Author: Will Sherwood
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Romantic Transformations, Part 1: Romantic Authorship in Ex Machina (2015)
During a recent flight I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015). What struck me within the opening minutes was how the film sets itself up to explore Romantic-period ideas on authorship and genius. There is a Frankensteinesque quality to the author and creation but…
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The Fantastic Symphony of Middle-earth
In my last blog post I explored the mother tree concept in Middle-earth’s woods and forests. In this one I want to pivot from the science of Arda towards its music. In writing my most recent PhD chapter I came across a book by Bernie Krause called The Great Animal…
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Eldest and Oldest: Middle-earth’s Mother/Father Trees
This year’s re-read of The Lord of the Rings has led to some striking revelations. Many are intimately linked to British Romanticism and how Tolkien grapples with its ideas and legacies (some problematic) that continue to live on today. For more on this, see my blog post on Romantic legacies.…
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Nameless Things in Deep Places: Moria as Eerie Heterotopia
In my last blog post, I started to delve into mountain worlds from fantasy, science-fiction, and horror narratives. Here I focus solely on Moria from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). It was originally written for a panel on Tolkien’s Queer Landscape: Three Papers…
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“Knowledge does not dispel mystery”: Fantastically Gothic Mountain Worlds
Following a call I put out on social media for recommendations of Fantasy mountains, this is the start of my work on the now colossal bibliography. The following text originated as a talk presented at the Mitchell Library’s ‘Wine & Wonders: Horrors at the Mitchell’ in Glasgow on 1.11.24. It…
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“So deep, even the rocks and roots now believe”: Metal music and Middle-earth
On Wednesday 7th August 2024 Tolkien and metal music fans were treated to a track from the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 score by Bear McCreary. ‘The Last Ballad of Damrod‘ is a metal song produced in tandem with or in the wake…
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‘Introduction’ – The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
I wrote this introduction for The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024) which I co-edited with Dr. Julian Eilmann. It is reproduced with the kind permission of Walking Tree Publishers. The full book in which this introduction features is available here. A recording of me reading the…
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How the Victorians (Re)made the British Romantics: Part 3 – Christian Appropriations
This blog series maps the contours of the ways in which the Victorians ‘created’ Romanticism. A term coined by the Victorians, ‘Romanticism’ as a movement and philosophy, and the ‘Romantic’ as an aesthetic and period were formulated and reconfigured as the nineteenth century progressed. In this post, I’m going to…
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How the Victorians (Re)made the British Romantics: Part 2 – ‘Renovating’ the Romantics
In my last blog post I considered why ‘revival’ isn’t the best word for discussing Romanticism as it existed in the Victorian period. Here I’m going to take a slightly different angle. At first it may appear contradictory, but the first generation Pre-Raphaelites and their circle considered themselves to have…
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How the Victorians (Re)made the British Romantics: Part 1 – Change and Transition
In a recent Guardian opinion piece, Ross Barkan announced that “the new romanticism has arrived” (2023). Likening “today’s romantics” to those of a distinctly English Romantic tradition: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron (albeit tied to Scotland), and William Blake, he imagines that their supposed fascination…
Will Sherwood 