Blog – Page 2

Top 3 Fantasy Authors excluding Tolkien? Data from a Twitter snap poll.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a tweet which ended up developing into a snap poll with over 450 responses. The question? Here it goes: Please help me with a quick experiment to inform a discussion with our #Fantasy…

By Dimitra Fimi | 18th May 2020 | Children's Fantasy, Fantasy Literature, Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin | No Comments |

Tolkien Reading Day 2020 – Interview with a Special Guest!

Exactly a week ago, it was Tolkien Reading Day 2020. Tolkien Reading Day is a worldwide celebration of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, established by the Tolkien Society in 2003. It is held on the 25th of March, the date of the downfall…

By Dimitra Fimi | 1st April 2020 | The Hobbit, Tolkien | 2 Comments |

Reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit with my 6-and-a-half-year-old son: a journal

One of the highlights of 2019 was reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit aloud to my 6-and-a-half-year-old son at bedtime. We started towards the end of August 2019, and finished it in just over a month. I tweeted the entire experience…

By Dimitra Fimi | 3rd January 2020 | Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature, The Hobbit, Tolkien | No Comments |

A Homeric Simile in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

I managed to watch episode 7 of BBC’s adaptation of His Dark Materials live tonight. It included a scene I’ve been looking forward to for weeks now. Like many others, I am sure, I re-read Pullman’s entire trilogy a couple…

By Dimitra Fimi | 15th December 2019 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment |

Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy wins Mythopoeic Award!

I was absolutely thrilled to find out a couple of months ago that my recent monograph, Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy, had won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies! This is my second Mythopoeic Award: my…

By Dimitra Fimi | 18th November 2019 | Alan Garner, Awards, Books, Celtic Myth, Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature, Folklore, Henry Neff, Irish myth and folklore, Lloyd Alexander, Myth and Folklore, Welsh myth an folklore | No Comments |

TLS review of Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s book The Dark Fantastic

Race in fantasy is a topic quite close to my heart: I wrote about Tolkien’s complex engagement with race and racial anthropology in my 2008 monograph Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History, summarizing some of my main findings in a later…

By Dimitra Fimi | 2nd November 2019 | Uncategorized | No Comments |

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

* This essay was originally published in Gramarye, the journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, in Issue 11 (Summer 2017), pp. 51-63. In the medieval Irish tale of Tochmarc Emire (“The Wooing of Emer”),…

By Dimitra Fimi | 28th October 2019 | Books, Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature | No Comments |

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

Last month, I visited Cheddar Gorge and Caves, together with my husband and young son. This trip had been “on the list” for many years, and I am grateful to my colleague and fellow Tolkien scholar Dr Kristine Larsen for…

By Dimitra Fimi | 20th October 2019 | The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien | 1 Comment |

Tiny Alice and Miniature Books Exhibition – July-September 2019

This summer, a very exciting project I have been working on for a while was launched, and I curated my first exhibition to accompany and complement it. The launch itself was an overwhelming moment, with a lot of media attention…

By Dimitra Fimi | 5th September 2019 | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Children's Fantasy, Fantasy Literature, Media | No Comments |

It’s taken a bit longer than usual this year, but this is my brief report on an outstanding series of papers and a roundtable discussion on Tolkien at the International Medieval Congress 2019 at Leeds in early July 2019. This…

By Dimitra Fimi | 23rd August 2019 | Uncategorized | No Comments |