Winter of 2016 is promising to be a fantastic year for historical and fantasy-themed television. Season 3 of Black Sails is right around the corner, followed by the debut of Season 4 of History’s Vikings. And, in perhaps the most unexpected new addition, MTV, of all networks, has already brought us a surprisingly good adaptation…
As a follow-up to my recent post on 5 Reasons Peter Jackson’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” Was Better Than Tolkien’s Original, I’m offering my thoughts on the merits of Jackson’s second film, The Two Towers, as compared to the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. (My daughter and I are still reading The Return of the…
For the past few years, my daughter and I have been slowly making our way through J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings (this is the third time for myself, the first for her). After we’d finish a part of the trilogy, we followed it up by watching the movie version by Peter Jackson….
For my final post of 2014, I’ll offer my thoughts on the final installment in The Hobbit series and what will likely be our last visit to the Middle Earth envisioned by Peter Jackson. So, without further ado . . . Two movies would have been enough. 1. This should have been a 2-movie series…
It’s hard to find time in December to get anything done, and with a busy work week, it’s been near impossible. That said, I found a few minutes to post a link to this amusing interview of Smaug by Stephen Colbert (you can see it here). I’m off this week for the holidays, but…
This past weekend, my daughter and I saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second installment of Peter Jackson’s take on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (you can read my review of the novel here). Unlike The Lord of the Rings, where each book in the trilogy fits nicely into its own 3-hour film, Jackson…
Reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur reminded me of another work of Arthurian fiction that’s related to Tolkien and has been stuck in my the back of my bookshelf for years. That work is Tolkien’s translation of a fourteenth century poem titled Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The famous poem is the work…
While I was writing a series of posts of the Magic of Medieval Fiction and the Late Fifth Century and the Age of Arthur, this little gem fell out of the sky: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur. Needless to say, I dove right in, and my review follows after this image of the book’s…
In the midst of my series on the Magic of Medieval Fiction, which is currently focusing on the Arthurian age of the late Fifth Century, a treasure falls into my lap – The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien is being released tomorrow! I purchased an advanced copy on Amazon last night. Here’s an excerpt from…
One of the things I love about journey tales is all the different places they can take the reader. For example, my own novel, Enoch’s Device, begins at the monastery of Derry in Ireland, but the journey soon takes my protagonist to France (and the cities of Paris and Poitiers), and finally into the heart…
The Wayward Herald has been rather wayward of late (isn’t that the point), but he arrives once more with tidings from the Middle-Earth News. It seems that the film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has surpassed the first two films of The Lord of the Rings at the box-office. “According to Deadline, as of…