Tea at Trianon: Glorfindel Explained

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, January 27, 2022

Glorfindel Explained

I always thought that there were two Glorfindels but it seems there was only one. From Gamerant:

Glorfindel was born in Valinor during the Years of the Trees, which is the name for the period of time between the founding of Valinor and its Darkening, when it was lit by the light of the Two Trees while the rest of Middle-Earth was still in the Great Darkness. During the First Age, he was appointed the Lord of the House of the Golden Flower, which was one of the noble houses of the Elven realm of Gondolin. Glorfindel was a captain of the king and greatly beloved by the Gondolindrim.
In the year F.A. 510, Morgoth (the being that represented the ultimate evil in Middle-Earth) attacked Gondolin. Glorfindel was able to make it out with another group of survivors of the Fall of Gondolin, until they were attacked by a group of Orcs led by a Balrog at the pass of Cirith Thoronath. Glorfindel fought the Balrog and managed to slay it, but the creature grabbed him by the hair at the last second and sent them both tumbling into the abyss together. Thoronath, the Lord of Eagles, retrieved Glorfindel's body and returned it to his people, who buried him on the mountains that surrounded Gondolin. (Read more.)