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It started with the HP and Baptist thing, but spilled over onto the fanatical homeschool thing.

Anyway, my wife just got home from NH and she brought a couple of presents. One was an old paperback copy of The Hobbit and the other was an old paperback of two Tolkien stories that I had never heard of, one of them was Farmer Giles of Ham(?) and I can't remember the name of the other one. I will post it when I get home and have the book in front of me.

Ever heard of that story before?

-Kevin

Yeah, Farmer Giles is kinda nice, if you've read Beowulf and such and know the sources. By the way, there was this link at TORn yesterday to some of Tolkien's sources - Kalevala, Beowulf, Nibelunging, the Eddas - that sort of thing - that was very interesting. I'd read Kalevala before, in a better translation than the online one. For one thing, the linked translation of Kalevala uses non-standard forms of the names, and it loses a lot of the rhythm of the original.

But my point is, if anyone has time, reading some of this stuff might be worthwhile. If you want to read Beowulf, though, go to the library and get the recent version (Seamus Henry or someone like that) that has the Anglo-Saxon and the translation next to each other.

my wife just got home from NH

Hi Kevin! Where in NH? My wife and I have recently started attending a wonderful little parish in Claremont, between Hanover and Keene on the Connecticut River. We've made some new friends, and are so taken with the area we've started looking at property.