Alan and Shawn welcome Verlyn Flieger back to the Prancing Pony Podcast to finish out our fourth season! We catch up with her on Beowulf, free will, the mistakes of Túrin, and her new book Arthurian Voices…
Alan and Shawn are honored to welcome Verlyn Flieger, author of There Would Always Be a Fairy Tale, to The Prancing Pony Podcast! We discuss her new book, her work co-editing the annual journal Tolkien Studies, and of course, her classic study of...
Yes, I referenced both Bob Dylan and Rush in the title of this essay. Fair warning: that may very well be the essay’s high point. After all, philosophers have been debating—without a certain answer—the nature of free will for centuries, and I’m...
I’ve probably admitted to this on the podcast at some point; if not, let this serve as my confession. Way back when I first started reading Tolkien as a teenager, I… uh… I often used to skip—or, at best, merely skim—the passages of verse. Maybe this...
If you’ve listened to the podcast enough, you’ve probably heard Alan and I make the bold claim that J. R. R. Tolkien never, ever made an accidental word choice in his writing. Every single word was chosen quite deliberately, we like to believe, and...
Anyone who’s read even the first few pages of The Lord of the Rings is familiar with the “found manuscript” concept at the heart of Tolkien’s mythology: the idea that the books of the Middle-earth legendarium were not...
By now, you’ve likely noticed that there are certain themes that Tolkien touches on frequently in the Legendarium that I’m quick to notice and talk about during the podcast — or even here in our Ponderings. Not surprisingly, then, this is another...
I like to think of myself as well rounded, and I try not to have a single “favorite” anything. I love most flavors of ice cream, I look forward equally to Halloween and Christmas, and depending on my mood I can listen to anything from...
Those of you who have been paying attention during the podcasts so far have probably noticed that the passages I am often drawn to (or at least the ones I’m drawn to discuss) are the ones that strongly illustrate some of Tolkien’s most recurrent...
In my previous essay for the Prancing Pony Ponderings series, I wrote of Frodo’s meeting with the Elves of Gildor Inglorion’s company in the Woody End in Book I of The Lord of the Rings as an initiation into the mythic world, and found...