2020 revisioned
It’s astonishing how quickly plans can change when faced with a pandemic.…
2019: The view from January
The year begins with new software, new hardware, and a strong focus on the top priority: Tolkien’s maps of Middle-earth. And so far, I’ve successfully restricted paper and conference commitments to “stepping-stone” content directly related to The Project.…
2018: The view from 2019
2018 began with a failure: I was unable to make the deadline for my “Mapping Mordor” chapter in Walking Tree Publishers’ forthcoming book Tolkien and Literary Wordbuilding. The cancer was gone, but I had neither the stamina nor the focus for this project. My editors were very understanding, and I thank them profoundly for their patience and support.…
Paper accepted for NACIS!
I’ll be giving a paper this October at the North American Cartographic Information Society annual meeting in Norfolk, Virginia. If you love maps, mapping, or cartography, consider attending — it’s a very welcoming group! …
Two more papers given…
Two more papers given at the Mythopoeic Society’s 49th annual Mythcon: The Lord of the Rings Citations: A tour and The Tolkien Art Index: A tour .…
Another paper given
Paper given at the 2nd annual Tolkien Symposium prior to ICMS Kalamazoo…
Well, I’m back
I don’t, as a rule, discuss personal or family matters here; that’s the role for my personal blog. Nevertheless, I feel I should mention that I’m more-or-less “back” from an unexpected journey health-wise. Details — no doubt too many for some readers, and never enough for others — are at a specialized set of pages at PostHope.com. No more need be said here.
To celebrate, …
Paper given
Paper given at the 15th annual Tolkien in Vermont conference at UVM:
Mapping Mordor: Normalizing Tolkien’s maps as the first step in examining his worldbuilding method of construction-by-revision; or, Yet further confirmation (as if we needed it) that Tolkien had no master plan, did not “first make a map and make the narrative agree,” and, in fact, never did produce a map that exactly portrays what’s described in The Lord of the Rings
Another paper given
Paper given at the 1st annual Tolkien Symposium prior to ICMS Kalamazoo:
The river Swanfleet: A journey from the Misty Mountains to flat fenlands and half-way back again; or, How the discovery of Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-earth by Blackwell’s Rare Books in Oxford extricates Pauline Baynes’ cartographic reputation from the marsh of Nîn-in-Eilph
Tolkien anniversaries symposium at Kalamazoo
I’ll be reworking the paper I gave a few weeks ago at Tolkien in Vermont at Brad Eden’s “Tolkien Anniversaries” symposium, held the day before the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University.…
Tolkien in Vermont, 2017 — at which I give my first paper
Well, it’s about time. I’ve given my first academic paper.… A curious set of circumstances led up to this, but essentially I was prepared to give this paper and was called upon to fill a suddenly empty slot. It worked out well.
Paper given…
Paper given at the 14th annual Tolkien in Vermont Conference at UVM: “Far-away places with strange-sounding names: Endonyms (autonyms), exonyms (xenonyms), and the romance of Tolkien’s toponymy of Middle-earth; or, On the redundancy of Bree-hill, the heady topper of the Brandywine, and how the discovery of Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-earth by Blackwell’s Rare Books in Oxford extricates Pauline Baynes’s cartographic reputation from the fens of Nîn-in-Eilph.” …