[The Greek from which this has been translated is here] . [Strophe A] The best thing is water: then airy gold burning through the gleaming night, magnificent with lordly wealth. And to sing of the prizes — your wish, dear my heart — look no further than the sun’s warming daylight, and the shining…

[Part 1 of this reread is here] . :1: Rereading Book 2, and with it completing The Fellowship of the Ring, it occurs to me that ‘the Fellowship of the Ring’ actually only describes part of this second book (so less than one sixth of the whole Lord of the…

Rereading Lord of the Rings, as I am at the moment doing, I’m struck by one particular detail — oddly, I’ve read this novel a dozen times and more, and it’s never struck me before. It’s to do with the plural in the novel’s title. There’s no doubt as to…

:1: Thing is, I’m writing a short-ish History of Fantasy — I signed the contract earlier this week, and am looking to deliver the book to the publishers by the end of the year. …

What I knew about the original publication of The Lord of the Rings I gleaned from Humphrey Carpenter’s Tolkien biography: namely that Allen & Unwin were keen for a sequel to 1937's The Hobbit, which had been pretty successful; that Tolkien offered them The Silmarillion in draft form, and when…

[The Greek from which this has been translated is here] μεγαλοπόλιες ὦ Συράκοσαι …” [Strophe A] Syracuse, megalopolis! Deep-plunged in war, temple of Ares, home to men and horses, steel-delighting nourisher: I come to you from gleaming Thebes with this song with news of a four-horse chariot to make the earth shake! — the…

I The Lad and the Jabberwock went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took two toves, and some borogroves, To gimble their gyre afloat. The Lad looked up at the beast in shock, And flourished his scimitar, “O frightful Jabber! O Jabber, my wock, What a horrible Jabber you are, You…

Sex, as the phrase goes, and violence. And here’s the thing: I have no problem with reading about explicit sex, but the older I get the harder I find it reading about explicit violence. There’s an awful lot of violence in contemporary writing, and film, and video games — in…

Here’s Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (probably written 1851; first published 1867). It’s one of the most famous short poems of the nineteenth-century. The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering…