Stratofanatic's Emporium

I'm a big believer in using data to improve teaching, and, having just finished the midterm for my World-building class, ENGL 178 , I was curious to see, among other things, how much of the assigned reading my students did. So I created an anonymous survey. Here are some results. So this .... wasn't quite as bad as I feared, actually. According to one study, only about 20-30% students do the required reading . My students did a good deal better than that. Now, granted, there's a selection bias here. Only students who attended class today took the survey, and one might suppose non-attenders would, on the whole, tend to be non-readers as well. So I'll mentally subtract 10% from each book. At the same, my linked study studies a different population ("hospitality and tourism" majors), and I don't know how that would compare to students taking a 100-level General Education course. DISCUSSION Some positive results. Out of 65 respondents, 72% read The Hobbit. To ...

If I haven't mentioned it before, my 100-seat General Education course on world-building is going gang-busters. For my opening day, I created an awesome opening sequence , based on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey , using Adobe Premier Pro, and afterwards this adorable little fella became my course mascot. But before having my students start creating their Legendarium artifacts in Module 2, however, we're doing a cultural history of dragons and elves in Module 1. The basic idea is  (a) they're both really cool, and  (b) since most artists model their imaginary worlds on real-world history and cultures, we follow suit with the same -- basically, source studies into several medieval traditions. Well, in preparation for talking about Dragons in particular (to which I owe Daniel Ogden's fantastically thorough book, Dragons in the West , a debt), I had my students take a survey on the dragons they knew best.  The results out of 85 respondents: Toothless – 96% Smaug – 76% ...

For poetry fans, the NPR program The Academic Minute  just featured my research on the Modern Alliterative Revival on an episode. Basically, The Academic  highlights a new academic every day for brief, 2-minute long episodes. At the very least, it's a good way of spreading the word about one movement in speculative verse. Since I can't bear the sound of my own voice, I only made it through the first 30 seconds, but they seem to have done a good job with it.

Just read John Holmes's lengthy "review" (actually, a 40-page critical essay!) on The Collected Poems of J. R. R.. Tolkien , edited by Cristina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, and all praise where praise is due -- this is one of the most lucid and enlightening articles I've ever encountered on Tolkien's verse. It's extraordinarily well-written and, at times, even funny. It's charitable yet also appropriately critical -- personally, I get overly impatient with the vapid "thank you for existing" kinds of reviews, but Holmes provides a much-needed discussion on modern textual editing practices as well as the history of textual editing for Tolkien in particular. This review also demonstrates a remarkable knowledgeable of medieval poetry and the history of poetry, which is a critical must for anyone trying to grasp Tolkien's verse, but something most academics are increasingly less likely to have nowadays. This is definitely a text I'll be r...

Blown away that my Los Angeles Review of Books review, " Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited ," has made a top ten list of notable critical works in 2024, as compiled by the Ancillary Review of Books . Their full article is here: " ARB’s 2024 Notable Criticism ." Here's what they said: Wise’s analysis of insularity in specialized fields is a warning that speculative critics, in our genres and subgenres, would do well to consider. So, so much good work is being done. This is a true honor. 

New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf: The Hitches [ Last week, I discussed Tolkien’s poem in dróttkvætt meter, “The Derelicts,” and showed how “Bleak Heave the Billows” is in ljódaháttr meter. This helps date both texts to 1932-1934. As I’ll show here, however, the picture is actually more complicated than that . ] Click here to read Parts 1 & 2 for this entry. Click here to  read Part 3 . The Problem To pick up where I left off last week, I’ve been arguing that Tolkien’s four poems in Norse meters all appeared roughly together during the period of 1932–1933. By relying on metrical form rather than subject matter, I also avoid the problem of why Tolkien might have chosen Old Norse meters for Old English subject matter. That problem is mainly why I hesitate with the dating provided by Scull and Hammond. After all, they linked “The Derelicts” with Tolkien’s first lectures on the old Germanic legend of Finn and Hengest, which in my view puts the poem two years too soon, and they also l...

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 R...