Although John Heath-Stubbs’s long modernist epic Artorius is largely unknown, this ambitious text combines a cyclical vision of history with a linear one on its way to understanding Great Britain’s loss of imperial status. If this point has generally been missed, the complexity of Heath-Stubbs’s multiple symbolic superstructures partly accou…[Read more]

This essay explains the background for two famous essays on the alliterative meter by the Inklings, “The Alliterative Metre” (C.S. Lewis) and “On Translating Beowulf” (J.R.R. Tolkien). The latter essay, I argue, owes its final published form to a sense of academic urgency that Lewis’s own publication had unwittingly instilled in his friend Tolkien.

Details the usages of “gnomes” in L. Frank Baum and J.R.R. Tolkien

The alliterative poetics used by C. S. Lewis have often proved a critical challenge for scholars without the right kind of medievalist training. In Lewis’s most ambitious contribution to the Modern Alliterative Revival, The Nameless Isle, I argue that he has a strong interest in maintaining fidelity to the Old English alliterative meter, p…[Read more]

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are two key figures in the Modern Alliterative Revival, and each sought to revive Old English poetics with close to absolute metrical fidelity. While scholarship on Tolkien’s alliterative verse has seen an uptick in recent years, though, Lewis remains the odd poet out. Nominally, this article attempts to assign a c…[Read more]

Although Marxist critics, including Frederic Jameson, have found little to admire about fantasy literature in general or J. R. R. Tolkien specifically, one of the prime qualities of Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) is its instantiation of depth—the serious treatment of the conflict between the ancient world and modern. As such, works such as The Hob…[Read more]

The secondary literature on The Dispossessed mostly treats the novel as a conveyer of ideas, and Le Guin herself has frequently objected to this. I wish to situate The Dispossessed within a tradition of ambiguous literary utopias by linking The Dispossessed with Plato’s Republic. According to Leo Strauss, Plato isn’t writing a blueprint for a per…[Read more]

A small but influential segment of modern fantasy literature deals with evil possessed vampire demon swords (EPVIDS). The paradigm example is certainly Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer, but this article shows that Moorcock’s pulp tales have twentieth-century precursors in Poul Anderson and J. R. R. Tolkien, both of whom worked closely with Old Nor…[Read more]

In 1977, a landmark year for fantasy publishing, Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon emerged as one of the era’s most popular fantasy novels. Since then, however, the novel’s reputation (as well as Anthony’s) has fallen precipitously. The reason for this, I suggest, involves our changing habits of critical reading, which view Anthony’s sexism an…[Read more]