Random Blog Post Discovered on an Article of Mine

So, this really bucks me up .... I discovered a random blogger, Joe Hoffman, whom I discovered through a recent mention on Brenton Dickieson's own excellent website A Pilgrim in Narnia, and I saw that Hoffman was interested in Poul Anderson. "Cool!" I thought. "I'm working on Poul Anderson too."

Then I noticed that among Hoffman's keyword categories was "Alliterative Verse." Growing excited at seeing someone else interested in this same thing, I clicked the link .... and, right off the bat, immediately saw a highly laudatory reference (and link) to my own paper published last year in Studies in the Fantastic, “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry”. The link used by Hoffman was to the version on Humanities Commons. 

It seems like Hoffman was also familiar with Jere Fleck and the Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia, two groups important in the Modern Alliterative Revival. It's an amazingly small world once you know what to start looking for ....

Anyway, reading through Hoffman's posts, he's done a lot of digital humanities work measuring levels of alliterative phrases in The Lord of the Rings. I have some questions about his methodology, but overall it looks fascinating. Almost ridiculously fascinating, in fact.

Here's a summary of some conclusions by Hoffman; the specific blog post is titled, "Alliterative-verse density measurement".

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