Word: earthly
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Amid a constantly changing landscape, our guide Hossein led us up giant boulder-strewn hillsides and past juniper trees to the 2,500-m Tizi Mezik pass, only to drop sharply down again into a mineral-rich valley of red earth and terraced villages. The next morning - with a night's snowfall caking the red soil and pines - everything looked different again. As we hiked up a final ridge, muleteer Ali Baba (he assured us that was his name) used the opportunity to pelt everybody with snowballs, a prank I hadn't expected to experience in North Africa...
...larger homes and drive larger cars, always thinking that bigger is better. We drive Hummers to haul our supersized butts to the drive-through and then have the audacity to complain about the price of gas. The American Dream has become an environmental nightmare. As the greatest nation on earth, we should be leading by example. Bob Tiedeken, WAYNE, NEW JERSEY...
...Lord of the Rings and seen the movies and let it go at that. Then there are the hardcore - the Uruk-hai of Tolkien readers - who have delved further, into The Silmarillion and beyond, who seriously grok the deep history and elaborate geography and endless mystical genealogies of Middle Earth. Now there's a "new" work of Tolkien fiction called The Children of Húrin, cobbled together by Christopher Tolkien, son of J.R.R., out of manuscripts left behind by his dad. As it happens, it's got something for both of the Tolkien tribes...
...Children of Húrin is set in the First Age of Middle Earth, six and a half millennia pre-Frodo, back when Treebeard was barely shaving (Tolkien scholars will know that The Lord of the Rings takes place in Middle Earth's Third Age). The First Age has a different feel to it: it's younger and wilder somehow. The elves, distant figures in The Lord of the Rings, spend more time outside their secret spa-resorts mixing it up with mere mortals. When, in the midst of a huge battle, a balrog rears up and whips down...
...Alan Lee.) But once you surrender to the richness of Tolkien's vision, the immersive detail of it, the faux-archaic diction barely registers. Children, as a short work, never achieves the towering operatic grandeur of the trilogy, but it's a huge pleasure to be back in Middle Earth, and to see people and places that Tolkien only alludes to glancingly elsewhere. There's plenty of lore for the scholars and superfans, and there's no shortage of elves and dwarves and mighty smiting for the casual...