I have been going through a number of small pamphlets and booklets in my Tolkien collection recently, and have been posting about them on Twitter: see here for a thread on the UK and USA Hobbit 50th Anniversart commemorative booklets…
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…
It’s been a heady few weeks in my academic world. We recently launched the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow (which I co-direct), I welcomed a new cohort of Fantasy MLitt students and started teaching…
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 have briefly mentioned before Lloyd Alexander’s “eat and read” programme, but in these times of coronavirus, much more home-bound due to lock-down and the self-isolation advice, I have found myself reading more during the day, and cooking more, and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…