HoD vs. RoP; game over
Rings of Power cost $60 million dollars per episode while House of the Dragon cost $20 million dollars per episode. These are astronomical figures, but RoP is arguably the most […]
Rings of Power, first two episodes, initial reaction
Good – they spent much of the massive budget on decent special effects. The scenery and setting were often great – the Hobbits are weird, but the main Hobbit character […]
The world of new Tolkien
Since Amazon is working on new Tolkien products, we’ll be hearing about the author and his works more. Most of the scuttlebutt is that the new series, set in the […]
Tolkien’s heir, R.I.P.
Christopher Tolkien, Keeper of His Father’s Legacy, Dies at 95: Christopher Tolkien, the son of the writer J.R.R. Tolkien, who guarded his legacy and brought forth monumental posthumous works, like “The Silmarillion,” based on his father’s writings, died on Wednesday in Provence, France. He was 95. The younger Tolkien became notable in his own right […]
From shades of gray fantasy to woke fantasy
Vox has an interesting but predictable reaction to the finale of the show that much of America was watching, The Game of Thrones finale had a chance to break the wheel. It upheld the status quo. The show is obviously now its own thing apart from the books. But as someone who was reasonably immersed […]
The new Amazon Tolkien series will be set during the Second Age
So it’s confirmed, the new Amazon Tolkien series will be set during the Second Age. This seems like a fine choice, since some of the characters that we know and “love,” such as Sauron, Galadriel, and Elrond, will be major players, and the framework for the Third Age which is the backdrop that we’re familiar […]
The beginning of the end of Game of Thrones and the hanging thread of A Song of Ice and Fire
Even if marginally, A Storm of Swords is the highest rated of George R. R. Martin’s books on Amazon. In the judgment of many people, which includes me, it is the best of his books. It was also the highpoint of interest in the series. For various reasons, it was published several months earlier in […]
Game of Thrones, a journey of three peoples
Westeros and western EssosThe HBO television series, Games of Thrones, has captured the imagination of modern American culture. It has been used as a metaphor and example for many things, from national politics to international relations, and of course…
Reflections on the biology of Homo calaquendi
For a while now I’ve been really haunted by a question about the verisimilitude of J. R. R. Tolkien’s world-building: what are the long-term social and biological consequences of the fact that the Eldar, the elves, are immortal? Consider the fact that the elves are long-lived, and not particularly fecund. Even when they are, inter-general […]
Gods and wizards in fantasy
A reader in the comments pointed me to Vice and Fire (though I’d already seen it on Twitter), a rumination on 20th century and 21st century fantasy literature by Peter Hitchens in First Things. Hitchens is the religious and politically conservative brother of the late Christopher Hitchens. The piece is curious because it reflects more about Hitchens […]
The Fall of Gondolin and the transformation of Tolkien’s world
In a little over a week, The Fall of Gondolin will be released. This is on the heels of the publication of Beren and Lúthien last year, and The Children of Húrin in 2007. I notice that both of these two books are “Kindle Deals” right now, so they are probably anticipating that getting more […]
Rule #34 for Elves
George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire was striking in the mid-1990s when the first book debuted because it combined the epic aspect which suffused J. R. R. Tolkien’s work with a gritty realism in regards to sex and violence more appropriate for HBO. So it was entirely unsurprising that Martin’s vision […]
Winds of Winter not likely in 2018
George R.R. Martin Throws Even More Cold Water on Winds of Winter Dreams. Basically, it looks like he will come out with a different book first. It’s hard to imagine him squeezing out the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire before that in 2018. There were two years between A Game of […]
The world of Tolkien coming to the smallscreen
Unless you are hiding under a rock right now you may have heard that Amazon seems to have purchased the rights for the world of The Lord of the Rings. My understanding is that this deal does not cover The Silmarillion (unfortunate, but perhaps for the best as I’m not sure I’d want to see a dramatization […]
Can we make Tolkien “woke”?
The Pacific Standard has a piece, How can we untangle white supremacy from medieval studies, which is an equal part nuggets of fact and equal part tripe. Setting aside much which I found disagreeable in the piece, I was intrigued by the references to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work and their relationship to the race-theories […]
A plethora of secondary worlds
A short write-up, Why build new worlds, which surveys the origins and of secondary creations such as Middle Earth. One aspect of these attempts at world-building is the most detailed ones invariably borrow and reconfigure aspects of our own universe. This is obvious in The Song of Ice and Fire, and explicit in The Lord […]
Does Tad Williams still have game?
Like many people I was quite taken with Tad Williams Memory, Sorry, and Throne, when they came out in the years around 1990. George R. R. Martin has admitted that Williams’ trilogy helped awaken him to the possibilities of the fantasy genre. I tried to read his Shadowmarch series, but I didn’t find it as […]
The year shall belong to those who finish
Seeing as how I have three children, I don’t think I’m admitting my virginity when I admit that I am mildly excited that Brandon Sanderson’s third volume of his ten volume The Way of Kings, Oathbringer, is coming out in the fall. Sanderson writes at a fast clip and finishes lots of books. Yes, his […]
Tad Williams’ Revisits Osten Ard
Tad Williams has a new book set in Osten Ard, The Heart of What Was Lost. At only 224 pages it seems more like a novella compared to what he produced for his original series. The last of that of that trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel T…
An Orientalist fantasy
A few months ago I had a post up about Game of Thrones, where I argued that to a great extent the book and the world that George R. R. Martin created was racist because that’s true to how pre-modern worlds generally are constructed structurally….