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…
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…
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…
It was great fun to review a film, for a change, though it was very much in keeping with one of the main strands of my blog: Dome Karukoski’s biopic Tolkien. I went into the cinema thinking about two words:…
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…
The last few years have seen the publication of two of Tolkien’s works that scholars and serious fans have known about for a very long time: Tolkien’s unfinished alliterative poem The Fall of Arthur[i] and Tolkien’s prose translation of Beowulf…
Yesterday I gave a brief interview on J.R.R. Tolkien for the Turkish TV channel TRT World. It’s now available on YouTube and can be accessed here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=90OMuDIbliA
I am now back from Leeds, after an excellent Tolkien Society Seminar, and an outstanding series of papers and a roundtable discussion on Tolkien at the International Medieval Congress 2018. Here’s a quick overview of all papers presented at the IMC,…
Last month I had a new journal article published in the Open Access Journal of Tolkien Research: Fimi, D. (2018) ‘Language as Communication vs. Language as Art: J.R.R. Tolkien and Early 20th-Century Radical Linguistic Experimentation’, Journal of Tolkien Research, 5(1), pp.…
I had a new (festive) article published yesterday on the The Conversation, titled: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christmas letters to his children bring echoes of Middle-earth to the North Pole”. In this article I discuss the letters from Father Christmas Tolkien sent…