In Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana and John Crowley's Love and Sleep,part of his Aegypt sequence, characters born with cauls are summoned in the middle of the night to walk among the dead. Kay calls these individuals Night Walkers. Their story stretches back to real-world superstitions about children born with a membrane around their heads. This …
Continue reading Ember Nights in Guy Gavriel Kay and John Crowley
We all know the villain. Dracula is an aristocratic vampire who lurks in a Transylvanian castle, emerging only at night from his casket in an abandoned chapel to stalk the living with unholy horror. He is suave, seductive, can transform into a bat, but is best know for his penetrating incisors, which he uses to …
Merry Christmas! From Santa and his "Huldufolk" (I mean "elves").A merry Christmas to all! For Part 2 of my series on J.R.R. Tolkien, I take you to the frozen rocks of the North: to Iceland, the land that inspired so much of Tolkien's Middle Earth. I stumbled upon a fascinating article in today's Montreal Gazette. …
Continue reading What Icelandic Elves can tell us about Christmas and the Environment
The Vinciolo Journal turns 1 year old January 5th, two days after J.R.R. Tolkien's Birthday, so in celebration of both events, I am making a series of Tolkien-related posts. This is the first of several ... 7 ways Saruman resembles Queen Elizabeth's court astrologer and geographer John Dee. . In comparing these two figures (the …
Feel disconnected from your childhood lately? Although I am not a licensed psychiatrist, or a doctor of any sort, let me recommend to you The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Never fear: it is not a pill that is bitter to the taste, although it is certainly not sugar coated. …
Continue reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Matthew Rettino 