The Naming of Hobbits. By Michael Adams It will be interesting to see how much of J.R.R. Tolkien ’s several invented languages will appear in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit . In a letter to his American publisher, dated 30 June 1955, Tolkien suspected there were limits to how much invented language readers would ‘stomach’ — to use his term. There are certainly limits to how much can be included in a film. American audiences, anyway, are subtitle averse. The Lord of the Rings Family Tree Project. Terry Pratchett: 'Fantasy is uni-age' Terry Pratchett's entourage has taken over a corner of the White Hart hotel in Salisbury, a long-standing haunt of the writer, who has a house just outside the town.
There's his PA, Rob Wilkins, whose role has become more demanding since Pratchett announced in 2007 that he had a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's; a publicist; and Mr Boggis, a fan who describes himself as "PA to the PA". Mr Boggis is named after a character from Pratchett's Discworld series; he says he has read all 39 books. I never do discover his real name. There will be another Discworld book, Raising Steam, in the autumn, but it is nothing if not an industry: this month, Pratchett publishes volume IV in his Science of Discworld series, in which chapters of fantasy alternate with chapters of surprisingly demanding Roundworld [aka Earth] science, supplied by Pratchett's long-time collaborators, mathematician Professor Ian Stewart and biologist Dr Jack Cohen. Los Angeles Review of Books - To Understand The World Is To Be Destroyed By It: On H.P. Lovecraft.
Why has Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the elitist, eccentric, racist New England writer of that specialized brand of fear literature known as “cosmic horror,” lasted and prospered where other, better writers have been forgotten.
Study: Reading novels makes us better thinkers. Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity?
It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. Fortunately, new research suggests a simple anecdote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction. A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.
“Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.” Djikic and her colleagues describe an experiment featuring 100 University of Toronto students. Mangling A Myth, Ctd. Mangling A Myth, Ctd. The Hidden Hobbit: 10 Secrets from Tolkien's Classic. Revisiting "The Hobbit" is like sifting through the deep piles of loot in a dragon's hoard: there's always something new to discover about J.R.R.
Tolkien and his classic. Here are 10 secrets concerning the author and his tale that you, good lover of Middle-earth, might have overlooked. A Hobbit Smorgasbord The first translation of "The Hobbit" was in Swedish, and Tolkien was none too pleased with the result. The translator altered the name of Hobbits to the bizarre Hompen. Tolkien hated it when foreign publishers changed his word Hobbit to something else, like the first Portuguese edition that was called "O Gnomo" ("The Gnome"). Smells Like Hobbit Spirit In Tolkien's posthumously published story "The Quest of Erebor," Gandalf states that he chose the plucky Bilbo to join Thorin's expedition to the Lonely Mountain for one very important reason: Smaug the dragon would not be able to identify the down-to-Middle-earth aroma of one of the Shire-folk.
The Hunger Games Novel & Katniss Everdeen. 40,000 students worldwide are studying Lord of the Rings Online and you can too. Professor Jay Clayton of Vanderbilt University is chatting with me over Skype, but he admits that his attention is slightly divided.
He's got Lord of the Rings Online running on a second monitor, and countless players are sending him messages to say hello. Clayton has to be the most popular player in Lord of the Rings Online right now. Apart from his two level-capped end-game characters he also runs low-level characters on 18 different servers that he uses just to communicate with his compatriots around the world. Clayton is so popular because he's running an online course right now called “Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative” that's being taken by over 40,000 students around the world and focuses largely on Lord of the Rings Online. Big elf on campus. To Understand the World Is To Be Destroyed By It: On H.P. Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft as Source Code. Today is the birthday of one H.P.
Lovecraft, a pulp writer from the early part of the 20th century. There’s a gigantic list of birthdays for pulp writers of the 20th century – you could form a calender of saints out of them all, if you wanted to – and you haven’t heard of most of them.