The Library of Babel

The Universe (which others call the Library) is what we're after here.

[The Library of Babel @Library_Babel1]

The Story of Layla and Majnun – Romeo and Juliet of the East

A thread

[The Library of Babel @Library_Babel1]

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Napoleon's Favorite Poet was Actually a Sophisticated Literary Hoax (Thread) 🧵

[The Library of Babel @Library_Babel1]

Macpherson didn't invent the literary hoax he was engaged in. Pseudepigraphy—attributing a text to a much older source, usually a famous person supposed to have written the newly discovered text—is an ancient practice. Nonetheless, Macpherson was very successful in his hoax—perhaps the most successful literary hoax of the modern age. To this day, you can find scholars and lay readers who maintain that the poems are mostly authentic. Some, in an effort to rescue Macpherson's tarnished reputation and rehabilitate him as a great poet, go so far as to claim that the authenticity of Ossian's poems is irrelevant.

[The Library of Babel @Library_Babel1]

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[The Library of Babel @Library_Babel1]

For J.R.R. Tolkien, It Was Always About Writing the Perfect Fairy Tale (Thread)🧵

[The Library of Babel @Library_Babel1]

We usually talk about Tolkien’s mythology or Legendarium (a collection of legends)—and that is understandable. Tolkien himself used these two words interchangeably when discussing his life’s work.

What we don’t talk about often enough, however, is the fairy-story. Tolkien might have believed that his mythology was the centerpiece of his work, but it’s the novels that are ultimately the entry point for even the most devoted fans.

These novels are not—at least not in Tolkien’s mind—fantasy books (or High Fantasy, a term that didn’t exist when Tolkien published his second great novel in 1954), but rather great and elaborate fairy-stories.