Tolkien and Fantasy

A long time in the making, Abrams Press has released (on September 15th) a new special hardcover edition of Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion Tetralogy, which is made up of The Virgin and the Swine (1936; retitled The Island of the Mighty in 1970); The Child…

In the Spring 2026 issue of Mythlore, I reviewed the book Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection (2025), edited by Amanda T.

I've just posted a new piece at Tolkien Oddments substack.

Okay, I'm experimenting.

A.

My dragon award from the Tolkien Society, announced here (with other winners) at the end of April, arrived a few weeks ago.

In July 1964, L.

So far as I know, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author of such magisterial fantasy stories as "The Aleph" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," mentioned Tolkien only twice--and not favorably.

Recently I finished a checklist of the writings of Richard Adams (1920-2016), the author of Watership Down and many other books.

I just learned that the painter, illustrator and writer known as Ul de Rico (his full name was Ulderico Conte Gropplero di Troppenburg) passed away on 3 August 2023, a bit over a year ago, aged 79.

In The Letters of J.R.R.

So I started watching the Apple tv series The Changeling, based on the Victor Lavelle novel, and at the very beginning there is shown a shelf of books in a library in Queens.

In May 2024, a scrap of paper

The fact that Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was one of the first reviewers of The Silmarillion on its publication in 1977, seems to have long escaped Tolkienists, and Tolkien bibliographers.

The 1964 & 1973 Knopf dwThe recent hullabaloo over posthumously revising classic texts to conform to contemporary ideologies reminded me that I have long wanted to look into the changes Roald Dahl himself made in 1973 to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I just googled to see if my old friend Richard Mathews was still the Director of the University of Tampa Press, only to find out that he died last month.

Oscar Wilde by MaxThe New York Public Library recently hosted an exhibition on Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity from October 20, 2023--January 28, 2024.

In Tolkien On Fairy-Stories (2008), Verlyn Flieger and I noted that in Tolkien's research notes for his famous lecture/essay, Tolkien queried himself twice about whether on not Andrew Lang had included a retold Beowulf in any of his Fairy Books--the first…

When I made my previous post, I did not know that Chris Riddell had earlier illustrated Tolkien in a similar anthology of illustrated extracts.

The Puffin Twentieth-Century Collection of Stories (1999), edited by Judith Elkin, is a collections of extracts from 23 children's books, each extract illustrated by a different artist, in varying modes.

Michael Hague illustrated the 1984 edition of The Hobbit, but that wasn't the only time he illustrated scenes from The Hobbit.

So David Bratman of Tolkien Studies just posted here that Verlyn Flieger is retiring from the journal after 22 years.

Recently, David Haden, at his Lovecraftian blog Tentaclii, noted that an old and rare children's fantasy is now available in pdf-form for the first time (link accessible here).

Charles in 1987My friend Charles Noad was found dead on Thursday of last week.