The Book of Balin

A couple months I ago I received an email from the eBay auction site, indicating that one of my few remaining product searches had been triggered. In this case, the search text was “MAZAR BALINŪ”. What the heck does that mean?

Welp, I recently posted that in high school I was a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. And that I was one of the founders of the New England Tolkien Society.

NETS had two publications: a monthly newsletter called Ravenhill that my friend Gary put out, and a (nominally) annual literary magazine called MAZAR BALINŪ that I produced. The name is in Tolkien’s Dwarven language and translates to “The Book of Balin”, which was an artifact that the LotR fellowship found in the mines of Moria.

It wasn’t easy to get the artwork, articles, and stories I needed, so only two issues were ever published: in 1980 and 1983. I photocopied issues and mailed them to our members, which were probably less than a hundred people. So it was pretty amazing to discover 40-year-old original copies on eBay, being sold by someone in the Netherlands!

But seeing them got me thinking. To my knowledge, there are no copies of MB online, and I’m not even sure any exist in public collections. So I scanned my archived originals and compiled them into the two PDFs that I can share with you now.

MAZAR BALINŪ I (pdf)

MAZAR BALINŪ II (pdf)

As an interesting postscript, MAZAR BALINŪ’s focus on original artwork, poetry, stories, and articles was the antecedent for my subsequent internet-based electronic magazine, FSFnet. FSFnet, which I founded in college in 1984, was renamed DargonZine in 1988, and has held the title of the longest-running electronic magazine on the internet for decades. While it still exists today in a torpid, nominal form, we’ll still celebrate the 40th anniversary of its founding later this year.