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Alexandria, Virginia


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American town of Alexandria, Virginia, is one of the oldest towns in the country, founded in mid-eighteenth century, and the first settlements of European colonists emerged there already in late seventeenth century.  The town is near Washington, on the opposite bank of the Potomac River.  In 1791, Alexandria was included in the newly established District of Columbia, but in 1846 the federal government returned it to the State of Virginia.  The town in quite nice, with old streets and neighborhoods, so you certainly ought to see it if you ever come to Washington.

I was in Alexandria twice—in 2012 and in 2017.  The pictures below are made in 2012, when I was there together with Claudia Galloppa. It was in October, in the midst of autumn, on the eve of Halloween and of the presidential elections 😉

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About the New Constitutional Amendments

I don’t support the latest amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation that allow Vladimir Putin to remain President until his death.  I don’t hope the official results of the ‘unique nation-wide voting’ will be relevant, current regulations for that voting provide the electoral boards with unprecedented opportunities for falsifications.  But at least I still can express my position publicly.  It’s time for Putin to retire.  And it has been time to for many years 😉

Vector Map of Númenor

NumenorWhile working at the maps for my friend’s book, I’ve also made a ‘canonical’ vector map of Númenor. Here it is, on the chance that it’s useful for someone else as well.

Download the file

The map is in SVG format, multilayered, geographical names in Russian and in English are in different layers. I used Inkscape 0.92 to draw the map, Century Schoolbook L font is used for the names. The map is based on the original map by Tolkien from Unfinished Tales rotated so that the North is strictly at the top, and on the map by Karen Wynn Fonstad. The aesthetics of the map is similar to the map of the Westlands by Chris Taylor.

Particularities of Study of Arda as an Invented World: Theory and Methodology

Mints M. (Amdir), ‘Osobennosti izucheniia Ardy kak vymyshlennogo mira: voprosy teorii i metodologii’, Palantir, no. 80 (2020): 25–42.

The article (in Russian) deals with main questions of theory and methodology of Tolkien studies, including the object of research, the nature of (sub)creative legacy of J. R. R. Tolkien, world of Arda as a separate imaginative work, texts and pictures by Tolkien as primary sources, ‘external’ and ‘internal’ history of Arda, Tolkien studies as a field of interdisciplinary research etc. The text is revised and extended according to the results of its discussion at VesCon-2019 (Moscow annual Tolkien festival) and to the suggestions of the editorial board of Palantir. I’m grateful to everyone who took part in the discussion for their additional useful ideas, as well as to Arthoron who finally made me finish this (nine-years old!) work 😉

Text of the article

Archive of the journal (at the website of the Tolkien Society of Saint-Petersburg)

This work is important for me for personal reasons as well. While being a post-graduate, and for the first years after the end of my term, I had a terrible stage fright, and it was at Major Tolkien Seminar in Saint-Petersburg in 2010 where I made my first report on theory and methodology that I was surprised to feel the fright had disappeared 🙂

An Improved Vector Map of Middle-Earth


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Finally uploaded into Wikipedia an improved version of a vector map of Middle-earth, here you can take it as well:

Download file (SVG, without geographic names, 2.2 Mb).

The initial map is not mine; as I can understand, its author is Chris Taylor who, for his part, had vectorized manually (!) the original map by Christopher Tolkien. Hope he won’t be angry 😉 My revision is minimal: I just removed a ‘bare area’ in Mirkwood (which is absent in the original map), added cays in the Sea of Rhûn and the lower reaches of the river Harnen. Will be glad if this map is useful for anybody 🙂

GOST R 7.0.100-2018, “Bibliographic entry”

Published an official text of the new Russian bibliographical standard, GOST R_7.0.100-2018, “Bibliographic entry”, issued in late 2018, in force since 1 July.  It replaced an older standard, GOST 7.1-2003.  Both standards are developed mostly for library catalogues, so in academic publications in Russian, one should still follow GOST R 7.0.5-2008, “Bibliographic citation”, designed as an addition to GOST 7.1-2003.  It will probably be replaced with a new standard later.

See also Russian Bibliography Standards.

Goodbye, Kubinka?

The Tank Museum in Kubinka, Moscow Oblast, doesn’t exist any more.  Officially it’s called now ‘museum space no. 2 of the Patriot Park’, and almost all the most interesting exhibits have been transferred somewhere to the central part of the park itself (kilometres away), including almost entire collection of German World War II tanks and self-propelled guns (although several exhibits still remain on their places, the collection is therefore divided into parts), almost all the Soviet Second World War tanks, at least part of Western World War II tanks and even the English tank of the First World War.  What still remains are mostly the Soviet Cold War tanks, self-propelled guns and armoured personnel carriers, including a lot of experimental ones, and also a collection of English and American Cold War tanks.  It’s interesting, too, but mostly for area specialists.

They have just plundered the museum.  Someone may think it’s patriotism, but for me it seems much more like the Nazy invasion.  Kubinka used to be the biggest, and probably the best, tank museum in the world.  Now I have to write about it in the past tense…

And Once More about the Geography of Middle-Earth

About a month ago I received a surprising invitation to give a lecture on Limmud Moscow 2018 conference about… the geography and cartography of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth 😉  So this Saturday, from 11:30 to 12:30 PM, I’ll be talking about Tolkien’s own maps, and about how well the inhabitants of Middle-earth knew the geography of their own world, and how researchers and artists tried to imagine the Middle-earth as a whole (not only the Western Lands, a well-known map of which can be found almost in every publication of The Lord of the Rings), and finally, how the geography of the East and the South of Middle-earth could ‘really’ look like, according to available texts.  Hope it’ll be interesting 🙂