The below was presented as a paper at Oxonmoot 2010 (24th – 26th September). I include endnotes to indicate when I refer to contemporary/topical matters. Please also note that this piece was written for oral delivery, so it’s not polished…
*This blog post is a short extract from a paper I gave at Tolkien Society’s 2012 conference (Return of the Ring, Loughborough University, 16-20 August 2012), titled: “Elves, Goblins and Other ‘Fairy’ Things in The Hobbit: Tolkien’s Victorian and Edwardian…
I am on research leave at the moment, working – among other things – on a new book on miniature worlds and characters in children’s fantasy. One of the primary sources I’ve been re-reading recently is Lynne Reid Banks’ The…
* This is the original first draft of my Times Literary Supplement article “Alan Garner’s The Owl Service at fifty”. The published version (which appeared on 21 August 2017 to celebrate 50 years from the publication of this novel) is…
One of the most iconic scenes from Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the moment when Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, having set off from the Shire towards the great…
* This is the original first draft of my review of the film Tolkien (2019), directed by Dome Karukoski, for the TLS. The version published is slightly shorter, and with a different title – link here. Tolkien: Knowing it’s…
I have been going through a number of small pamphlets and booklets in my Tolkien collection recently, and have been posting about them on Twitter: see here for a thread on the UK and USA Hobbit 50th Anniversart commemorative booklets…
This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for a few years now – in fact, every time I teach William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World I tell myself I’ll get on with it, but every year…
It’s been a heady few weeks in my academic world. We recently launched the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow (which I co-direct), I welcomed a new cohort of Fantasy MLitt students and started teaching…
Since the publication of the paperback edition of A Secret Vice, I have been asked a few times what’s different or new, compared to the original hardback edition. My good friend and fellow Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson actually asked…