From Babel to Barad-Dûr
Or a Tale of Two Towers: Art and Archetypes in Middle-Earth Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is conspicuous in that it contains no places of worship. Few fantasy authors resist the urge to have temples and gods (usually malevolent ones with slimy and unappetizing minions,...
From an Ultimate Dim Thule
Or Diligently Seeking Sidney Sime Anyone recall Sidney H. Sime? I have to confess I didn’t, but his name came up, as the saying goes, the other day. In a book by H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a great inventer of mythical (and generally long-lost, terribly distasteful...
Aspriation, Application, Abnegation, Abdication
Or An Alliterative Throwing-In of the Towel Every now and then, a person just gets too busy to think. So, I confess. The following is an admission of failure - and a newsletter with little or nothing to say. (Which, it must be said in passing, has never been a reason...
Konrad Gesner and the Jenny Hanivers
Or Wishful Thinking, Mythological Science and Easy Money The other day, as I was reading Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve, something stuck in my mind - the name of Anna Fang’s airship, the Jenny Haniver. Naturally, something stuck in one’s mind requires prompt...
Canadian Celtics
Or Empires Within, Empires Without Yes, I realize the title sounds like the name of a lacrosse team (but it’s only to insure that my compatriots read this.) Nevertheless… A summer ago, I spent a few days in Toronto giving a little talk at IdeaCity and shooting a...
Catching up in Kyiv
Or Thoughts Along the Dnipro Early last December, looking out the hotel window at the blowing snow, I thought “Well, I’m in Kiev.” Every time I end up in some out-of-the-ordinary place, it takes my mind a while to catch up. Landing in the Ukraine at 4 pm it was...
Saint’s Haloes and Mouse’s Ears Part IV
SAINT’S HALOES AND MOUSE’S EARS PART IV Or Northern Lights, Baroque Solutions and Back To The Future Painters of the Northern Renaissance for the most part seemed to have continued as before or simply dropped haloes altogether, rather than trying to adapt them to...
Saint’s Haloes and Mouse’s Ears Part III
Or Reconciling the Irreconcilable (Or At Least Trying) The transformation of the halo signals the end of medieval art and the spread of the Renaissance view far more clearly than more commonly examined factors, perspective foremost amongst them. It accompanies the...
Saints’ Haloes and Mouse’s Ears Part II
Or Keeping One’s Halo While Losing One’s Head Back to saints. Given that one of the essential acts of sainthood is an untimely and occasionally gruesome demise, usually in a vigorous and imaginative fashion, the question arises ; what happens to the halo when the head...
Saint’s Haloes and Mouse’s Ears Part I
Or Putting A Few Things in Perspective The things we accept visually, rapidly and at face value, are legion. All those things we recognize, that “jump the synapses directly as a code” (as the folks in advertising just love to say), make up probably the majority of...
Many Meetings
Or the Ins and Outs of Tolkien Fandom Meeting Tolkien fans is invariably an engaging experience - occasionally delightful, sometimes moving, often a little scary - but never ordinary. It’s not that they form an always identifiable body, like Trekkies - who I find a...
Forging (More) Dragons
Or a Few Words From Someone Else About Dragons Forging Dragons will be out towards the end of the month. Here’s the preface, with the kind permission of the editor, so you won’t need to read it on the way to the checkout. “SVNT DRACONES” In the original draft of...
