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 […]
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 […]