Anna Smol: A Single Leaf

Category: Review

  • Movie reviews by Tolkien scholars and fans

    The Tolkien biopic has been in limited release for several weeks now, and assessments have appeared in many of the usual places by professional movie reviewers.  I’ve decided to collect a few reviews by Tolkien scholars and fans.  I’m not aiming to be comprehensive, so let me know in the comments if there’s a review…

  • Jackson’s Lost Opportunity: The Death of Sister-Sons

    I enjoy many things about Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films – the material realization of various Middle-earth cultures, the creation of the best movie dragon I’ve ever seen, Martin Freeman’s Bilbo, to name only a few – but of course Jackson is not making the films specifically for me, a medievalist with a love of Tolkien’s…

  • Dictionnaire Tolkien review in Medievally Speaking

    A little over a month ago, I published a review of Dictionnaire Tolkien in Medievally Speaking, an open access review publication associated with the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. This book challenged me to think about the reception of Tolkien in languages other than English; specifically in this case, in French. It hadn’t…

  • The Tolkien Encyclopedia & Reader’s Diary: A Look Back

    The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment is now available in paperback and Kindle version, making this reference work much more affordable than the $100-plus Canadian and US hardback edition (with similar pricing in the UK). The Encyclopedia, edited by Michael D.C. Drout, includes entries by well-known critics such as Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger,…

  • Tolkien’s Guinever

    In my previously posted thoughts on Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur, I predicted that the character of Guinever would give rise to a lot more discussion, and we are seeing that debate occurring already on several sites.  Troels Forchhammer, who has listed a thorough collection of reviews on his blog Parma-kenta, has added his own…

  • Fall of Arthur – more reviews

    I posted a list of reviews of Tolkien’s Fall of Arthur back in June, but I now have a few more to add.  Most recently, Kathy Cawsey has published “The Lord of the Round Table” in Open Letters Monthly. Below is my collated list of selected reviews in online publications and in a few blogs (including…

  • “Wild blow the winds of war”: Tolkien’s Fall of Arthur

    [Can there be spoilers in an Arthurian tale? I don’t know if my review would count as a spoiler, but if you’re worried about such things, you might want to proceed with caution.] In a darkening world, tides are flowing fast and winds sweeping into the west while ghostly apparitions ride through the skies. Tolkien’s…

  • Fall of Arthur reviews

    I’m gathering my own thoughts on the recently published Fall of Arthur poem by Tolkien; in the meantime, here are a few reviews. John Garth, “Tolkien’s Unfinished Epic: ‘The Fall of Arthur.’” The Daily Beast. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/23/tolkien-s-unfinished-epic-the-fall-of-arthur.html Elizabeth Hand.  “J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Fall of Arthur’ and the Path to Middle-Earth.”   Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-jrr-tolkien-fall-of-arthur-middle-earth20130526,0,7954386.story Some brief comments…