Tag: J.R.R. Tolkien

April 15, 2012  |  No Comments

Richard III was Shakespeare’s first great play, and it casts its touchstones across his oeuvre all the way into the forms of his last great play, The Tempest. Seas, storms, and a misbegotten devil are the ensigns that bookend the greatest literary oeuvre of all time like components of a recurring dream.

Now is the winter … Read More

February 8, 2011  |  No Comments

As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker in 2001, “The work of Tolkien is infamously, almost scandalously, bereft of sex.”  Lane says he read it at 11 and 12 years old, exactly when I did–an age when a pretty girl was scarier than an orc.  Lane says that Tolkien’s epic particularly suits “those who … Read More