Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 13
February 7, 2016
War of the Ghosts
The following post was written as a guest post for Tom Hillman’s blog, Alas, not me. At the March 1920 meeting of the Folk-Lore Society, all three papers were delivered by Cambridge men. A.C. Haddon gave the presidential address, W.H.R. Rivers discussed the conception of ‘soul-substance’ in New Guinea and Melanesia, and F.C. Bartlett reported on […]
January 14, 2016
Who is Gandalf?
Gandalf is the story maker within the story, the artist of fantasy within the fantasy. His staff is Tolkien’s pen as it appears within Middle-earth. Gandalf! One morning, long ago in the quiet of the world, when Bilbo Baggins was enjoying a pipe out of doors after breakfast, Gandalf came by. Our unsuspecting hobbit saw […]
January 13, 2016
Tolkien’s magic II; or, what hobbits have that elves don’t
In my recent post on Tolkien’s Magic I argued that words constituted the real magic of Middle-earth, and illustrated this point by an exegesis of Gandalf’s confrontation with Gríma Wormtongue as a battle between two counsellors. But in my closing words I identified the various songs that precede the silencing of Wormtongue as the ‘real […]
January 10, 2016
Tolkien’s magic
What is Tolkien’s magic? We find magical items in Middle-earth, and also magical creatures, but at first sight magical spells appear rather scarce. Yet once we take Tolkien at his word we find magic interspersed throughout his stories, which themselves weave a spell of extraordinary potency. A spell, Tolkien explained in his St Andrews lecture on […]
December 10, 2015
Tolkien’s English Mythology (revisited)
It is now two years since I first formulated the idea that Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth were conceived as the stories of a lost English mythology. Since then the publication of Tolkien’s Beowulf commentary has amply corroborated this thesis, and my own research has established more clearly its range and, also, its limitations. The time feels ripe […]
October 19, 2015
Fantasy Incarnate
The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. J.R.R Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, lecture delivered in 1939 On the surface, the meaning of the above quotation appears straightforward: humans have always used language to tell stories to one another. But why, in the expression of this idea, do we […]
August 19, 2015
Albus Novus
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zurück, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich hätte wenig Glück. Below are two quotations from two twentieth-century thinkers rarely mentioned in the same breath. Firstly, an undated manuscript note by J.R.R. Tolkien: In Elvish sentiment the future was not one of hope or desire, but a […]
May 20, 2015
Levitation Machine
The big local news here in Luzit concerns the new levitation technology that we have just purchased and installed in the garden. The purchase was made possible by a generous donation from the grandparents to the BDY FUND, a small private charity that specializes in providing relief to overtired parents who live in our house. We […]
May 18, 2015
Keith Tribe on ‘Utilitarianism, the Moral Sciences, and Political Economy: Mill-Grote-Sidgwick’
Here is Keith Tribe giving the István Hont Memorial Lecture last Monday (May 11, 2015). http://traffic.libsyn.com/intellectua... You can read Keith’s account of what he was doing in the lecture on his website.
April 10, 2015
Night in the Museum
Reading John Gibbins’ latest post over at the Grote Club I was struck by how much we share in our approach to modern Cambridge intellectual history, but also how divergent are our perspectives. What we agree on is the vital importance of the Rev. John Grote to this history. This is no small beer. John has dedicated much […]
