Many of you will have heard about the closure of all Humanities courses at the Cardiff Centre for Lifelong Learning last July. These developments left a great number of students disappointed but now there is a new educational institution to…
Reviews of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History
In the last few months a number of reviews of my book Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits have appeared in various journals and magazines. I was delighted to see the latest one: a review by Jon…
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún has now been released!
The new Tolkien book I mentioned earlier on this year (see 30 January 2009) has now been released! Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a verse retelling of the Völsunga saga, which he originally composed in the 1920s…
Tolkien Studies Vol. 6
The sixth volume of the journal Tolkien Studies has just been published. As always it contains a great selection of scholarly articles, shorter notes and book reviews on many different aspects of Tolkien’s creativity. The leading article is a very…
Kenyan women’s Lysistrata protest
The BBC reported yesterday that women’s activist groups in Kenya have slapped their partners with a week-long sex ban in protest over the infighting plaguing the national unity government. Following this story I was interviewed by the BBC Radio Wales’…
Hobbit Songs and Rhymes: The Folklore of Middle-earth
I was recently asked by lotrplaza.com to contribute an article to their new Scholars Forum on a Tolkien-related topic. My recently published book Tolkien, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits includes an important part on Tolkien’s knowledge of folklore…
Which Lewis in Oxford?
Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis or Robbie Lewis? An Oxford-academic-cum-fantasy-writer, whose “muse” is called Alice; an elderly don (specialist on Lewis Carroll) with secret vices; a girl who literally goes “through the looking glass” (killed by a Persian mirror); and a…
Do you know your classics?
This morning the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach English Literature because students do not know the Bible or classical mythology. Having encountered very similar problems when teaching…
Tolkien at Kalamazoo
The International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo at Western Michigan University, is one of the oldest and most prestigious conferences on Medieval Studies in the world. The conference is now in its forty-fourth year, and for the past nine…
New Tolkien Book: The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún
After a long and pretty nasty illness, I am back online to report – somewhat belatedly – some really exciting news! A new Tolkien book is scheduled to be released in May 2009. HarperCollins will publish Tolkien’s retelling of the…