304. Pipe Smoking in Middle Earth Drops Today!
“In the far South it is said that men drink smoke, and wizards I have heard do so. But always I had thought it was part of their incantations or a process aiding in the weaving of their deep thoughts.” “My lord,” said Merry, “it is rest and pleasure and the crown of the feast.” —The War of the Rings, 36-37I am pleased to announce the release later today of the new edition of Pipe Smoking in Middle Earth. Per Andy Wike at SPC: “We’re releasing/featuring the PSME book this Thursday as part of our regular website update (so 9/29, around 3:30 pm ET).” While PSME is a little book and perhaps doesn't even justify the name at only a hundred pages, it's still dear to my heart. C. S. Lewis taught me early on that we write the books we want to read, and that was certainly the case with this one. I could never fathom why there was nothing about pipes and tobaccos in The Lord of the Rings when so many from my generation began smoking a pipe precisely because of it, and apparently my generation isn't alone in this. Steve Mawby (Customer Service Manager) and Andy Wike (Marketing Director) at Smokingpipes (both considerably younger than myself) have told me Tolkien was also a big factor in their own pipe pilgrimages. Over the years as I read and reread LOTR, I only became more intrigued with the unobtrusive yet foundational nature of pipe smoking in Tolkien's world. In 2006, when I opened the saga to read it again, several sheets of notebook paper fell out with handwritten notes for a concordance of every mention of this crucial subject. At the time, I was hopeful my nephew was taking up the pipe, so I prepared the concordance and wrote a few short essays to accompany it, placing everything in a chapbook. Five years later in 2012, as my work life became more intolerable, my thoughts slipped back to the chapbook. The Peterson book was just beginning to take up my spare time and with the rise of self-publishing, I thought I'd revise the chapbook and give it a shot. I got my old friend Charles Mundungus to create some suitably primitive illustrations and waited to see if anyone else was interested in the subject. As it turns out, they were. In 2015, Tolkien Studies even ran a short review of it in one of their literature roundups: “In Pipe Smoking in Middle Earth: The Fellowship of the Smoke Ring Mark Irwin gathers every reference he can find to pipes in Middle-earth, both in Tolkien’s novels and in Peter Jackson’s films (wisely separating the two). Accompanying two thorough concordances are several short essays on pipes, pipemen, leaf, and related subjects, along with a dozen drawings of the various pipes discussed. It is a short exploration of a niche subject, but Irwin manages some worthwhile observations.” * After I became fully immersed in the Peterson book project, I never dreamed…