blog entries: Harvard
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.…
Today, about five weeks after the fact, I learned of the death of Dr. Calvert Watkins. I was very privileged to have taken several classes and seminars with him in the late ’80s and early ’90s at Harvard — and my Linguistics 101 class and Sanskrit class were taught by his wife, Dr. Stephanie Jamison. But I first “knew” him, of course, as the editor of the enthralling Indo-European roots appendix to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which I discovered in 8th or 9th grade.…