Analyzes Tolkien's "The Hobbit," "The Lord of the Rings," "The Silmarillion," and his lesser works, and explains how his works tie into storytelling tradition dating back to Grimms' fairy tales and "Beowulf."
As a scholar of medieval literature and a lover of Germanic and Finnish mythologies in particular, J.R.R. Tolkien was "grieved by the poverty" of legend and myth in his own beloved culture. Inspired by works like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green…
Chronicles the history of counting and calculating from the time of cave dwellers to the late twentieth century, examining how different cultures used numbers to solve basic problems related to their everyday needs.