fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
The final chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, "The Breaking of the Fellowship," is broken into two parts: The first ends with Boromir falling to the temptation of the Ring while the second ends with Frodo and Sam heading out to Mordor as chaos rages behind them. These two passages lay out [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien was an academic with a vibrant interest in storytelling traditions and, because it was a lot easier for 13th century bards to remember rhyming stanzas than one long string of prose text, most of those traditions involve stories written in verse or performed as songs outright. Not content to merely translate and rewrite those existing verse [...]
For reasons that can best be described as “inexplicable,” my parents subscribed to both Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly while I was in high school. Neither periodical was a particularly good fit for my already-well-developed anti-establishmentarian artistic tastes and yet this was a time (for me, at least) before easy internet access and so, with few exceptions, I read [...]
Reading is an inherently independent activity so if there's anything unusual about my reading The Lord of the Rings every year, it's limited to the fact that I read The Lord of the Rings every year and not that I do so alone. Most years, after I finish that reading, I watch Peter Jackson's trilogy [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien was not known for his comedic stylings as evidenced by the fact that his work has been referred to as "dry" and "a slog." And yet the esteemed philologist was not without humor or the ability to turn an amusing phrase. The Lord of the Rings will never be mistaken for a comedy [...]
Before reading The Silmarillion, there are some questions that you should probably ask yourself: Do you know the basic stories of Gil-Galad and Beren One-Hand? Do you recognize names like Barahir, Grond and Fëanor and want to know more about them? Have you figured out, through context alone, what (fictional) words like dagor and ithil [...]
Like any self-respecting Nerdfighter who loves to read and is privileged enough to have disposable income, I signed up for a physical subscription to the Life's Library Book Club as soon as I learned about it. (For the uninitiated to whom the preceding sentence made precisely zero sense, a brief primer: Nerdfighters are, among other [...]
When asked to describe what kind of music his band plays, Andy Dwyer—the kindhearted lug played by Chris Pratt on Parks and Recreation—states that he "doesn't like to define" their sound but that they sound like Matchbox 20 and The Fray. "So ... rock," someone responds. "Well, again," explains Andy, "I don't really like to [...]
There is a spot along the southern wall of the Ann Arbor public library where the shelves wrap into an odd and isolated corner. There, on a shelf at right about eye level, you can find a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Farthest Shore. Or at least you could, for many years. I [...]
In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges—that miraculous, mind-fucking Argentinian—proposes an unusual premise. The titular Menard is shown to be obsessed with unusual literary feats and, as such, he decides to take it upon himself to rewrite Cervantes' classic, Don Quixote. He's not planning to translate the book or [...]
Songs & Stories 