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…
The Raw and the Cooked: William Morris’s Dwarf in The Wood Beyond the World, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gollum
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…
Epaminondas: Who was he, and why was Tolkien interested in him? (or, what’s different in the paperback edition of A Secret Vice?)
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…
A Homeric Simile in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
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…