Platypus of Truth

Great post by the Herch here advancing a new and interesting thesis about heroic pairs in Tolkien's works.  It's an intriguing idea and I highly recommend that you check it out!

There's something I've noticed while reading Tom Shippey's Road to Middle Earth .  Shippey really wants Tolkien to be an atheist.  It may not be a conscious desire, but it's a decided bent in both his books ( The Road to Middle Earth and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Twentieth Century ).  I have immense respect for Dr. Shippey's work, so this isn't an attack.  I notice this sort of warping even more with Verlyn Flieger who seems to have a dire need to turn Tolkien into a Barfieldian acolyte.  I also notice it in Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings where he seems to need Tolkien to have a very privatized faith to set off against what he seems to see as Lewis' overly militant faith. I don't just see this warping tendency in Tolkien criticism either.  There are Catholic commentators who need Shaekspeare or Lewis to be crypto-Catholics in order to enjoy them.  There are Protestant scholars who need Dante to be a proto-Protestant before they can enjoy ...

The 2011-2012 school year has been for me the year of the secondary sources.  I have determined that it is high time I go back to my professional roots and continue in earnest my study of Ancient Greece.  This has meant countless trips to the used bookstore to catch anything the universities are dumping and getting a helping hand from some very kind family friends. In preparation for my great trek, I started off at the popular level in an attempt to build up my interest and ease back into the swing of things.  To begin with, I chose The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander and The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss.  Once the wheels were in motion, I picked up the pace a bit with a tour through Oswyn Murry's Early Greece , Robin Lane Fox's Traveling Heroes in the Epic Age of Homer , and Vassos Karageorghis' Early Cyprus .  Now that we're full-steam-ahead, I've turned to Gregory Nagy's The Best of the Achaeans , and A.B. Lord's Epic Singers and Or...

This post will be a review of Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever , the second volume in Mike Mignola's Sir Edward Grey series.  If you wish to remain spoiler free, don't read on. As the name suggests, Lost and Gone Forever brings Sir Edward Grey to the American Wild West on the trail of occult evil.  To briefly summarize the plot, Grey travels to Reidlynne Utah on the trail of Lord Adam Glaren, a British nobleman who has committed an unspecified crime. Grey's first attempts to locate Glaren are a disaster with the Englishman's failure to understand frontier culture landing him in the stereo-typical bar fight.  The locals then attempt to run him out of town and Grey is only saved by the intervention of the mysterious Morgan Kaler.  What exactly Mr. Kaler does, we never find out, but he seems to be a sort of occult detective himself.  Throughout Lost and Gone Forever , the older Kaler adopts a mentoring role, with Grey slowly learning that he doesn't kn...