Anna Smol: A Single Leaf

Category: Publications

  • Tolkien the Playwright

    We don’t often think of Tolkien as a playwright. Fantasy novelist — of course. Poet, scholar, artist – yes. But we shouldn’t forget that Tolkien also wrote one published play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” – let’s call it “The Homecoming” for short – which was produced by BBC Radio and has been read…

  • Adaptation as Analysis: Student Projects on Medievalism and Tolkien, part 1

    As usual, students in my Studies in Medievalism course have created wonderful projects to demonstrate their engagement with our texts and to experience first-hand the process of adaptation, a main theme in our seminar. I’ve written about this type of assignment before in my essay “Adaptation as Analysis: Creative Work in an English Classroom” that…

  • Seers and Singers: Tolkien’s Typology of Sub-creators

    I was very pleased to have an essay recently published in A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, edited by John D. Rateliff and published by Gabbro Head Press, not only because I’m in fabulous company – take a look at the table of contents! – but mainly because I’m a great…

  • Tolkien as Artist and Writer

    Family and friends joined me in the Tolkien Birthday Toast on January 3rd, a global event sponsored by the Tolkien Society. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that your own toast is part of a continuing wave of glasses raised around the world every hour at 9 p.m. local time. This year, I was fortunate…

  • New Books on Tolkien

    The busyness of the start of term in September gradually turns into the marking marathon that is October and November, and the silence of my blog in those months is testimony to how the hours of my days and evenings have been taken up with course preparations and grading, grading, grading. I was just reading…

  • An exercise for active reading of the syllabus

    “Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham http://www.phdcomics.com   It’s syllabus-writing season! Here’s an exercise I devised several years ago that I’m still using to promote students’ active thinking about course policies — and faculty understanding of how students perceive course requirements and regulations. The article explaining my exercise was published in the Atlantic Universities’…

  • Tolkien Society Seminar 2017

    Where do the months fly by? June was busy, as I was preparing my talk for the Tolkien Society Seminar in Leeds while also putting the final touches on our family vacation itinerary in Europe — we were given a very special opportunity this year to travel to France, Italy, and Scotland, with a stop…

  • Forthcoming: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger

    I’m very happy to announce that one of my essays will be part of a festschrift for Verlyn Flieger, a renowned Tolkien scholar and someone I admire very much. The book, A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, is edited by John Rateliff. He’s recently posted the table of contents on his…

  • Talks on Tolkien II: summer series. Flieger on Kullervo

    In the winter months of 2015, I posted a series, Talks on Tolkien, which consisted of presentations by Tolkien scholars that had been previously recorded and made available on the internet. As I was watching a live stream this morning from the New York Tolkien Conference Facebook page, I was reminded of how much I…

  • The Child, the Primitive, and the Medieval: making medieval heroes in the 19th and early 20th centuries

    I wrote “The Child, the Primitive, and the Medieval: Making Medieval Heroes in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” in an attempt to answer the questions, why would people think that stories of King Arthur or Beowulf or Robin Hood or stories written by Chaucer were appropriate for children? Why did late Victorian and…