I've been listening to the 1968 BBC radio dramatization of The Hobbit and wow is it a bit jarring. Having grown up with the music from the animated 1977 Rankin and Bass production, hearing the poems and songs performed with different melodies and cadence is an "uncanny valley" level of weird.
G...
Fans of JRR Tolkien already know that his love of language led him to seek the roots of his native English in Anglo Saxon verse and Norse saga. Many of his scholarly investigations were published. As someone who loves ancient history, works like Tolkien's 'Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment' 1...
Better known as 'The Fragment', what follows is a translation of all that is left of an (apparently) 5th century anglo-saxon lay that describes a saxon hero, Hengest. This may very well be the same Hengest who led the first Germanic invasion of Britain, and if so probably did so shortly after the...
Sometimes there's just no way to do something unless you know somebody. Seeing an advance showing of the Lord of the Rings, the Return of the King would have been pretty much a fantasy but for my buddy Seth. Thanks, man! Seth was kind enough to extend his extra tickets to my brother and myself,...
