Nuit silencieuse, nuit vagabonde.

À pas aveugles de par le monde, Leïb Rochman

Un magnifique livre acheté durant l’année et commencé il y a peu. À pas aveugles de par le monde est une oeuvre de la littérature yiddish et traite de l’après guerre, du retour dans sa ville d’origine, d’un retour dépaysant et difficile. D’un homme, S., qui erre dans un monde nouveau. 

J’en suis qu’à la page 152 (sur 857), mais je sens qu’il fera partie de mon top 3 de lecture estivale ! 

Beethoven Flashmob Mensa Heidelberg 

“Beethovens 9. Sinfonie in der zeugheus-Mensa. Am 5.2.2015 überraschten die Musiker vom Collegium Musicum Heidelberg mit einem Flashmob zur Mittagszeit die Besucher.”

“In 1913, the 21-year-old Ronald Tolkien should have been studying for his exams,” writes critic Elizabeth Graham. 

He was halfway through his Classics degree — the subject all the best students did at Oxford in those days. Getting admitted to Oxford on a scholarship was a great opportunity for young Ronald, an orphan who had always struggled to stay out of poverty. A Classics degree would have set him up for almost any career he chose. But he wasn’t studying. Instead, he was trying to teach himself Finnish.

Why would a brilliant student with so much at stake let himself go astray at such a crucial time? There were two reasons: love and the Kalevala.

That obsession with Finland’s national epic led Tolkien to produce his own version of one of its chapters, The Story of Kullervo, about a doomed, damned youth who inspired many of Tolkien’s own characters. 

It’s now in print for the first time, and you can find our review here.

Tolkien: So there’s Saruman the White, Radagast the Brown, and Gandalf the Grey.

Tolkien: Oh, and also Alatar and Pallando, the Blue wizards. 

Me: What? Who are they.

This Map Of Westeros Shows The European Equivalents Of The Seven Kingdoms

Still reeling from Sunday’s season 5 finale of “Game Of Thrones”? Understandable. It was brutal!

One mental exercise useful during every traumatic episode of the show or moment in George R.R. Martin’s book series, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” is to remind yourself that Westeros, and the people living there, are not real. It’s all fiction! Nothing happening on the screen or page actually happened to a living human.

This is easy, of course, when there are dragons or White Walkers on screen. Yet Martin has made it clear that he did use historical events, people and places as the inspiration for some of his world.

With that in mind, we at The Huffington Post decided to play a fun little game: If Westeros did exist, what real world countries would correspond to each of the Seven Kingdoms?