Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Robots, slaves, orcs, and dragons

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Many people — engineers, software developers, scientists, philosophers — are now pondering the question of AI consciousness. I have thoughts...
2 comments:
Wednesday, October 14, 2026

The things we remember, the things we forget, and the things we never knew we didn’t know

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Wikipedia entries about Tolkien and related topics have been making reference to my research for some time. I can’t remember when I first di...
2 comments:
Saturday, July 25, 2026

Fifteen years!

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This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of my book, Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays , published by McFarland & C...
7 comments:
Thursday, March 12, 2026

Generative AI, Hallucinations, and Tolkien Revisited

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Just about a year ago, I wrote about the problem of hallucinations when discussing Tolkien with generative AI chatbots. That followed a post...
7 comments:
Sunday, January 11, 2026

My Year in Books: 2025

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As anyone visiting this blog must know, I read quite a bit. I’ve been recording most of my reading (with one or two lapses) since 2004, over...
Sunday, June 22, 2025

“The Ulsterior Motive” and other unpublished writings of Tolkien

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With the upcoming publication of “The Bovadium Fragments” — following the recent Collected Poems , Nature of Middle-earth , Battle of Maldon...
6 comments:
Monday, May 26, 2025

First mention of The Bovadium Fragments

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As many of you will know already, another posthumous Tolkien publication is on the horizon, this time also posthumously edited by his son, C...
4 comments:
Thursday, April 10, 2025

A new profile of Karen Wynn Fonstad

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Wisconsin Public Radio just published a great profile on Karen Wynn Fonstad, the celebrated part-time cartographer known for her incredibly...
5 comments:
Monday, April 7, 2025

An ephemeral coincidence

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It should be obvious from my last several posts — if it hadn’t been already over many years of posts! — that I love digging into old archiv...
4 comments: