Hey! I’m a classical musician, lover of storytelling, Tolkien tragic, and generally just a guy who likes to talk about whatever interests him – so a blog was less a decision, more an inevitability. The title comes from “the Book of Mazarbul”, a tome kept in Khazad-dûm’s hall of records, and so, this blog is my own historical record kept in a rather more modern format. Plus, I really like Dwarves.
….in all seriousness, ever since I got a Facebook account (a good 6 years after the rest of the world) people have been sporadically encouraging me to blog. Alas, this blog is a betrayal of their faith – my social media posts tend toward the pithy and the wry, which this blog most certainly is not. However, over time, my interest in and passion for writing has developed – and this blog is an opportunity for me to hone and practice the skills of narration, observation and analysis that I’d like to develop for myself in the real world.
Hence the vague and imprecise subject matter of this blog – really, it’s just an excuse for me to practice writing, no matter the topic. I’m extremely interested in Tolkien, so expect to see a lot of Tolkien. I’m also extremely interested in music – however, music’s already my job, so I have little inclination to write about it for “fun”! However, I also love fiction in general (especially the tropes that underpin and inform its structure), boardgaming, rambling walks, and military strategy. I know little about any of these subjects, but I can be expected to ruminate on them at length regardless. Unearned confidence is a prominent trait of mine.
I also have interest in dinosaurs, statistics, theology, time travel, propaganda, probability, psychology, education, venomous reptiles, rhetoric, swordsmanship, and astronomy, and look forward to vaguely touching on many of these topics as my interest is piqued.
Welcome to the Blog of Mazarbul…come for the Middle-earth deep cuts, stay because it takes so damn long to read just one post.
If you wanna know more about me in a vaguely more professional context, feel free to head on over to my personal website, which has considerably less Tolkien and considerably more about ‘me’. I cannot say I think that to be an improvement, but it is at least a novelty.