It has been no secret that Middle-earth Talk Radio has struggled to continue its progressive series of Tolkien-inspired talk shows. Hawke Robinson wanted to achieve so much with the show that he was never really in a position to bring about. The show was always supposed to feature guests but more often than not was just Hawke and a co-host (me or Brian Huseland) chatting away about the latest Tolkien-related news or some esoteric topic.
There were indeed some deep discussions on those episodes. Whether Hawke shared his insights into how role-playing games can have a therapeutic effect on gamers or I just rambled on about the nature of Orc society, we made an effort to keep the light burning in Middle-earth.
Nearly every episode featured 1 or 2 songs performed by Tolkien-inspired artists, and Hawke sometimes shared information about the artists and their careers. One of my favorite episodes featured Elvish singer Heather Downing, who performed as Rehtaeh at one of the best of the MERP/TolkienCons Hawke put on. And it was fun interviewing her again for an episode of “Raw Hobbit”.
We also spoke with Chris Seeman, who is well-known in Tolkien/gaming circles as the founder and publisher of Other Hands. I don’t yet have them all archived. I’m not sure I will, now that Hawke has taken his Tolkien Scholars site offline (a mirror of it is available for a brief time).
Another great resource Hawke helped to promote was the Other Minds journal, which is viewed by many as the successor to Chris’ Other Hands. I’m not aware of what the status of Other Minds is at this time. It may need a new home.
The loss of the essay archive at MERP is not quite a disaster for I have been republishing my old Suite101 essays at Middle-earth.Xenite.org, but they are not yet all online — and some I had chosen not to republish there. Also, Hawke had essays from other contributors in the archive at one time — and there were a few that I myself wrote specifically for MERP.com. I’m sure I have lost the original files through various hard drive crashes across the years.
There are still other great Middle-earth and Tolkien fan resources available online — perhaps more today than ever before. But none of them are quite like Hawke’s network. He had a special devotion to supporting Tolkien scholarship in ways that other resources did not. Hawke’s decision to discontinue his network is personal but it may have much farther-reaching consequences than many now perceive.
A soft but powerful voice for online Tolkien scholarship has fallen silent, and a special but (in my opinion) needful light has been extinguished. I wish I could saw I saw this coming for if I had I would have made a great effort to try to stave it off. Alas! I have had my own cares and concerns, and I was unaware until now of the doom awaiting this wonderful network of fannish devotion.
Perhaps one day Hawke will be able to restore some of the content, but my heart tells me that an age has passed and we shall never see its like again. I hope I am wrong.
Michael,
Thank you for the kind words. I am so very deeply sorry that it came to this. I thought I had given people over a year of warning, maybe I wasn’t sufficiently clear in explaining how serious the issues were when I kept asking for people to step up and help, and I am sorry too for that.
Thanks so much for your invaluable help, support, and encouragement over the years.
As for the content, there are links on the “why.html” page to all the sites indirectly, so everyone can grab any content they need from it.
Also, most of the videos from MerpCon, Tolkien Moot, Middle-earth Talk Show, and Ea Tolkien Society, are on Youtube at the Tolkien Moot, Middle-earth Radio, and Tolkien Scholars channels. I’ll try to keep the servers running as long as possible, but I do not know how long that will be. Between the constant need for fighting off hackers, spammers, government agencies with their harassing bureaucrats and worsening regulations, and general server maintenance, and the health issues, I can no longer keep up to keep them running.
My sincerest apologies to all the communities.
To everyone out there, wherever you may be, Be well. Namarie.
-Hawke