Reading and Writing for the Glory of God
It was during high school that I discovered the delights of the mystery genre. I enjoyed it thoroughly but generally left it feeling a little jealous of its protagonists. As an absent-minded daydreamer, my brain has always worked more like that of Anne Shirley than Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew. And while I loved Anne … Continue reading Gabriel Gale: Unexpected Detective
C. S. Lewis once wrote that “a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last.” 1 I am inclined to agree with him. My favorite books are the ones that I liked at age 12, love at 22, and will probably treasure at 42. They are … Continue reading Daughter of Arden: Exile
When I was 14, I took my massive volume of Andersen’s fairy tales and challenged myself to read it from beginning to end. By the time I reached “The Snow Queen,” I had read over 20 tales and was beginning to grow tired of them, but this one had a magic of its own. No … Continue reading Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy
Author and folklorist Rosemary Sutcliff once wrote, “You can learn a lot about a people from their stories, because their stories show the way they think and feel and look at things.”1 This is the power of mythology — it allows us to see through the eyes of cultures long past. Sometimes it reveals forgotten … Continue reading On Reading The Hound of Ulster
Though J. R. R. Tolkien and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in different eras and genres, they were brothers in thought and art. Tolkien was an English professor and myth-maker, while Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and Victorian poet, but they had much in common, such as their use of the sound of words and Anglo-Saxon … Continue reading Tolkien and Hopkins: The Beauty of this World
Story-making is an art, and the storyteller is an artist. Like the painter or the sculptor, the true storyteller strives to craft a thing of beauty from a particular medium. Rather than using marble or paint, the storyteller works with words. There are often many words to choose from, but he knows that each word … Continue reading The Story-maker’s Medium
J. R. R. Tolkien loved mythology and languages, and desired to be a myth-maker himself. He set about crafting Middle Earth, a world complete with its own tongues and tales. He knew that in order to become good at something, one must learn from the masters that came before. So, he borrowed many elements from … Continue reading Anglo-Saxon and Old Icelandic in Middle Earth
The Glass Hill 