…With a religious book it is less what we see in it than what we see through it that matters. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fairy-tale epic the Lord of the Rings helps draw the distinction...

How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand… there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and...

No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above...

While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give ‘luck’ a chance to operate.

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. . .. . . (quoting an obituary) ‘There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever...

I’m a hobbit!

Grief is a hone to a hard mind.

Aw, fudge,’ floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. ‘You’re a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?’I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium...

Under the Mountain dark and tallThe King has come unto his hall!His foe is dead,the Worm of Dread,And ever so his foes shall fall.The sword is sharp, the spear is long,The arrow swift, the Gate...

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity...

This, since junior school, had been virtually my only experience of women—as fantasy figures. Reading about women in fantasy novels had set me an even more unrealistic point of view. The Lord of the Rings...