Alas, not me

Continued from Part One Túrin at the Last Battle Clearly, in "the sons of the Valar" and "the sons of the Gods" the mart...

Two sections at the end of the 1937 "Quenta Silmarillion" record a prophecy which is familiar to many as The Second Prophecy of Ma...

I just noticed this a little while ago. I was reading Faramir’s declaration of love to Éowyn in “The Steward and the King.” One word jumped...

The difficulty many of us face in understanding Tom Bombadil arises from the fact that he is part of nature and we all too often think of o...

As was widely noted back in May of this year Pope Leo XIV quoted Tolkien in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas , specifically Gandalf's ...

Tolkien, it seems quite clear from multiple statements he made in his letters, thought of his tales as taking place in our world, but in an ...

In view of the recent news that Tolkien once said in a letter previously unpublished that Treebeard knew more about what was going on in Th...

At the bottom of the Emyn Muil, Sam and Frodo realize that they would have to leave the Elven rope behind which they had used to descend the...

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, as just quoted, is extra...

Here's a one-paragraph excerpt from something I'm working on, which has to do with children and heroic tales in Tolkien's legend...

 A name I often came across when I was in school studying history and how to write it was Leopold von Ranke (1795 - 1886) . Rather than try ...

At the beginning of Book 4, in the chapter called "The Taming of Sméagol," there's a beautifully subtle little touch, a single...

While analyzing the death scenes of Nienor Níniel and Túrin in the chapter "Turambar and the Foalókë" in The Book of Lost Tales , ...

Recently I was asked to present a 30 minute talk on the first five chapters of Book 4 of The Lord of the Rings . (When? Later in the summer....

The 2026 Tolkien Conference Switzerland , organized by the University of Zurich, the University of Lausanne, and Friedrich Schiller Universi...

I was reading Charles Williams' 1945 novel All Hallows' Eve  yesterday morning. It's a rather spooky story, the first chapter of...