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...
The Discovery Age
Western historians refer to the period from the late 15th century through the 17th century as "The Age of Exploration" or "The Age of Discovery". These terms are obviously ethnocentric as they refer to the discoveries made by western Europeans primarily on the seas during the "A...
I was first introduced to D&D in 1979 by some friends in school and was soon addicted. I spent inumerable hours creating maps and dungeons for my buddies to explore, and rolling up characters to populate my own worlds or to play in another kid's campaign. I played straight through high school bu...
Its been a while since I've written anything here. I've written plenty on various social media (G+, twitter, reddit mainly) but these places aren't under my own control and eventually whatever I write there will likely be lost as these companies grow, change, acquire and get acquired and their pr...
What is the Book of Song?
In late 2008 I was getting tired of lugging around the thick three ring binder that held all the songs my little troupe of folk musicians had learned up to that point. Over time the lyrics to the songs we did, complete with chords and sometimes with some of the history b...
I enjoyed watching Lawrence Olivier in Shakespeare's As You Like It tonight. Certainly not Olivier's best work (filmed in 1936 it was actually his first on-screen performance of Shakespeare) but having never read the play or seen it performed before I have to say that at the least it held my at...
My wife has been reading books on her palm pilot for years but when the prices began to fall on the e-ink e-readers recently I urged her to get one of those instead. The e-ink screens aren't backlit, so you have to read them in a lit room or outside but they're reflective (like real paper) so the...
Chaucer wrote The Parliament of Fowls in 1382 to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia (they were both 15 years old when they were married shortly thereafter), but it has become associated with the present day celebrated as Valentines Day over the centur...
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,...
