Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, I've been avoided posting about the troubles faced by the University of Arizona. Already coming into this semester, we knew our particular college (Social and Behavioral Sciences) was going to a $5 or $6 million dollar shortfall . . . and then coronavirus hit. Given that the U of A receives about half of its tuition dollars from out-of-state and international students, whose enrollments are predicted to decline precipitously for Fall 2020 the university is obviously in dire financial straits. To address this situation, upper admin is  (A) introducing mandatory furloughs on all employees of at least 10%. Since teachers are not allowed to let the quality of their teaching suffer, faculty whose jobs consist entirely of teaching (like us lecturers) are basically being given "pay cuts", a phrase admin is apparently reluctant to use. (B) A hiring freeze, and offering admission to fewer potential graduate students. (C) Increased course caps for Writing Program cour...

What, what? Well, apparently , an example of Tolkien writing skaldic verse has just been uncovered. . . . and, as far as I can tell, this may be the first evidence we've ever had that Tolkien even wrote skaldic verse. So, Tolkien wrote a lot of alliterative poetry, most of it using Old English metrics, but sometimes in Old Norse. For example, the two long poems in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun . However, that is specifically eddic verse, and I've never seen anything that suggested that Tolkien wrote skaldic forms. In the following article on skaldic dróttkvætt , though, Roberta Frank reproduces one of Tolkien's skaldic verses. In a footnote, she gives the following source: A typed copy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s dróttkvætt imitation was presented to me more than forty years ago by the late Eric Christiansen, New College, Oxford, who had discovered three stanzas in Tolkien’s hand inside the latter’s copy of Heimskringla (The Saga Library, ed. and trans. William Morris...

It's true, apparently. About a week ago, a gentleman from ArdaNEWS Studio, a Chinese fan society, contacted me for permission to translate " On Ways of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward a Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism " into Mandarin. Or at least I'm assuming it's Mandarin. He gave me the links where it would be put up, but of course . . . it's all in Chinese. Actually, I had to do a fair amount of digging to make sure that it was a legitimate fan society, since one must always beware predatory publishing in foreign languages.** But it looks like everything is on the up-and-up, and it's just a really cool thing to put on my CV. And this now makes this my second article being translated, even. Strangely, the first one is my other publication for The Journal of Tolkien Research, " Harken Not to Wild Beasts: Between Rage and Eloquence in Saruman and Thrasymachus ," which is being translated into modern Greek for a collection edited by Dr. Dimi...

As part of quarantine, I've started Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicles . For years, I've refused to read it because he just won't finish the damn thing, but it's good. Really good. Still, I continued to be annoyed that there's no book three yet. Also, The Name of the Wind is 700 pages and The Wise Man's Fear is 1100 page. As a kid, I used to love super long books -- it was my version of extreme sports. I read not just once but twice both Stephen King's It and L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth . Now, though, as someone who reads books for a living, I firmly believe that writing long books is simple bad manners -- no matter how quickly the pages turn!