Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 12

Death and the Tower

At the root of Tolkien’s fantasy is a meditation upon death. Paradoxically, this is the reason that Tolkien strikes such deep chords and yet remains so little understood. For death is the last taboo. An author who has thought long and hard about death can tell us much that we yearn to know but dare […]

The Shadow in the Nameless East

Over the weekend a couple of people sent me links to ‘All the East is Moving‘, an online essay by the British popular historian Tom Holland. His long essay is thought provoking and flawed. Holland describes the First Reich as born a thousand years ago out of life-or-death struggles between Christian Germans and invading barbarian hordes – which begin […]

Tolkien’s undiscovered previously discovered laundry list with new annotations

A laundry list “from the darker side of JRR Tolkien’s washing basket,” which hints at an early version of the orc clothing that Sam and Frodo wore on the last stage of their journey in The Lord of the Rings, is due to be published for the first time in more than 70 days this November. Tolkien’s laundry […]

Scholarship as a Vocation

The modern university in 1917 The ‘modern university,’ as Keith Tribe has pointed out, arose by way of a misapprehension. In the 1870s and 1880s many American students attended university in Germany: Returning graduate students brought back to the United States the ideal of the ‘modern research university’, an institution driven by academic research, its […]

Brexit

Some reflections on the modern university

I’ve been studying English intellectual history for nearly three decades, focusing on the years between 1865 and 1925. At the beginning of this period intellectual life in England took place largely outside the universities; by the end of it the modern university had emerged, replete with its professional journals and division of faculties, and has claimed […]

Origins

I’ve been doing this blog for a few years now, and use it mainly as a means of playing around with ideas as a preliminary stage of research. Beyond my ideas, I’m careful to avoid exposing much about myself. But the other day my cousin sent me some old family photos, and I felt a strange […]

Rounded Globe

We now have a brand new website for Rounded Globe. Have a look: feed your mind! All our ebooks can be read online, downloaded (Kindle, tablet) for free, and legally shared with others. And all our ebooks embody scholarly excellence. The original site went up just over a year ago and for some months contained only […]

Journal of Tolkien Research

I just received an automatic email from the Journal of Tolkien Research (JTR) saying my new Tolkien article – ‘Fantasy Incarnate: Of Elves and Men’ – has been published.  JTR is an open access journal, so you can read the article here. This post is not about the article, however, but the journal it has just appeared in. This […]

Faërie as Nature

We have got too hung up on the idea of Tolkien’s fantasy as an escape into a world of make believe. Tolkien believed that humans, as mortal souls, are part strangers here on earth. From this perspective Faërie, rather than some ‘other world’, is simply the natural world as experienced by those who truly belong to it. […]