As I've said probably too many times, "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is a really tough story to do justice, and I was pretty adamant in doing "80 Years of Conan" in the order Howard wrote the stories. That order shows far more "continuity" than any of the fan-made chronologies, and it offers greater insight into the creation of the stories altogether. However, it's really tough hewing parts 4 and 5, as they deal with a lot of mythological and literary sources, and it's easy for me to go off on tangents.
Therefore, rather than wait until I'm finished the rest of FGD or any one story, I've decided that if I ever get to a point like this, I'll skip ahead to the next one. That isn't to say "The God in the Bowl" isn't as worthy of FGD, far from it: I just believe that it's more straightforward. So if I don't get Part 4 out in the next few days, I'll move on to GitB (though I'm obviously still working on FGD), which will probably just be one or two parts. Then, if I discover there is more to GitB than I anticipated, I already have one post up, so I can go on to the next story, and so forth. Part of this is because I really want to finish this series by the end of the year - 80 Years of Conan, after all - but I also don't want to rush or overlook things either, and feel I was guilty of that in Part 3.
In the meantime, Ben's uploaded some more Howard Days videos for your perusal. Once again, I'll update my Scottish Invasion posts, but here they are for convenience:
Howard & Academia
with Jeff Shanks, Charles Hoffman and Mark Finn
What's New with REH
with Paul Herman, Rusty Burke and Jay Zetterburg
Oh, and I have to comment on the wild speculation of a Hobbit Trilogy, which I'm tying in with a few other thoughts on Tolkien merchandising and Christopher Tolkien, but that's another post.
Hobbit trilogy? There's a line in LOTR about "butter scraped over too much bread".
ReplyDeleteThat quote is *exactly* what came to mind.
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