Sometimes in an unexpected, tucked-away place I’ll come across a piece of writing that hits home. Brandon Day, a veteran youth wrestling coach, wrote a piece for the Times Herald in Port Huron, Michigan, and he opens bluntly: “After 17 years coaching at the high school level, I am not a big fan of the youth sports culture in America today”. [Read more →]
PALMYRA, NJ – Arts programming at Palmyra High School (PHS) will receive a boost of $18,000 following a Casino Night community fundraiser organized by the school’s education foundation. [Read more →]
Prolific author, poet and Tolkien scholar, David Day, is well-known to serious readers of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. My own shelves already contained his Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and A Tolkien Bestiary. They’re cool, and all, but I am kind of a peculiar sort of Tolkien reader who has never been one to “nerd-out” over the details of Middle Earth (Tolkien’s fantasy world). I really could not care less whether the Dwarves (that’s how he spelled it) of the Iron Hills have coarser beards than those in Moria or whether the Balrog has real or metaphoric wings. As a consequence, Day’s other two books, outside of a fun hour or two after purchase, haven’t really gotten a lot of use. They are pretty; they are fun to look through and they are meticulously researched, but, over the years, they have gotten only the occasional thumbing-through when I was confused about a name or a place during one of my numerous Tolkien rereads — which, to be fair, is what the books are really for: reference.
Day’s new book, An Encyclopedia of Tolkien: the History and Mythology that Inspired Tolkien’s World is something familiar, yet quite different from the long list of Tolkien encyclopedias and dictionaries and guides already in print by all sorts of authors. This book is the kind of resource “literary” Tolkien readers will appreciate and it is also the one that is most likely to coax the younger fans who came over to the books from the Peter Jackson films into curiosity about the foundations and inspirations for Tolkien’s world. [Read more →]
