# Homeschooling With Tolkien



## 1stvermont (Aug 7, 2021)

We homeschool two of our kids aged 14 and 11. The best part of homeschooling is I can force them to read everything I want them to, watch any movie I want them to, and study any subject I want them to. They both have read the hobbit and the 14 year old will start LOTR soon. Yesterday I got the idea to have them memorize a famous section from each of his books. I have the quotes for the hobbit and LOTR, but what about the Silmarillion?

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”​

“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,​Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,​Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,​One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne​In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.​One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,​One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.​In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”​


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## Miguel (Aug 8, 2021)

_"Not until the Sun passes and the Moon falls shall it be known of what substance they were made. Like the crystal of diamonds it appeared, and yet was more strong than adamant, so that no violence could mar it or break it within the Kingdom of Arda."_


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## Ealdwyn (Aug 8, 2021)

Be he foe or friend, be he foul or clean,
brood of Morgoth or bright Vala,
Elda or Maia or Aftercomer,
Man yet unborn upon Middle-earth,
neither law, nor love, nor league of swords,
dread nor danger, not Doom itself,
shall defend him from Fëanor, and Fëanor's kin,
whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh,
finding keepeth or afar casteth
a Silmaril. This swear we all:
death we will deal him ere Day's ending,
woe unto world's end! Our word hear thou,
Eru Allfather! To the everlasting
Darkness doom us if our deed faileth.
On the holy mountain hear in witness
and our vow remember, Manwë and Varda!

(although strictly it's not in that form in the published Sil)


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## 1stvermont (Aug 8, 2021)

Ealdwyn said:


> Be he foe or friend, be he foul or clean,
> brood of Morgoth or bright Vala,
> Elda or Maia or Aftercomer,
> Man yet unborn upon Middle-earth,
> ...



Perhaps a bit long, they are already complaining about the ones I gave them lol.


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## Olorgando (Aug 8, 2021)

I take it Bilbo's "Eärendil was a mariner" in "Fellowship" book two, chapter one "Many meetings", is a bit off-scale then ... 🥵


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## 1stvermont (Aug 8, 2021)

Olorgando said:


> I take it Bilbo's "Eärendil was a mariner" in "Fellowship" book two, chapter one "Many meetings", is a bit off-scale then ... 🥵



I am reading through LOTR and i am at many meetings as we speak.


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## Olorgando (Aug 8, 2021)

1stvermont said:


> I am reading through LOTR and i am at many meetings as we speak.


From at least one of the JRRT commentators that I've read, "Eärendil was a mariner" was JRRT's tour-de-force in alliterative verse - at least in what was published in his lifetime.


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## Ealdwyn (Aug 8, 2021)

What about:
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.

or
Now the Children of Ilúvatar are Elves and Men, the Firstborn and the Followers. And amid all the splendours of the World, its vast halls and spaces, and its wheeling fires, Ilúvatar chose a place for their habitation in the Deeps of Time and in the midst of the innumerable stars.

or
Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

or
Then hate overcome Fëanor's fear, and he cursed Melkor and bade him be gone, saying: 'Get thee gone from my gate, thou jail-crow of Mandos!' And he shut the doors of his house in the face of the mightiest of the dwellers of Eä.


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## 1stvermont (Aug 8, 2021)

Ealdwyn said:


> What about:
> There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
> 
> or
> ...



I am seriously considering feanors statement, jail-crow of Mandos, love it.

I was thinking when my kids learn Quenya and Sindarin will a college accept those as two foreign languages?


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## Goldilocks Gamgee (Aug 9, 2021)

1stvermont said:


> I was thinking when my kids learn Quenya and Sindarin will a college accept those as two foreign languages?


Who are you going to have them learn that? Like, I'm not aware of anything that can teach one to.
About the quote, this one is quite a favorite of mine:
“But Fingolfin gleamed beneath it as a star; for his mail was overlaid with silver, and his blue shield was set with crystals; and he drew his sword Ringil, that glittered like ice.”


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## Olorgando (Aug 9, 2021)

1stvermont said:


> We homeschool two of our kids aged 14 and 11.


This immediately made me think of something I had read in two separate books: Joseph Pearce's 1998 _Tolkien: Man and Myth_, and Tom Shippey's 2000 J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (in which Shippey quotes Pearce). What got the anti-JRRT critics hopping like water droplets on a red-hot electric hot-plate was a Waterstone's poll (a leading British bookshop chain) in 1996 (together with a BBC channel four - usually meaning quality programming) about the five greatest books of the century. The hotplates got hotter, and the water droplet "critics" jumped all the madder as poll after poll afterwards confirmed LoTR's victory.

Shippey makes one point that (at least in the late 1990's in the UK) there was one difference between LoTR and its runners-up:

"... the leading places after [LoTR] were taken by Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ and _Animal Farm_, and Salinger's _Catcher in the Rye_, with Golding's_ Lord of the Flies_ not far away: all very familiar school set texts, routinely taught and examined, and for the most part comparatively short. The Lord of the Rings is however rarely if ever set as a text in schools or universities. Apart from the dislike of the educational establishment, it is too long, at over half a million words. The following it has acquired has all been the result of personal choice, not institutional direction."

Now what little (very little) I know about home schooling is what I (mainly) gleaned from comments by a member of another JRRT site, who home-schooled all three of her sins successfully. But success meant her sons passing state tests, or at least not far below that level.

What Pearce and Shippey mention is

a) at least twenty years ago, and 
b) UK schooling, not that of the US (states).

I do have a vague feeling that the US educational establishment has been more laid-back in its reception of JRRT's works than the snobbishly tied-into-knots UK one (at least of years gone by). But have JRRT's works actually worked their way into US educational canon where you live that your pushing them to read them helps them in their education, in the ultimate sense of passing tests? We JRRT nerds here would certainly agree that his books are very worth reading. But educational bureaucrats have the ultimate say on such things ...


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## 1stvermont (Aug 9, 2021)

Goldilocks Gamgee said:


> Who are you going to have them learn that? Like, I'm not aware of anything that can teach one to.
> About the quote, this one is quite a favorite of mine:
> “But Fingolfin gleamed beneath it as a star; for his mail was overlaid with silver, and his blue shield was set with crystals; and he drew his sword Ringil, that glittered like ice.”



it was more a joke. 

Nice quote i shall consider it thanks.



Olorgando said:


> This immediately made me think of something I had read in two separate books: Joseph Pearce's 1998 _Tolkien: Man and Myth_, and Tom Shippey's 2000 J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (in which Shippey quotes Pearce). What got the anti-JRRT critics hopping like water droplets on a red-hot electric hot-plate was a Waterstone's poll (a leading British bookshop chain) in 1996 (together with a BBC channel four - usually meaning quality programming) about the five greatest books of the century. The hotplates got hotter, and the water droplet "critics" jumped all the madder as poll after poll afterwards confirmed LoTR's victory.
> 
> Shippey makes one point that (at least in the late 1990's in the UK) there was one difference between LoTR and its runners-up:
> 
> ...



I have not heard of LOTR being used as a textbook in the US, but then I have not looked for it either. I am also just as unsure of how it was received compared to the UK. I have heard of Narnia being used in schools and I believe the hobbit. LOTR is just too long .

As for government schools in the US they are awful. The cost allot and perform low, I am a shining example of government education failures  Hoemschool kids regularly test better [testing should not be the judge of education] and the cost is incomparably cheeper.


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## ArnorianRanger (Aug 9, 2021)

I feel that if quotes are to be memorized from any of Tolkien’s works they should be ones that are applicable to day-to-day life, as otherwise it is mainly esoteric knowledge. I once visited a homeschool co-op and my biggest critique of it was that literature that was memorized was so often empty knowledge. It sounded cool and it looked good on paper, but in reality it had no weight in helping someone later in life.

And that’s not a critique of what you are doing 1stvermont in any way; I grew up in a homeschooling environment (and in many ways still live in one if learning is continuous throughout life, ha ha) and was quite fond of it. It is just my personal opinion and observation that if things should be memorized, they should bear some applicability to life; for example, Gandalf’s golden conversation with Frodo when the former tells the latter to not be so quick to mete out death. And perhaps less helpful but still quite applicable, “The road goes ever ever on…”. 
Specific quotes from The Silmarillion aren’t coming to me but there are certainly plenty of life lessons to be had in there too.

Thanks,

ArnorianRanger


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## 1stvermont (Aug 10, 2021)

ArnorianRanger said:


> I feel that if quotes are to be memorized from any of Tolkien’s works they should be ones that are applicable to day-to-day life, as otherwise it is mainly esoteric knowledge. I once visited a homeschool co-op and my biggest critique of it was that literature that was memorized was so often empty knowledge. It sounded cool and it looked good on paper, but in reality it had no weight in helping someone later in life.
> 
> And that’s not a critique of what you are doing 1stvermont in any way; I grew up in a homeschooling environment (and in many ways still live in one if learning is continuous throughout life, ha ha) and was quite fond of it. It is just my personal opinion and observation that if things should be memorized, they should bear some applicability to life; for example, Gandalf’s golden conversation with Frodo when the former tells the latter to not be so quick to mete out death. And perhaps less helpful but still quite applicable, “The road goes ever ever on…”.
> Specific quotes from The Silmarillion aren’t coming to me but there are certainly plenty of life lessons to be had in there too.
> ...



Yeah, and I was not looking at this as a vital thing for them to learn, only for my enjoyment of being able to force my kids to learn things i am interested in. Just a little fun on the side. I now see why politicians like power and those who set education standards.


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## Olorgando (Aug 10, 2021)

1stvermont said:


> ... only for my enjoyment of being able to force my kids to learn things i am interested in.


Green Mountain Boy, *force* always stinks ... 👿


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## Ciderwell (Aug 10, 2021)

One of my favourite quotes from _The Silmarillion_:

“In this Music the World was begun; for Iluvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.”

Comparable to the Holy Bible at its best -


> In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And God said - _Let there be Light! - _and there was Light.


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## Culaeron (Sep 13, 2021)

Personally, I love the idea of exposing your children to outside literary works. As the son of a US soldier, I grew up traveling around the US and Germany. My final years of school were spent in a small town, near a small military installation in Louisiana. The teachers there had a very limited range of "thought" that they passed on to the students, and the students, in turn, had a very narrow bubble of interests when they stepped out into the world as adults. My own travels, and my being exposed to books like LotR led to my having a very open mind, and vastly expanded horizons, compared to the rest of my graduating class. To this day, they are all still the small minded people they have always been, and I now travel the world, involved in a dream job most could never even comprehend existing. My own children were raised in much the same way I was. I made sure they were exposed to many elements, not just those of the expected educational curriculum. 

Kudos to you, 1stvermont. You're doing your children a great service by including such things in their education.


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