"You have never talked to a mere mortal."

Ostania's normalest family

The next day, at a hastily thrown together birthday party at the Forger residence:

And I've finally narrowed in on what bugs me the most about that comment. it misses the most fundamental thing about The Lord of the Rings and Aragorn specifically.

Aragorn is The One True King. He is THE perfect monarch for Gondor and the Numenorean line. He will fix things ("The hands of the king are the hands of the healer"), he will reconnect not just the living but the dead and right old oaths that have been wronged.

Aragorn is the classical example of the king. Not an absolutist monarch, but someone who is meant to be good and do good for all in the kingdom.

"I never set out to write a treatise on medieval governance or the practical burdens of kingship. My work is a mythology an exploration of moral truth, not political mechanics. Aragorn is not meant to be a bureaucrat but an archetype: the just king of legend, much like Arthur. Myth is concerned with the heart of a ruler, not the tax policies of his court.

The question of governance in the modern sense belongs to another kind of story one that I entirely respect, but did not seek to write. Real history is indeed complicated, but myth speaks to deeper, older truths. Power in my world is already perilous; no one may wield it without cost. Even the wise refuse the Ring, for good intentions alone are never sufficient. In that sense, my work hardly denies the burden of rule it only treats it in a different language.

As for the orcs: they are not a people I delight in destroying. Their existence is a tragedy, a corruption of something that was once good. No just king would slaughter the innocent, for even in the darkest creatures there remains a spark of the original creation. Mercy is not weakness; it is the highest form of strength.

You ask questions proper to politics. I ask questions proper to myth. Both have their place, but they need not answer each other in the same terms."

Happy Birthday to Mary Anning, the “Mother of Paleontology!” Born on this day in 1799, she hailed from Lyme Regis on the coast of Dorset, England, and grew up collecting fossils. At age 13, she unearthed a skeleton of a giant marine reptile, one of the first ichthyosaurs. In her late twenties, she discovered Dimorphodon, the first pterosaur found outside continental Europe, on the beach cliffs at Lyme Regis. At the time, headlines celebrated Anning and her “flying dragon.” Her discovery proved that these flying reptiles were varied and had a wide range.