Articles and Essays

The thumbnails below link to articles and essays which are free to access and read.

On J.R.R. Tolkien

: ‘Mad Elves’ and ‘Elusive Beauty’: Some Celtic Strands of Tolkien’s Mythology

: Tolkien’s ‘“Celtic” type of legends’: Merging Traditions

: Victorian Fairies and the Early Work of J.R.R. Tolkien

: Revisiting Race in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Constructing Cultures and Ideologies in an Imaginary World

: How to invent a Tolkien-style language (The Conversation)

: Language as Communication vs. Language as Art: J.R.R. Tolkien and early 20th-century radical linguistic experimentation

: Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters (The Conversation)

: Riddles, Heroes, and Folktales Come True: Folklore in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Folklore Thursday)

: Hobbit Songs and Rhymes: The Folklore of Middle-earth

: Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity

: Filming Folklore: Adapting Fantasy for the Big Screen through Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings

: Review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo

: Review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur

: Was Tolkien really racist? (The Conversation)

: Tolkien and Folklore: Sellic Spell and The Lay of Beowulf

: A review of Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien biopic (The TLS)

: Lord of the Rings: debunking the backlash against non-white actors in Amazon’s new adaption (co-authored with Mariana Rios Maldonado)

: Tolkien’s Glittering Caves of Aglarond and Cheddar Gorge and Caves in Somerset

: The Past as an Imaginary World: The Case of Medievalism (Chatterton, Tolkien, Eco)

: The Raw and the Cooked: William Morris’s Dwarf in The Wood Beyond the World, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gollum

: Tolkien’s Hobbits, a Black Rider, and a Tree Root: chasing a visual chain

: Tolkien’s Arda: An Introduction

: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1953 W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture: An Updated Chronology and Related Findings

: Tolkien and the W.P. Ker Lecture at Glasgow

On other Fantasy works, authors and themes

: Ursula K Le Guin’s strong female voice challenged the norms of a male-dominated genre (The Conversation)

: The Owl Service at 50 (TLS Online)

: Why build new worlds (TLS Online)

: Inventing a Whole Language (TLS Online)

: After 150 years, we still haven’t solved the puzzle of Alice in Wonderland (The Conversation)

: Samhain or Halloween? The “ancient Celtic year” in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy

: Welsh Legend in Susan Cooper’s The Grey King and Jenny Nimmo’s The Snow Spider

: Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree to hit the screen in latest bid to aim fantasy at grown-ups (The Conversation)

: A time-traveling cat fantasy: Lloyd Alexander’s Time Cat

: Plastic toys and WWI trauma: Tommy in Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian in the Cupboard

: Gnomes, Gnature, and the “Gnifty Gnomobile”: Elemental Spirits, Deforestation and Energy Systems in Transition in Upton Sinclair’s The Gnomobile