In this chapter, I discuss the use of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

This special issue of Social Text takes as its starting point the generative tension between recovery as an imperative that is fundamental to historical writing and research, and the impossibility of recovery when engaged with archives whose very assembly and organization occlude certain historical subjects. Responding to recent debates among…[Read more]

A book review of R.D. Fulk, An Introductory Grammar of Old English with an Anthology of Readings

Ongoing digitization provides new opportunities for teaching and engaging students both inside and outside the class room. This article reports on three approaches to using new media to facilitate undergraduate teaching of Old English at Leiden University, the Netherlands. First, the use of video clips to explain basic features of Old English…[Read more]

An interview with Rolf H. Bremmer Jr about Frisians in the Middle Ages on the occasion of his retirement.

This article outlines briefly the methodology of studying Tolkien’s sources and then attempts to move beyond the early medieval English sources that have so often been the topic of research, such as Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. The paper proposes hitherto unnoticed links between Tolkien’s fiction and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Old English law…[Read more]

An introduction to the volume of conference proceedings of the international Tolkien conference ‘Tolkien Among Scholars’, as well as a brief introduction to Tolkien Studies.

In 1963, details of the membership of congregations in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United Kingdom and Ireland took place and was published in The Construction Era. Individual congregations and their membership, which is assumed to be total membership, was published alongside a chart indicating how far it had progressed…[Read more]