This blog is now an archive of older posts. My current essays, research notes, and recorded lectures appear on Substack at A kind of elvish craft.
Little People inside machines: aetiologies of technology
This blog post started with one of the motifs I noticed once or twice, while researching miniature worlds and people: that of little people in the fridge – either as a permanent feature and an aetiology of the workings of…
Tolkien and the W.P. Ker Lecture at Glasgow
Last year we celebrated the 70th anniversary of Tolkien’s W.P. Ker Lecture on Sir Gawan and the Green Knight at the University of Glasgow, which he delivered on 15 April 1953. The essay was published posthumously, in 1983, in The…
Venturing Out: The Littles Take a Trip
This is the second blog bost in a series about John Peterson’s The Littles books (1967-2002), you can find the first one here. The second book, The Littles Take a Trip, was published in 1968. It follows the Littles as…
The Littles: Of (Tiny) Men and Mice
At last I’ve managed to get my hands on The Littles series (1967-2002), by John Peterson (1924-2002) – well, at least most of the books in the series (still missing one, I think, but getting there!) This is the first…
Tolkien and the Fairies: Faith and Folklore
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…
Goblins in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Tolkien’s The Hobbit
*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…
Plastic toys and WWI trauma: Tommy in Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian in the Cupboard
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…
Breaking the rules of fantasy: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service at 50
* 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…
Tolkien’s Hobbits, a Black Rider, and a Tree Root: chasing a visual chain
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…