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Thanks to Andoni Cossio scouring the University of Leeds's Tolkien-Gordon collection, we have now discovered a new alliterative poem by C. S. Lewis: "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg"! This is the problem with research: I just published a whole anthology containing  all of Lewis's known alliterative poems, and now another one has been found! Grump grump. It's a pretty interesting poem, though ... Andoni actually showed it to me prior to publication, and we talked about its dating. The title refers to Beowulf , in particular the evil queen Modthryth ( although this isn't a proper name in Old English; Lewis sees the word instead as "Mood of Thyrth"). Despite the title, this 12-line text was written as a thank-you note to Eric and Ida Gordon, two philologists at Leeds, after having stayed at their home for a few days. According to Andoni, a poem by Tolkien dated June 26, 1935 references Lewis's earlier stay, which therefore puts "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg" to earl

I n the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival , I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural knowledge, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult. Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of

When talking about original fan works of the Modern Revival, no discussion is complete without Paul Douglas Deane. If you’ve heard of him before, it’s no doubt thanks to his website founded in 1999, Forgotten Ground Regained – the largest and best collection of alliterative verse on the interwebz. Originally, Deane envisioned his site as a combination blog, fanzine, and content index, running things on that model for about a decade before life (as they say) intervened. But then Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival appeared, and this event motivated Deane to give his website a major overhaul. Now the layout is sleeker and snazzier than ever before, and Deane’s talent for finding new alliterative poets has been on full display. In the last few months alone, he’s discovered several new revivalists, and a few of them – Lancelot Schaubert, Amit Majmudar, Susan Edwards – have already been discussed in this series. The thing is, Forgotten Ground Regained – as important a

I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony . And even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, I guarantee you'll never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two dis

Last week, when comparing medieval retellings of the Trojan War to contemporary fan fiction, my reason involved more than there simply being folks like M. Wendy Hennequin around, people for whom medievalism and creative fan activity are deeply entwined. My other reason is that the Middle Ages can seem so distant to my students. Popular culture helps them grasp some aspects of medieval life and culture, albeit often in distorted form, for instance feudalism and chivalry, but otherwise? The instinctive concern for rank, the holy awe of kingship, the ubiquity of religion in daily life … all these things tend to be beyond the everyday experience of college students in the 21 st century. As a teacher, you have to find a bridge. Calling stories about the Trojan War or King Arthur “fanfic” therefore breaks down a historical barrier. Students know what fan fiction is. They understand the conventions. So while it’s easy to be intimidated by a syllabus that contains Dante’s Inferno with the gho

  The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf:  M. Wendy Hennequin and Fan Fiction In my introduction to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival , my first section is called “The Story of the Modern Revival.” Every story needs a hero, though, and our story’s unsung hero is undeniably contemporary fandom. Many years ago, I once read an essay by Harlan Ellison praising SF for having so many big-name authors emerge from the ranks of SF fandom. He considered this situation distinct from mainstream, non-genre literature, and while I won’t agree with Ellison completely – as one of my students once told me, she has an older brother named Geoffrey because of how much their mother loves The Canterbury Tales – but still, genre fandom seems special. Such fandom has been a guiding light for the Modern Revival, too. We’ve already touched upon several revivalists with impeccable fan roots: Fletcher Pratt, Poul Anderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Paul Edwin Zimmer. Nonetheless, most people tend to think

Newest post in the series ! This one tackles what happens when steampunk poetry meets the medieval alliterative meter.

So, Paul Deane just clued me into a new long alliterative poem, Ulfhildr by Mary Thaler, that's hot off the presses -- published November 10, 2023. I wrote it a positive review on Amazon and Goodreads, because really, we're all in this together. You'll find that review below. However, I was a bit more skeptical about some of Thaler's metrical choices, and since I shared these with the group at Forgotten Ground Regain, I'm posting them here below my review. REVIEW This is an exciting new long poem in a modified form of the Old English alliterative meter. Calling it an "epic" (as the back cover does) is probably a misnomer; Thaler's narrative is quite linear, and it contains few twists or complications. Yet it's also peppered with powerful passages that show exactly what a modern poet can accomplish with an archaic medieval poetics. The heroine's closing monologue is particular strong. In fact, we find a stronger feminist element in her speeches

So, last week, I described my purist-impressionist scale as a 1–10 spectrum of historical metrical fidelity. Yet I know some people will naturally (and automatically) discount certain impressionists solely on the suspicion that they don’t know much, if anything, about genuine medieval alliterative poetics. And, granted, some revivalists do not, but even if true, I suggested this doesn’t necessarily impact a text’s literary merit one way or another. Proof is always in the pudding, though, so let’s prepare to be slathered in pudding. We’ll be turning to three exciting revivalists whose deviations from the historical meters are, bluntly, less than fully intentional, yet their texts are both fascinating and critically interesting. Without further ado, our first poet is ….. PATRICK ROTHFUSS Call me biased (and I probably am), but the honor of most metrically bonkers revivalist goes to Patrick Rothfuss. He included two poems in The Wise Man’s Fear (2011), and from a purist’s perspect

One oddity about the Modern Revival is that, historically, critics don’t normally categorize literary movements according to poetic form alone. For instance, we don’t talk about the “Rhyming Octosyllabic Revolution” of Anglo-Norman England, or the “Blank Verse-ism” of the Elizabethan stage. This oddity has been one reason (out of several) some medievalists have challenged the notion of an “alliterative revival” in the mid-14 th century at all. After all, no medieval source ever mentions such a movement. The whole idea is a hypothesis put forth by modern scholars. Although my Brit Lit I survey course in college confidently taught the mid-14 th century revival as accepted fact, quite a few recent scholars have argued that just because various late medieval poems share a certain set of metrical similarities, they needn’t constitute an actual community of poets with similar attitudes or aims. The whole notion of metrical revivalism in the later Middle Ages is, therefore, a shot in the da

It's rare to have my mind blown by a review essay ..... but Joseph Rex Young's review of two edited collections about HARRY POTTER, published last year in Mythlore , is not only the single best thing I've yet seen written on J.K. Rowling's legacy, but it's also simply one of the best *written* (and most literary) reviews I've ever had the pleasure to read.   Young's review is open access and can be found here . If interested in Rowling studies, check it out.

So, I'm reading through the newly expanded version of Tolkien's Letters. One thing I hadn't properly realized is that these letters were part of Carpenter's original manuscript back in 1981, but Carpenter had to cut them due to cost. Turns out that Carpenter had a pretty keen eye on what could bear cutting -- most of this new stuff isn't terribly interesting, but I discovered a few nuggets. VINDICATED!! (Me, sorta) Naturally, whenever you read new primary material, your first instinct is to check to see if anything contradicts something you've said in print ... especially biographically. Well, I've made three big "biographical" claims, and here's my sigh of relief: Concerning my claim that, in 1954, Tolkien and colleagues contrived to create CS Lewis's academic chair at Cambridge in exchange for them nominating EM Forster for the Nobel Prize. Nothing in  Letters  supports or contradicts this. In my recent article for  Notes & Queries ,

I'm taking a bye week for the "New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf" series, so thought I'd post about something cool. In my fourth entry of the series, I discussed a poem by Lancelot Schaubert called "Dear Tolkien Estate." Well, apparently that inspired the curator for the Tales After Tolkien Society blog, Geoffrey Elliot, to pen a response, " In Response to Lancelot Schaubert ."  It's another nice example of its kind -- I always love discussions of literary history in such things (Elliot's first several lines), and there's a nifty reference to Tolkien's Unfinished Tales in there as well. 

BOOM! Latest entry just dropped on the Tales After Tolkien Society blog . 

Although technically this book is a sequel to Bolivar’s The Lay of Old Hex , I read this having only encountered A Wheel of Ravens before. From the two books, though, you can clearly tell that Bolivar has a unique style. Unlike Wheel , which is written in the Old English alliterative meter, this book primarily appears in ballad form. This creates a smooth reading experience with strong intimations of 18 th - and 19 th -century British folklore. Like Wheel, though, the poems in Ballad for the Witching Hour share several interconnected stories and characters that Bolivar likes to use in common. Most of this collection’s poems are “Jack” tales (although not all these “Jacks” appear to be the same Jack). There’s also a dream-world, lots of cool mythological references, shared characters such as Scarlet Balladress, and so on. Overall, I’d recommend reading Ballad for the Witching Hour in one sitting, like I did, because then you can better see how Bolivar’s poems all play off one anot

Of all the new alliterative poems I’ve recently seen, Lancelot Schaubert’s “ Dear Tolkien Estate ” is one of the more delightful. To give this one some context, if you’re a regular reader of Tales After Tolkien , you might have already heard of a little-known fantasy author by the name of J.R.R. Tolkien. Well, back in May 2013, the executor of Tolkien’s estate (his son Christopher) posthumously published one of his father’s longest original works in strict Old English meter, The Fall of Arthur . If you’ve not read it before, it’s a remarkable achievement, but alas … as holds true for most of Tolkien’s major projects, he never completed it. Only four cantos plus portions of a fifth are finished. Nevertheless, in 1934, he shared a draft of The Fall of Arthur with his trusted friend and colleague, the medievalist R. W. Chambers (1874-1942), who praised the poem highly. Yet this encouragement was apparently insufficient to entice Tolkien towards completion, and despite hinting a few deca

Having already discussed Poul Anderson, the Modern Revival’s most noteworthy early pulp poet, it only makes sense to now turn our sights on the Inklings, the two best-known “university” poets. And because most readers interested in such matters already know about Tolkien, let’s take the opportunity to give equal time to his friend and fellow Inkling, C. S. Lewis. Now, full disclosure: I’ve published a lot about Lewis’s alliterative verse, so there’s quite a few paths this blog post could take. Issues of national identity and English nationalism, for instance, or Lewis’s infamous disdain for modernist poetics. Or we might mention his preference for formalist poetry, his Christian apologetics, or the religious aspects of his fantasy. But if people “know” one thing about Lewis’s poetry, they know that it’s … well … not very good. Now, that’s not my view, mind you, but even fans and scholars of Lewis tend to accept this assessment as the default consensus. Unfortunately, Lewis is p