New Year, A Fresh Start

Happy Belated New Year from The Tales That Really Matter

George Washington rallies his men for a counterattack against the British at the Battle of Princeton, January 3 1778, by Don Troiani. 6’2” with piercing blue eyes, and an excellent horseman, Washington “could have walked in Numenor and not have been thought an alien save in his clothes and his arms” to paraphrase Unfinished Tales and The Fall of Numenor. ©2007, Don Troiani

Well, friends, we made it. Three full years, plus a couple of days, at The Tales That Really Matter. And it’s honestly at least partially in spite of my best efforts.

I went into 2025 with a lot of high hopes, even if my plans for the year were a lot less grand than they were for 2024. I had just come off a fairly successful year, even if many of my plans hadn’t come to fruition. I had a bit of help on that score from Britbox and Amazon, which released Murder Is Easy starring Morfydd Clark and Season 2 of Rings of Power respectively; I had a lot to work with, even before the latter officially premiered at the end of August. I was able to put out a revised version of an older essay on some of the great women of Middle-earth, a takedown of one of the most common Tolkien misquotes that’s frequently used to slander RoP a Season 1 retrospective, a lengthy essay about how Galadriel’s actions vis-a-vis Sauron are a credit to her character, numerous interview roundups, and trailer and episode breakdowns for each of the season’s 3 trailers and 8 episodes. It was a very productive year, and 2025 looked like it would be another such.

Unfortunately, January came around, and it hit me hard. There are a few reasons for this. I’d passed the halfway mark in the Masters program, and it was just about this time that suddenly everything started getting a lot more intense, even more than I’d experienced thus far. Not to mention, December had ended with my biggest reversal since college, a 67% on that current course’s final paper (the topic I had to write on was too broad, and it was probably the most significant instance of me BS-ing my way through it), so I had that blow to my morale hanging over me as I entered the final stretch. Something similar happened in my personal life, honestly; or more specifically, within my Tolkien life. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but suffice it to say, towards the end of January some things happened that triggered a bit of an existential crisis. Suddenly, so much of the joy that I had found in writing for this blog was gone almost at the snap of a finger, and for a couple of moments I sincerely considered completely scrapping my entire operation: Substack, social media, my Tolkien bookshelf, my hopes to one day meet Morfydd Clark, everything. Don’t worry, I was never in any serious physical danger, or real long-term mental trauma; I made it through. But what happened in January definitely cast a long shadow over my joy in Tolkien.

“Yet suddenly for Faramir his [Pippin’s] heart was strangely moved in a feeling he had not known before…He knew now why Beregond spoke his name with love. Here was a captain men would follow, that he would follow, even under the shadow of the black wings. ‘Faramir!’ he cried aloud with the others. ‘Faramir!’” ©2025, Vatican Media

But I’m glad I didn’t end up following through. For this, I cannot express enough thanks to the several people who I have met over the course of my Tolkien experience who have become some of my dearest friends, and who helped me keep my spirits up and assured me that I still had something to offer to the conversation. And as winter faded into Spring, life finally began to be breathed back into my Tolkien spirit. The official renewal of Rings of Power for Season 3 was a massive boost to my morale, as it was to many others’. So too was the election of Pope Leo XIV to succeed Pope Francis of blessed memory; seeing him give his first speech on the balcony of St. Peter’s, I felt the same way as Pippin did in the books when he first meets Faramir, and I’ve never completely lost that feeling. The three year anniversary of Season 1 of RoP came, and as I began a rewatch (probably my eighth so far?) I was reminded anew of why I fell in love with this world in the first place. Subsequently, I had to put that on a long hold while I finally completed my Masters, but once that was done, I was able to rediscover my joy in it…through the somewhat unexpected medium of experiencing Stranger Things for the first time. While my long-form output here still was sub-par (only a three articles in a whole year is not ideal), at least I never gave up and scrapped this entire Substack, like I did to my old History one that I started around the same time as this one but which subsequently died from neglect, basically. And I was still able to keep up my output on social media. To the point that even with my varying degrees of neglect, I’ve actually grown across all platforms. As of this writing, I have 391 followers on Instagram, 87 subscribers to the blog (this last one makes me chuckle, given how I’ve done almost nothing this year to deserve it), and 375 followers on Facebook; indeed, the performance of many of my posts to the last platform, mostly the ones involving news about Morfydd Clark or her trademark nuggets of wisdom, have done exceptionally well in the second half of the past year. As Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn 99 once put it, “Two steps forward, one step back, is still one step forward.” I’ve literally put this to the test, and it checks out; walking is just much slower this way, but you are still moving forward

Although our beloved Morfydd Clark was extremely absent from the public eye for much of 2025, things did improve a bit around August, and we finally saw more of her throughout the fall. This was taken at her most recent public appearance, the Women in Film Awards last December; she is as beautiful as ever 🥹🥲🥰 ©2025, Simon Ackerman

So, with the publication of this essay, and the start of a new beginning, what am I hoping to accomplish here this year?

• Obviously, Rings of Power will almost definitely be releasing its third season later this year, probably around the Labor Day weekend; that’s when both previous seasons have premiered in years past, and it’s been quite a lucrative weekend for them. So I will do my utmost to cover Season 3 as I did Season 2, with trailer breakdowns, interview compilations from SDCC (if the show makes an appearance there) and elsewhere, and episode recaps (last time I called them reviews, and that’s how they started for the premiere, but by the fourth episode they were just recaps).

• Before that happens, of course, there is some unfinished business from Season 2. Chiefly a retrospective on Season 2 as a whole, a character defense of Galadriel in the season, my own thoughts on the controversial but actually beautiful scene of her and Elrond’s kiss in “Doomed to Die”, and probably a special interview compilation from when Morfydd and Sam Hazeldine made an unlikely but quite delightful pairing just before the season premiered. Those are the highest priority; if I have time before Season 3 is upon us, I may also visit the characters of Elrond and Adar.

• One of the reasons I ended up falling in love with Stranger Things is that, despite being quite a different show than RoP, it ends up dipping into the same “cauldron of story” and shares some similar plot and character beats and many of the same themes and ideals as the Amazon show. That’s something I will want to explore at length. I’m not sure when I would release it, to celebrate the official confirmation of who Jamie Campbell-Bower aka Vecna aka Henry Creel aka One aka Mr. Whatsit, to tie in with the Tales from ‘85 animated spinoff series, or just because it’s ready and I want to send it out. We’ll see.

• One of the first Tolkien books I read last year as I crawled out of my January blues was the classic biography by Humphrey Carpenter. Somewhat dated, a little bit scorned by more recent scholars such as Holly Ordway or John Garth, it still remains in my view the best introduction to the man who made this all possible; an easy read, insightful, fair, and affectionate. I’ve been wanting to write about it for a while, this is probably going to be the year I do so.

• This May will be the 110th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, where Tolkien’s fellow TCBS Christopher Wiseman fought aboard the battleship HMS Superb; meanwhile, July will be the 110th anniversary of the Somme, where Tolkien himself fought. Honestly, as good a time as any to offer my thoughts on the aforementioned John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War, another excellent work of Tolkien scholarship by one of our finest living Tolkien scholars.

• I’m really late to the party, of course, but I do still have a mind to watch War of the Rohirrim, which came out in December of ‘24. I have…thoughts about it, both on its own merits and on how the fandom and Warner Brothers have treated it. But I can’t really talk about something I haven’t seen, can I?

• And at least in theory, in May of this year, filming will begin on the first live action theatrical movie since 2014, The Hunt for Gollum. Or as I affectionately refer to it as, The Hunt for Nostalgia or Gollum Eating Babies. As you might guess from those titles, I am not particularly enthused about this project, either on its own merits as we know them, on the attitude of the fandom, or on how WB continues to mishandle the Tolkien IP. But that’s a story for another time, hopefully this year.

And, of course, those are all just my new plans, hopes and dreams; hopefully, I haven’t given myself too much to chew. A lot of the old things that I’ve done this year have clearly been popular, as can be seen by my slow and steady growth across my platforms. So of course, those will continue to happen. And this corner of the internet will continue to be a haven for anyone and everyone who loves Tolkien, adaptations of his world that are faithful to his themes and ideals even if it seems that everyone else hates them, real-world history that I can tie into the legendarium, the real-world counterparts of the many surprising animal friends who show up in his works, and Morfydd Clark who so wonderfully brings the Galadriel of Unfinished Tales, The Silmarillion and the Letters to life. All of these things bring me joy; I know that now, after a time in the wilderness. And I hope that as I continue to explore them and discuss them, you all will also find joy, both old friends and new adventurers. As The Stranger from RoP (whom we know know to be Gandalf, in his pre-Third Age form as Olorin) says at the end of Season 1, “Now adventures, they must be shared”; in the short term his favorite traveling companion Nori has gone her separate way, but hopefully the two of them will be able to reunite. We’ve come a long way together, my friends, and I’m sure there is further to go. And I look forward to us sharing this journey together. If you are praying folk, I’d appreciate your prayers as we step into the new year.

As I've written about in the past, I was once in Eleven's position in this meme; although I'd also read the Trilogy and The Silmarillion, I still tended to miss the importance of Galadriel. It was RoP and Morfydd's Galadriel who first showed me how much MORE there was to the character and who pointed me in the right direction, and for that I am so grateful. ©2019, Netflix

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