My article, "Roads Go Ever Ever On" is featured in Oklahoma Humanities Magazine

I'm excited to have my new article featured in Oklahoma Humanities Spring/Summer 2020 issue! My article, "Roads Go Ever Ever On," focuses on the importance of home in fantasy literature, looking specifically at the works of Tolkien in conversation with Old English literature and The Odyssey. You can download the issue free below, as well as sign up for a free subscription on their website. It's an excellent issue focused on the theme of 'home,' and features articles ranging from food, immigration, Dorothea Lange, Woody Guthrie, WWI-era pop songs, and women's suffrage. Hope you enjoy it!

Read it here: https://www.okhumanities.org/doccenter/d66870df8ad249eb8b9ca560123d1db4

Tolkien's The Hobbit and the Prophecy of Language

We’re often reminded that all of Tolkien’s stories began with language. Tolkien invented the languages of elves first and then wondered, where did these words come from? Who made them? Spoke them? What books and legends preserved them? Of course, his languages didn’t exactly emerge out of a vacuum, either; they were his attempts to connect the linguistic thread between various ancient cultures, teasing out common words and phrases that might have belonged to an earlier, ur-language now lost in the folds of time. If words tell a story (today is “Tuesday,” which was originally “Tyr’s Day,” the Norse God of war), then it’s amazing how little of this story we understand, or even puzzle over.

That Time Mary Wollstonecraft Traveled to Scandinavia...and Found a Manifesto

In the Nineteenth Letter of Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, she informs her unnamed recipient, “Do not forget that in my general observations, I do not pretend to sketch a national character; but merely to note the present state of morals and manners, as I trace the progress of the world’s improvement…my principal object has been to take such a dispassionate view of men as will lead me to form a just idea of the nature of man.”

Why Keep Western Civilization? Because It Waited So Long To Be Remembered...

I just read an article about universities (yet again) abandoning the Western Humanities in the face of a relentless drive to embrace diversity and a multicultural outlook. The article decried the loss of a rich culture in the face of a loose hodgepodge of approaches, none of which offers a coherent curriculum to university students. As an eighteenth-century British scholar and someone who wrote a Master’s Thesis on South Asian literature, I’m torn. Do I want to preserve a world where Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Johnson, and Jane Austen still have a place in the curriculum? Absolutely. But I do want that to be the only voice in the curriculum, so students have no idea that there was a Golden Age of Indian Literature? Or never encounter Taoism? Or remain ignorant of names like Tagore, Narayan, Naipaul, Desai, Lahiri, and Rushdie? Not on your life.