Stratofanatic's Emporium

New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf:  Tolkien the Skald [ Last week, I outlined the shape of Tolkien’s career as an alliterative poet and noted his immense productivity between 1932 and 1934 – the moment he turned to Old Norse meters. Now I’ll tackle specific issues with his two shorter Old Norse poems . ] Click here to read Parts 1 & 2 of this entry. Click here to read Part 4 . Tolkien’s “Lost” Stanzas: The Derelicts If your puppy ever runs away from home, everyone knows what to do. First you search. Then you plaster posters on telephone poles. Then you panic. Though not in that order. Personally, I prefer panic first. But if your poem runs away from home, well, that’s a tougher situation. To be fair, the story behind Tolkien’s dróttkvætt sequence “The Derelicts” doesn’t relate directly to whenever he wrote anything, but the tale’s too good to pass up. These stanzas first came to my attention when researching skaldic meters for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Reviv

New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: The Norse Connection Click here to read Part 3  for this entry. Click here to  read Part 4 . Introduction: The Versatile Revivalist So far in this series, I’ve tended to tackle either individual poets (C. S. Lewis, Amit Majmudar, etc.) or specific issues such as SF or fan verse. Now let’s sneak a peek at what happens by focusing on a specific alliterative tradition in the Modern Revival – namely, Old Norse. So here’s a riddle for you. What do medieval Norse skalds – folks like Thjódólf of Hvinir or the legendary Bragi Boddason – have in common with medieval English poets wise in the ways of alliterative poetics? People like Cædmon, William Langland, and whoever the hell wrote Beowulf. Not much, actually. Got you with a trick question! So, yeah … this riddle’s somewhat like Bilbo asking Gollum what’s in his pockets. Although us moderns might study a wide range of medieval texts side by side – thank you, anthologies – in the Middle Ages, obviously, most p

[Last week in Part II of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed poems by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Math Jones. Here in Part III, we now discuss Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series for how it incorporates alliterative poetry into a science-fictional setting.] Click here to see Part I or Part II of "Troubles in SF Poetry." Kirstein is one of those hidden gems of a writer who has flown, as sometimes happens, unfortunately, under the radar. For myself, I discovered her thanks to Paul Deane, but in addition to the alliterative verse in Kirstein’s Steerswoman series (1989-2004), she also published with Del Rey Books … a major second research interest of mine. What to say about Del Rey? Well, if you – like me – grew up reading fantasy in the 1980s or 1990s, chances are that more than a few Del Rey titles lined your home bookshelves. These books were everywhere. Del Rey published big-name SF authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, not to mention Alan Dean Foster’s ghostwr

[ Last week in Part I of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed a poem by Poul Anderson and how he resolved the issue of creating a science-fictional context for a poem in an alliterative meter. Here in Part II, we now discuss Marcie Lynn Tentchoff’s “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” with a brief excursion into a few lines from Math Jones’s “Lenctenlong.”] Click here to see  Part I  or  Part III  of "Troubles in SF Poetry." While researching Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, when I first encountered “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” I instantly knew that here was one of the most throat-catchingly good SF poems yet to appear in an alliterative meter. Tentchoff herself is hardly new to verse-craft. Back in 2000, her long Arthurian poem, Surrendering the Blade , won Canada’s prestigious Aurora Award, but her love for all things Norse goes back even further. She’d grown up reading Poul Anderson, for instance, but at Simon Fraser University she a

Well well well! So, it seems that my article on Judy-Lynn del Rey for The Conversation , " The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due ," has now climbed to over 150,000+ (EDIT: now 250,000+) pageviews ... which means that I've now "gone viral," as the kids say. I'd originally written the article almost spur of the moment, realizing that the PBS documentary on which I served as a research consultant, " Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal ," was going to premiere on October 1st. So I wanted to create some publicity for that , and just happened to know about The Conversation .  I've gotten a lot of extremely positive feedback about the article, too, and it's all very bemusing, especially for someone used to spending months on research articles that might garner one or two dozen readers, tops. Anyway, here's a few random reflections on going viral: Nobody looks at the writer's byline. One friend of mine post

I've been meaning to blog about Brian Murphy's brilliant  Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery for literally two months now .... but life happens. Better late than never, though! Anyway, I can't recommend this excellent book highly enough. Given how greatly S&S has influenced modern non-Tolkienian fantasy, including folks like George R. R. Martin and Glen Cook, it's surprisingly hard to find good discussions of the subgenre. Fantasy literature tends to be marginalized anyway , but S&S is so pulpish -- so full of icky "-isms" -- that, frankly, most fantasy scholars in academia are ideologically ill-equipped to understand why normal or decent people might love this kind of fantasy at all. A ridiculously cool cover. Artist: Tom Barber That's obviously a problem for scholars. If you can't read a literature with sympathy, your critiques of -isms  in that literature will always risk being toothless or superficial. It also means you wo