points are divided often means that a song that would have won on the strength of audience votes doesn’t win because the juries favor something else, sometimes to ire of some fans who feel their favorite was cheated.
Finland has traditionally done quite poorly in Eurovision. The country has only one win to its credit, 2006, when the monster metal band Lordi unexpectedly pulled off a win in what is seen as the audience rebelling against a contest they felt had grown stale with too much bland, predictable pop music.
Finland has become a semi-reliable source of audaciously weird contributions to Eurovision, most of which fall absolutely flat in the voting results, but which appeal to some parts of the audience by standing out against a background of highly-polished pop.
Sweden, on the other hand, is a Eurovision powerhouse, with a current total of seven wins to its credit. Highly-polished pop is Sweden’s Eurovision bread and butter, and they pull it off better than most other countries, earning frequent recognition from juries. Sweden is home to a major pop music industry, and Swedish composers, lyricists, and choreographers are frequently found working on other countries’ Eurovision entries.
Recent Eurovision history
With the stage set, we turn to the recent history of the Eurovision Song Contest to see how these deeply-rooted forces have played out to lead us to this year.
In 2012, the Eurovision Song Contest was hosted in Azerbaijan and won by the Swedish singer Loreen with her song Euphoria. While Euphoria leaned a little to the weird side for Sweden, it was still highly produced and sung in English, making it easy for an international audience to follow. Euphoria swept both the audience and the juries.
Sweden took home the trophy again just three years later in 2015, when Austria was hosting. The singer Måns Zelmerlöw won with his song Heroes. Like the usual Swedish entry, Heroes was an immaculate pop anthem with a clever stage show, but it caught the heart of Europe. While Italy and Russia did better in the audience vote, Heroes soared with the juries, and Måns’s telegenic charisma won over even those fans who didn’t place Sweden first.
The next year, 2016, Sweden hosted the contest. Måns returned to the stage not just as a performer but as co-host of the festivities along with comedian Petra Mede. The 2016 show was carried off brilliantly and established Måns as not just a beloved past winner but one of the contemporary faces of the contest. He reappeared in several following contests as part of the general entertainment and the interval acts that fill up time while votes are counted. (2016 also gave us Peace Peace, Love Love, a loving parody of the contest itself, performed by Petra and Måns.)
In the following years, Finland and Sweden continued their usual patterns. Swedish songs routinely scored well with juries, and Finland’s songs occasionally excited some fans while mostly ending up near the bottom of the vote tallies. Then came Käärijä.
Finland chooses its Eurovision act with a televised national contest called Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu (New Music Contest, abbreviated UMK). In 2023, a young Finnish rapper/singer known as Käärijä had a runaway victory at UMK with his song Cha Cha Cha and quickly became a sensation among Eurovision fans. Cha Cha Cha was a challenging song: unabashedly weird, sung in Finnish rather than internationally-friendly English, and reflecting in complicated ways on Finnish alcohol and dance culture, but something about it spoke to a wide and adoring audience in Europe.
Sweden selects its competitor with Melodifestivalen (Melody Festival, casually known as Melfest or Mello), a multi-week tournament of songs which finally crowns a winner after several rounds. In 2023, Loreen returned to Eurovision by winning Melfest with Tattoo, a smooth jury-pleasing vocal performance.
Going into Eurovision 2023 (hosted in the United Kingdom on behalf of Ukraine), Finland was in the strange position of audience favorite. The outpouring of fan love for Käärijä and Cha Cha Cha was unheard-of in Finland’s Eurovision history. It quickly became clear that Tattoo was also gathering momentum. In the final voting tally, Finland came out way ahead with the audience, but the juries showed Finland much less love and delivered the victory to Sweden.
The 2023 contest felt like an encapsulation of the Finland-Sweden relationship: Finland the scrappy, weird underdog went up against Sweden the polished, practiced former winner, and the juries swung for Sweden. In the days after the contest there was a lot of resentment from Eurovision fans who felt the juries had cheated Käärijä of a win and the audience of their favorite. Finns felt deflated, and losing to Sweden rankled especially hard. Unkind things were said. In time, tempers cooled, and Finns and Swedes got back to the usual routine of quiet mutual disdain.
The 2024 contest, hosted again by Sweden, did what it could to soothe tempers. The Swedish hosts (Petra Mede again and actress Malin Åkerman) had plenty of self-deprecating jokes about Sweden’s Eurovision obsession, and Käärijä himself performed in one interval act.
It was a turbulent contest, however. Protesters demonstrated against Israel’s participation, and there were rumors about the Israeli delegation at the contest harassing other performers. The biggest cause of discontent, however, was when the Dutch performer, Joost Klein, an audience favorite and one of the leading contenders for victory, was suddenly booted from the contest after an altercation with a camera operator. The details of the incident are murky, but it was widely seen as an overreaction by Eurovision’s governing body. The live audience at the event was vocal with its displeasure, and in the aftermath many Finns enjoyed some schadenfreude at Sweden’s expense.
When do we get to the sauna brothers?
We’re almost there! I promise!
Finally we come to 2025. This year, Finland selected Erika Vikman’s Ich komme (I’m coming) to represent the country. Ich komme is a pumping, upbeat song celebrating a woman’s sexual desire. Sexiness is no stranger to the Eurovision stage, but it traditionally caters to the male gaze. Ich komme, though plenty sexy, is very clear in being about a woman’s own joy in her body and does it without disparaging men, either, a novelty for Eurovision. After UMK, Ich komme gathered some positive buzz, and, while probably not a winner, looks like it may do well at the contest.
And then came this year’s Melfest. As usual, it was a smörgåsbord of well-known Swedish pop music talent, but the star attraction was the return of Måns Zelmerlöw. Måns competed with Revolution, another highly-polished pop anthem in the same spirit as his winning Heroes.
Other great names in Swedish music filled the roster, including John Lundvik, a former Eurovision contestant who came close to winning in 2019. And then there was KAJ.
KAJ is a Finnish comedy group made up of three Swedish-speaking Finns from one of the smaller municipalities on Finland’s west coast. The group takes its name from the first letters of its performers’ names: Kevin, Axel, and Jakob. Although they were locally popular, they were not well known even on the national stage, and were practically unheard-of outside of Finland. KAJ was invited to join Melfest by one of the festival’s producers, and the trio figured it might be a good way to increase their name recognition and maybe score a few more gigs in Sweden but without much hope of anything more. KAJ joined the contest with Bara bada bastu (Just having a sauna), a light-hearted but sincere tribute to the joys of relaxing in sauna after a long day, performed in their own regional dialect of Finland Swedish. KAJ and Måns went up against each other in one of the last rounds of the competition and both passed through to the final.
KAJ stood out from the other performers in the final. Surrounded by media-sexy pop stars and their slickly-produced English-language international hits, the performers in KAJ were self-consciously nerdy, unfashionably authentic, and the only contestants so gauche, so outré, so utterly unsophisticated as to show up to the Swedish song-selection contest and sing in Swedish! Yet the audience loved them! When the votes were counted (Melfest uses a voting system similar to Eurovision’s), it came down to KAJ and Måns. It felt like Käärijä and Loreen all over again: the weird, provincial Finnish nobodies singing a niche but heartfelt little song in their own language up against Eurovision royalty with a whole national pop music industry behind him belting out a focus-group-perfect anthem in English.
And then the impossible happened: KAJ won! The juries broke just barely in Måns’s favor, but the Swedish audience went for KAJ by a million votes, giving KAJ the most audience votes in Melfest history! In this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, Sweden will be represented by a little-known humor group from Finland!
(Måns was less than gracious about his loss. One might have forgiven him for a few unguarded comments in the heat of emotion after a tense contest, but in the weeks since the Melfest final Måns’s wife has announced a divorce with allegations of abuse and drug use that have tarnished Måns’s reputation. Many Swedes are relieved that he will not be representing them on the international stage, especially not with the bitter aftertaste of 2024’s contest.)
The effects of the win have been remarkable to witness. Coming after the rancor of 2023 and chaos of 2024, Swedes and Finns are finding a new spirit of Eurovision togetherness. KAJ’s win has gone some way to patch over old resentments and break down timeworn stereotypes. It has also brought some international recognition to the little-known Swedish-speaking minority in Finland.
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest will be held in Switzerland in the middle of May. We will see what the rest of Europe makes of Ich komme and Bara bada bastu. At this moment, the boys in the sauna are running strong for the top spot, and if they win, then for once Finns will be just as happy for Sweden’s victory as the Swedes are.
An occasional feature on music and sound-related notions.
We all know that the representation of people of different genders and races is imbalanced in popular media, but sometimes putting it into visual form can help make the imbalance clear. Here’s a chart of the Phase 4 movies of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe (Black Widow, Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)
Characters included
(Characters are listed in the first movie in which they qualify for inclusion under the rules given below. Multiple versions of the same character played by the same actor are not counted separately.)
Black Widow: Natasha Romanof / Black Widow, Melina, Yelena Bolova, Alexei / Red Guardian, Antonia Dreykov / Taskmaster, Dreykov
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Xu Wenwu, Ying Li, Xu Shang-Chi, Katy, Razor Fist, Xu Xialing, Trevor Slattery, Ying Nan
Spider-Man: No Way Home: Peter Parker / Spider-Man 1, MJ Watson, J. Jonah Jameson, May Parker, “Happy” Hogan, Ned Leeds, “Flash” Thompson, Stephen Strange, Otto Octavius / Doctor Octopus, Norman Osborne / Green Goblin, Flint Marko / Sandman, Curtis Connors / Lizard, Max Dillon / Electro, Peter Parker / Spider-Man 2, Peter Parker / Spider-Man 3
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: America Chavez, Christine Palmer, Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch
Thor: Love and Thunder: Gorr, Thor, Jane Foster / Thor, Valkyrie, Axl, Zeus
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: Shuri, Namor, Namora, Attuma, Ramonda, Okoye, Nakia, M-Baku, Everett Ross, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, Riri Williams / Ironheart
Rules
In the interests of clarity, here’s the rules I’m following for who to include and where to place them:
I only count characters portrayed by an actor who appears in person on screen in more or less recognizable form (i.e. performances that are entirely CG, prosthetic, puppet, or voice do not count).
The judgment of which characters are significant enough to include is unavoidably subjective, but I generally include characters who have on-screen dialogue, who appear in more than one scene, and who are named on-screen (including nicknames, code names, etc.)
For human characters that can be reasonably clearly identified, I use the race and gender of the character.
For non-human characters or characters whose identity cannot be clearly determined, I use the race and gender of the actor.
I use four simplified categories for race and two for gender. Because human variety is much more complicated and diverse than this, there will inevitably be examples that don’t fit. I put such cases where they seem least inappropriate, or, if no existing option is adequate, give them their own separate categories.
“White” and “Black” are as conventionally defined in modern Western society. “Asian” means East, Central, or South Asian. “Indigenous” encompasses indigenous peoples of the Americas, Oceania, Australia, and other indigenous peoples from around the world.
There are many ethnic and gender categories that are relevant to questions of representation that are not covered here. There are also other kinds of diversity that are equally important for representation that are not covered here. A schematic view like this can never be perfect, but it is a place to start.
Corrections and suggestions welcome.
Image: Diagram by Erik Jensen
In Seen on Screen, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
Cats (or at least most cats) may not like water, but this one might have kept an ancient sailor safe on the waves.
Scaraboid, photograph by The Trustees of the British Museum. Outline illustration and collage by Erik Jensen. (Found Naukratis, currently British Museum; 600-570 BCE; glazed composition) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The cat is part of the decoration on the underside of a small talisman found at the site of the ancient city of Naukratis in Egypt. Talismans of this type are called scaraboids because they are similar in shape and size to scarabs, but do not have the traditional scarab markings on their domed top.
The cat is a hieroglyph, one of three on the bottom of the object. Reading from right to left, the feather represents the sound i, the cat represents m (from the Egyptian word for cat, miu), and the sun disc represents n (from the word niut, meaning town or city, which the sun disc sometimes stood for). Put together, these hieroglyphs spell imn, a form of the name of the Egyptian god Amun. Many other scarabs and similar talismans from Naukratis contain forms of the name of Amun.
Amun was an important god in ancient Egypt, at times regarded as the king of the gods. Among his other functions, he was worshiped as a god of air and winds who protected sailors and other travelers on the sea. A talisman of Amun was an appropriate thing for an ancient sailor to carry around.
Naukratis is an interesting place to find a talisman like this. Naukratis was a Greek city founded inside Egypt by permission of the Egyptian kings. It was originally built as a home for Greek mercenaries serving in Egypt, but it quickly became a port for Greek and other foreign merchants who wanted to trade in Egypt. Most of the sailors who came through Naukratis were not Egyptians, yet there seems to have been a thriving trade in Egyptian and Egyptian-themed talismans, many produced in local workshops. It is likely that the intended customer for this scaraboid was not an Egyptian but a visiting Greek.
On one hand, the prominence of the cat on this talisman makes it seem like a bit of tourist kitsch designed to appeal to foreigners. Domestic cats were not yet common in most of the ancient Mediterranean, and Greeks associated them with Egypt. Including a cat in the talisman made it extra Egypt-y for a Greek audience. On the other hand, Naukratis amulets include many different hieroglyphic ways of spelling names of Amun, not all of which use cats or other specifically Egyptian symbols. Even if some pieces were made as tourist souvenirs, there also seems to have been a market for talismans referencing the Egyptian sailors’ god, even in a place where most of the sailors were not Egyptian.
This talisman and others like it are an interesting window into the multicultural world of Naukratis, where Greek sailors hoped for protection from an Egyptian god and cats were good protectors against the dangers of the sea.
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
My human paladin is sporting a particularly radiant transmog these days. It uses several pieces from the Shadowlands covenants mixed with some old armor that matches the blue and gold color scheme, with the Legion artifact for a weapon.
All put together, it makes a satisfying look for righteously smiting evil.
It’s an all too well-known trope that the past is drab. When we picture ancient or medieval buildings, we tend to imagine white marble or gray stone. This assumption of colorlessness spills over into fantasy as well. When we imagine the built environments of made-up lands, we tend to see a lot of white and gray there too, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus gives a fantastical description of the Median city of Ecbatana, modern Hamadan, Iran, featuring a series of concentric walls topped by brightly colored parapets:
This walled city is built in such a way that each wall is higher than the wall encircling it by only the height of its parapet, partly by the fact that it is built on a hill, but largely by design. All together there are seven circles, with the palace and treasury in the innermost one. The largest wall is about as long as the walls of Athens. The parapet of the first wall is white, the second one black, the third red, the fourth dark blue, and the fifth amber. The first five walls had their parapets painted in these bright colors, but the next was covered in silver and the final one in gold.
– Herodotus, Histories 1.98
(My own translation)
Now, Herodotus probably got this description wrong. It does not match up with the archaeological remains on the ground in Hamadan. Herodotus never saw Ecbatana for himself, but relied on second-hand reports, which likely got garbled in the telling. In fact, Herodotus’ description of Ecbatana as a hill covered by concentric rings of walls fits a bit better as a description of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. A ziggurat is a pyramid-like structure made up of a series of terraces built one on top of another, getting smaller as they go up. Seen from ground level, they might well look like a series of concentric walls ascending a hill.
Ruins of the ziggurat of Choga Zanbil, photocollage by Pentocelo via Wikimedia (Khuzestan Province, Iran; c. 1250 BCE; brick)
Ziggurats had been built in Mesopotamia for thousands of years by Herodotus’ day, primarily to serve as temples. While not many new ziggurats were being built in the time of Herodotus, older ones were being restored and rebuilt, so news of a freshly (re)built massive structure with impressive concentric walls may well have reached Greece. The brightly colored walls Herodotus describes are not too far-fetched, either. Ancient Mesopotamians decorated important buildings with colorful glazed tiles, which still retain some of their impressive coloring even today, as can be seen in the Ishtar Gate from Babylon.
Detail of the Ishtar Gate, with modern reconstruction, photograph by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin via Wikimedia (Babylon, currently Pergamon Museum, Berlin; 6th c. BCE; glazed tile and brick)
All of these things put together mean that Herodotus invented (albeit unintentionally) a fantasy version of Ecbatana flavored after a Mesopotamian ziggurat with colorful tiled walls. And if Herodotus could do it, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t do the same. Let’s see more fantasy cities with vibrant scarlet walls, turquoise roof tiles, or streets paved with lush green stone!
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.
The literary works of Agatha Christie and J. R. R. Tolkien may not seem to have much in common. One wrote murder mysteries set in genteel English country houses, the other high fantasy in a mythic secondary world. When you look at the themes and ideas of their work, though, interesting parallels appear.
The two authors were close contemporaries; Christie was born in 1890, Tolkien in 1892. They belonged to the generation whose young adulthood was shattered by the First World War. Their experiences were different—Tolkien saw battle firsthand as an officer, Christie its terrible aftereffects as a nurse—but they both reflect the shock of the war in their writing.
One theme that occupies both writers is death. Death was, naturally, a crucial element of Christie’s murder mystery stories. In Tolkien’s legendarium, death and the things people will do out of the fear of it is a running theme. But neither writer’s work is focused on death as a fact; rather, the underlying drive in their work is a search for some way in which death makes sense.
In Christie’s case, this theme is more obvious: she writes about detectives solving crimes. By the time we reach the drawing room summation at the end of the book, we can see clearly how and why the victim or victims died. Order is restored to the world, and reason triumphs over the illogic of death, whether that reason is embodied in a fussy Belgian’s love for methodical neatness or a wise spinster’s deep observation of human nature.
In Tolkien’s work, the drive to make sense of death is subtler. Death often appears pointless in Tolkien. Boromir dies defending Merry and Pippin from Orcs, but after he falls the young Hobbits are captured nonetheless. Denethor dies in despair instead of living to see his city saved. But the larger point of Tolkien’s work is that hopelessness is an illusion. We never know the end of our own story or how profoundly the choices we make will affect the world. In the legendarium as a whole, death is the greatest mystery, but also the greatest hope. The world of Middle Earth had a beginning and will someday end, yet the spirits of mortal beings will not end with the world but transcend it through death.
It is not just the death of individuals that occupied Christie and Tolkien, but also how ways of life come to an end. They both witnessed the end of the world, in a sense. The innocence and hope of the time they grew up in perished on the battlefields of the Great War, but they did not. They kept going and witnessed as the world around them changed.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is about the ending of an age, the Third Age of Middle Earth to be precise. The story takes place during the last days before the Elves either depart into the magical west or dwindle into creatures of fairy tale and folklore, taking their beauty and wisdom with them. Yet the story also carries hope for what is to come after in the ages of Men—hope without guarantees, as Gandalf puts it. The Elf Legolas and Dwarf Gimli reflect on the promise and weaknesses of humans in the streets of Minas Tirith:
“If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.”
“And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,” said Gimli. “It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”
“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas. “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.”
– The Lord of the Rings. Book 5, Chapter 9, “The Last Debate”
Christie reflects the changing world in different ways, but also with hope for what the future will bring. Her early works are set in the interwar world of country estates and garden parties that we typically think of when we think of a Christie mystery, but that world was ending. She kept writing through the fifties and sixties as the life and culture of Britain changed around her.
The traces of this change are all over Christie’s writing. One of the ongoing themes in her mysteries is that it is difficult to know who people really are. Many of her plots hinge on people passing themselves off as or being mistaken for someone else. Such impersonations were possible only because the world of country villages and garden parties where everyone knew one another was ending. Miss Marple speaks of this shift in A Murder is Announced:
Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house—and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys … They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already.
…
But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come—and all you know about them is what they say of themselves.
– A Murder is Announced. Chapter 10, “Pip and Emma”
At the same time, Christie also saw that the fundamentals of human nature that underlay her stories were not changed by the passing of time. People might live differently, but they still had the same jealousies and aspirations, desires and fears as they ever had. Miss Marple, again, reflects on this fact in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side as she explores the new housing development at the edge of her beloved village:
She turned out of Aubrey Close and was presently in Darlington Close. She went slowly and as she went she listened avidly to the snippets of conversation between mothers wheeling prams, to the girls addressing young men, to the sinister-looking Teds (she supposed they were Teds) exchanging dark remarks with each other. Mothers came out on doorsteps calling to their children who, as usual, were busy doing all the things they had been told not to do. Children, Miss Marple reflected gratefully, never changed. And presently she began to smile, and noted down in her mind her usual series of recognitions.
That woman is just like Carry Edwards—and the dark one is just like that Hooper girl—she’ll make a mess of her marriage just like Mary Hooper did. Those boys—the dark one is just like Edward Leeke, a lot of wild talk but no harm in him—a nice boy really—the fair one is Mrs Bedwell’s Josh all over again. Nice boys, both of them. The one like Gregory Bins won’t do very well, I’m afraid. I expect he’s got the same sort of mother…
She turned a corner into Walsingham Close and her spirits rose every moment.
The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they had always been.
– The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Chapter 1
Some days now it feels like we are living through the end of the world we knew, and none of us knows what will come next. In these times, there is comfort in going back to writers who lived through the end of one world and saw that there was hope in the next.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 855.
Christie, Agatha. A Murder is Announced. London: HarperCollins, 2023, pp. 132-133.
Christie, Agatha. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. London: HarperCollins, 2023, pp. 13-14.
Image: Photo collage of Agatha Christie and J. R. R. Tolkien by Erik Jensen. Photograph of Christie via Wikimedia; photograph of Tolkien via Wikimedia
Post edited to correct formatting errors
Story Time is all about story-telling and how stories work, and what makes us love our favorites.
Happy New Year, everyone! We’ve closed the lid on 2024. Time to sit and reflect for a moment on the year that was.
Here’s a look at the posts we wrote in 2024 that got the most views from all of you:
News on the Murderbot Screen Adaptation, with Thoughts. Nothing got a bigger audience this year than Eppu’s reflections on what we knew at the time about the upcoming tv adaptation of Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries, about the self-named killing machine who would actually rather just be left alone to watch media.
Trailer for Megalopolis, with Thoughts. Eppu was underwhelmed by the trailer for Francis Ford Copola’s sci-fi man-epic. Given how the movie came and went with little visible effect on the public consciousness, it looks like she wasn’t alone in that feeling.
A Homebrew Alchemy System for Dungeons & Dragons. Erik’s attempt at homebrewing an alchemical crafting system for tabletop role-playing. We hope some of you have found it useful in your own games.
Train Like a Spartan. Erik’s review of what we know about how the ancient Spartans trained themselves for war—which may not be quite what you would expect.
It’s been a pleasure to share our thoughts and ideas with you again this past year. We hope you’ve enjoyed it as well. May the new year bring you lots of new and interesting things to enjoy!
Co-Geeking 
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