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  UPDATE: I wrote this post back in 2020 after a second reading of The Silmarillion left me unimpressed and fairly baffled. I've done a bit more reading around the subject since then, and on a third reading recently the book finally started to come into focus for me. I might try to blog about it at more length at some point. So I no longer stand by a lot of what I've written below, but I'll leave it here anyway. PR, 2025   When I was nine or ten I started to notice that a lot of my favourite authors claimed The Mabinogion as an important influence. So I ventured forth across the wilds of Queen’s Park even unto the Kemptown Bookshop and picked up the Everyman paperback edition, only to discover when I got it home that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Obeying no narrative structures that I’d encountered before, and sometimes consisting of little more than long lists of names, the Welsh legends collected in The Mabinogion contained little on which my imagination coul...

When I started re-reading The Lord of the Rings recently I thought I might get a blog post out of it, or maybe even two. Now, nine posts later, we finally draw near to the Grey Havens. If you have been, thanks for reading... Alan Lee So Sauron has been defeated, the War of the Ring is ended, the might of Mordor is destroyed, and Aragorn has taken his rightful place as king of Gondor with Arwen as his queen. Yay! And yet the the tone of The Return of the King becomes tinged with melancholy almost as soon as the Ring is destroyed. For its destruction doesn't just mean the end of the Dark Lord: it also heralds the end of the age of the Elves and the Ents, the age of magic. John Boorman, moving on from his abortive 1970s Lord of the Rings adaptation to direct the Arthurian epic Excalibur , gave Merlin a line which Gandalf or Galadriel might have said (and perhaps would have, if his version of Middle-earth had reached the screen). ' Our days are numbered. The old ways ...

I am re-reading The Lord of the Rings and blogging about some of the vague half-formed thoughts that it sends flittering, moth-like, across my sensorium... It's not hard to see why illustrators and film makers have been drawn to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's writing, especially about landscape, is incredibly visual. Here's Sam, alone on the pass of Cirith Ungol after Frodo's capture by the orcs, getting his first proper look down into Mordor. Hard and cruel and bitter was the land that met his gaze. Before his feet the highest ridge of the Ephel Dûath fell steeply in great cliffs down into a dark trough, on the further side of which there rose another ridge, much lower, its edge notched and jagged with crags like fangs that stood out black against the red light behind them: it was the grim Morgai, the inner ring of the fences of the land. Far beyond it, but almost straight ahead, across a wide lake of darkness dotted with tiny fires, there was...

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...

I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings for the eleventy-first time, and blogging my thoughts about it. You lucky people... So Gollum has led Sam and Frodo to the Black Gate of Mordor, and they've found it shut. They turn south, and their weary journey continues - they have no food except the Elvish Lembas they brought from Lorien, which is getting a bit samey. The landscape is still dreary and ruinous, and now that they are so close to Sauron's stronghold the Ring on its chain round Frodo's neck is getting heavier and heavier - his growing weariness and Sam's concern for him are constant themes in these chapters. First sight of Ithilien, by Ted Nasmith But as always in The Lord of the Rings , after an ordeal there comes respite, a rest, and usually a meal. It seems unlikely that the hobbits will find anywhere to rest so close to Mordor's borders, yet they do: the wooded countryside of Ithilien, which has only recently fallen under the Enemy's control, ...

I'm re-reading The Lord of the Rings . Tremble before the hotness of my takes... The Uffington White Horse, c/o Wikipedia Q: How cool are the Riders of Rohan? A: Extremely cool. They combine the outfits and culture of the Anglo Saxons with the expert horsemanship and healthy outdoor lifestyles of the Sioux or the Apache. They were always my favourites when I was young, and now that I'm very much no longer young the only problem I can see with them is that they make the Gondor crowd in The Return of the the King look a bit dull by comparison. But we haven't reached The Return of the King yet: we're still on Book One of The Two Towers , and if you're still reading this, thank you so much! We left Merry and Pippin marching off to war with the Ents, so now it's time for the narrative to loop back to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, who have just met a strange old man in another part of the forest. The strange old man turns out to be Gandalf, who has much impor...