Over at Bruce Charlton’s Notions, the good professor shares some Ork-related humor: A simple household candle… or is it? Few have yet noticed the sinister resurgence of those who revere the name of Saruman. I became aware of the problem some years ago when a shiny black pillar was erected near to my place of…
Post by Carlos Carrasco There is a prejudice in modern SF so nearly ubiquitous that it can be considered a trope. I’m talking about the assumption that the more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the less religious it will be. While this prejudice is normally implicit in a lot of science fiction, the assumption was stated…
If J.R.R. Tolkien liked to write satire, the satire he wrote was secured in what he loved. He loved languages, of course, importantly. But I’m not learned enough to say if his languages are in anyway satirical. I can say however that he employed his love of language in his satires. What did he love…
How best to go about telling a Bildungsroman for the son of Arathorn II, for a youth who would become the Good King Elessar? Achieving qualities Tolkien so carefully evoked in his great cosmology and Lord of the Rings stories, the landscape, map, and texts of Middle-earth provide answers, addressing formal and structural concerns…
This is a crosspost by L. A Smith from The Traveller’s Path One of the intriguing questions about the Anglo-Saxons who lived in England in the Early Middle Ages revolves around their religious beliefs and mythologies. Pretty much all of what we know of these beliefs were written down by Christian monks, and so it’s…
Article by S. Dorman Tevildo Prince of Cats was the first imaginative incarnation of Sauron the Dark Lord, whose power was destroyed in the unmaking of his Ring in the Third Age of Middle-earth. As many know, the process of writing is drafting and redrafting, a sort of making and remaking. An early incarnation of…
Article by David Llewellyn Dodds In 1927, John Livingston Lowes published The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination with a revised edition following in 1930. He traces the “caves of ice” in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (lines 36, 47) to William Bartram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and…
by Kevin McCall It is well known that C.S. Lewis was an extremely fast reader. Richard Ladborough, in his essay “In Cambridge” in the bookC.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table writes: “It is now common knowledge that his [Lewis’s] memory was prodigious and that he seemed to have read everything.” In his essay “Jack on Holiday” in the same…
This intriguing article is by S. Dorman The supporting characters mentioned in this piece are wrong. But are they wrong for their stories? I’ve talked before about wrong characters and how they can be wrong about particular things, or wrong overall in a peculiar way. This piece is a variation, or perhaps further explication, of…