Medieval History
- A Medievalism Post: What Is Fantasy?
For the second semester in a row, I'm teaching T. H. White's The Once and Future King, a book I first encountered 25 years ago, and haven't really thought about since. I have not been, surprisingly for a medieval lit and lang guy, a big fan...
- Atherton On Tolkien (trans.) & Tolkien (ed.), Beowulf
J.R.R. Tolkien (trans.) and Christopher Tolkien (ed). Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell. London: HarperCollins, 2014. 448pp. Reviewed by Mark Atherton Beowulf is "the major piece of Old English verse...
- Smol Reviews Ferré, Dictionnaire Tolkien
Anna Smol recently reviewed: Dictionnaire Tolkien. Ed. Vincent Ferré. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2012. J.R.R. Tolkien?s fiction is read around the world, having been translated into dozens of languages, from Vietnamese and Korean to Slovak and Catalan to...
- Tolkien 2009 ?ten Years Of History?
Tolkien 2009 ?Ten Years of History? event to be held on August 15th-16th 2009 [no location given] The Asociación Tolkien Argentina (A.T.A.) is a non-profit cultural and literary association founded by Dr. Ricardo Irigaray and Mr. Jorge Ferro in 1999...
- Blood, Sex, Malory: An International Conference On The Morte Darthur
Dear colleagues (with apologies for cross-posting), Registration is now open for the conference below (please click on the link for more details, including the conference programme). Do please pass this on to any colleagues or students who might be interested....
Medieval History
Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur, Reviewed
Alex Mueller reviews: J.R.R. Tolkien. The Fall of Arthur. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Imagine Sir Thomas Malory pouring over the alliterative poem before him, reveling in its contagious rhythms, until the cataclysmic fall of Arthur causes him to stop short. Arthur has just ravaged the Italian countryside, led his glorious knights to their deaths, and even ordered his enemy?s children to be tossed into the sea. What might happen, Malory wonders, if he were to replace these undesirable episodes of violence and tyranny with investigations of the psyches of his beloved Guinevere, her lover Lancelot, and the lecherous Mordred, all the while retaining the sonorous sounds of war through alliterative verse? For those of us who know Malory?s treatment of the Roman campaign, this speculation is easy to imagine, especially since he drew his material for this section directly from the alliterative Morte Arthure. If this is the first tale Malory composed, as Eugène Vinaver suggests, this challenge is answered with a compromise between prose and poetry, which embraces the psychological plotlines from his ?French books? and jettisons the strict cadences of alliterative long lines. Almost five hundred years later, J.R.R. Tolkien must have been grappling with the same question. READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE
- A Medievalism Post: What Is Fantasy?
For the second semester in a row, I'm teaching T. H. White's The Once and Future King, a book I first encountered 25 years ago, and haven't really thought about since. I have not been, surprisingly for a medieval lit and lang guy, a big fan...
- Atherton On Tolkien (trans.) & Tolkien (ed.), Beowulf
J.R.R. Tolkien (trans.) and Christopher Tolkien (ed). Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell. London: HarperCollins, 2014. 448pp. Reviewed by Mark Atherton Beowulf is "the major piece of Old English verse...
- Smol Reviews Ferré, Dictionnaire Tolkien
Anna Smol recently reviewed: Dictionnaire Tolkien. Ed. Vincent Ferré. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2012. J.R.R. Tolkien?s fiction is read around the world, having been translated into dozens of languages, from Vietnamese and Korean to Slovak and Catalan to...
- Tolkien 2009 ?ten Years Of History?
Tolkien 2009 ?Ten Years of History? event to be held on August 15th-16th 2009 [no location given] The Asociación Tolkien Argentina (A.T.A.) is a non-profit cultural and literary association founded by Dr. Ricardo Irigaray and Mr. Jorge Ferro in 1999...
- Blood, Sex, Malory: An International Conference On The Morte Darthur
Dear colleagues (with apologies for cross-posting), Registration is now open for the conference below (please click on the link for more details, including the conference programme). Do please pass this on to any colleagues or students who might be interested....