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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Back in 2016, I was very privileged to watch the “lost recordings” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1968 interview for the BBC. Those were previously unbroadcast offcuts from a filmed interview with Tolkien by John Izzard, a small part of which had…
I give you below two images: The first one is by Mervyn Peake. It’s his illustration of the nursery rhyme “Little Jack Horner”, from the book Ride a cock-horse and other nursery rhymes (British Library Publishing). Peake’s Little Jack Horner is…
The BBC Genome Project has been uploading on its site listings information which the BBC printed in Radio Times between 1923 and 2009. I’ve been meaning to have a little look there for Tolkien-related items for a while. There are many…