Wednesday, 29 April 2026

Further reflections deriving from yet-another engagement with Tolkien's On Fairy Stories

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In Master of Middle Earth , Paul Kocher's superb literary criticism of Tolkien's published work as of 1972, the author reflects on t...
Sunday, 22 March 2026

Faery by John T Kruse - 2020; the elves of folklore compared with those of Tolkien

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I have been reading some of the work of John T Kruse on the subject of fairies; especially  - especially his Faery: a guide to the lore, ma...
9 comments:
Thursday, 12 March 2026

Aunt Grace Day - A new Tolkien tradition established: March 3rd

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Last week, my wife and I decided to establish a new traditio n of celebrating the anniversary day of the death of JRR Tolkien's Aunt Gra...
3 comments:
Friday, 6 March 2026

The most chilling lines in The Lord of the Rings...

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From The Two Towers "Shelob's Lair" (slightly edited): ‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ Gollum said often to himself, when the evil mo...
3 comments:
Thursday, 26 February 2026

Was this JRR Tolkien's holiday home in Newcastle upon Tyne?

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9 St George's Terrace, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne - photographed in 2024;  this is where JRR Tolkien's Aunt Grace and Uncle Willia...
2 comments:
Friday, 6 February 2026

"Anxiety of Influence" can be powerful and harmful - Alan Garner and JRR Tolkien

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It is some decades since I read Harold Bloom's 1973 book "The Anxiety of Influence". The idea I retain from it is that a ...
7 comments:
Saturday, 24 January 2026

Gimli the Dwarf is the only non-Hobbit point-of-view character in The Lord of the Rings

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I was only in the past few years that I noticed that the Dwarf Gimli is (I think) the only point-of view character in The Lord of the Rings ...
8 comments:
Friday, 26 December 2025

Sauron versus Saruman - why two names read too-nearly the same

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While Tolkien's discernment as a creative writer enabled him to dodge nearly-all the potentially most embarrassing examples of character...
Thursday, 23 October 2025

The History of The Hobbit by John D Rateliff (2007) - a review

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John D Rateliff. The History of The Hobbit - Two volumes: Part One: Mr Baggins ; Part 2: Return to Bag End . HarperCollins: London, 2007.  ...
Sunday, 12 October 2025

Many bullets dodged, but he gets it right - in the end! Tolkien's character names

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Reading The History of Middle Earth (edited by Christopher Tolkien) and The History of the Hobbit (edited by John D Rateliff); it becomes ...
6 comments:
Monday, 1 September 2025

Frodo's first usage of the One Ring was frivolously motivated

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Despite possessing it for many years; Frodo Baggins seems never to have put-on the One Ring - until he was staying in The House of Tom Bomba...
2 comments:
Saturday, 16 August 2025

A lesson of Numenor: Mortal life can only be partly enchanted, even in Faery

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The sadness that underlies all the best accounts of the interactions of Men with elves, fairies and the like; is that the enchantment of Fae...
Wednesday, 30 July 2025

Critiquing the "Myth becomes Fact" concept of Christianity, in Lewis and Tolkien

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CS Lewis's conversion, as is pretty well known, had much to do with an idea he got (mostly) from JRR Tolkien that in Christianity Myth b...
Saturday, 26 July 2025

Initiation by participation in imaginative fiction

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When we really participate in the process of reading a work of imaginative fiction, we undergo some of the steps of what is sometimes termed...
Saturday, 19 July 2025

Where does the evil of Melkor come from, in The Silmarillion?

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At the beginning of The Silmarillion (1977) there is the creation story Ainulindale - which describes, in musical terms, how the universe ...
17 comments:
Friday, 27 June 2025

Charles Williams's Time Loop and other temporal paradoxes in Many Dimensions

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I am currently reading Charles Williams's 1931 novel, in which there is a very early discussion of the notion of "temporal paradox...
6 comments:
Saturday, 17 May 2025

What is the best way to subvert Tolkien?

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I make a suggestion over at my BC's Notions blog . 
Sunday, 11 May 2025

Re-reading The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams - the domination of abstraction over the personal

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I have read Charles' Williams's The Place of the Lion  many times over a span of several decades; and almost accidentally found myse...
9 comments:
Wednesday, 7 May 2025

Review of The Major and the Missionary by Diana Pavlac Glyer (2023)

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Diana Pavlac Glyer (edited). The Major and the Missionary: The letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanch Biggs . Rabbit Room Press: Nashvi...
2 comments:
Wednesday, 30 April 2025

Charles Williams Did influence JRR Tolkien's writing - The Place of the Lion and The Notion Club Papers

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For the past fifty years it has been normal to assume that JRR Tolkien disliked (probably because he was jealous of) Charles Williams; and t...
2 comments:
Tuesday, 29 April 2025

Why Tolkien "cordially disliked allegory"?

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Tolkien declared in his introduction to The Lord of the Rings: I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done ...
2 comments: