-
Why Greyhawk Still Feels Like Home in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
I started playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when I was six or seven, sitting on the floor with my older brother and his friends. They had all the advantages—a paladin with a gleaming sword, a magic-user with spells that could level mountains, a cleric who seemed to have a direct line to the gods—and I…
-
If Frodo Had Died: Why Merry Would Have Become the Ringbearer
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is built on choices, chance, and courage. Every decision—from who carries the One Ring to who enters the Mines of Moria—shapes the fate of Middle-earth. But what if a single, devastating event had occurred differently? Imagine that Frodo Baggins, mortally wounded by the Morgul blade of the Witch-king,…
-
Exploring Fantasy and Horror in Watership Down
There’s a casual misconception about Watership Down: that it’s simply a gentle animal story, perhaps even a children’s book about rabbits in the vein of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter or Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson. This assumption collapses almost immediately upon reading. What unfolds instead is something far more complex—a work…
-
Pagan Narnia: Lions, Witches, Wardrobes, and World Myth
C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is often read through a modern or theological lens, but when we set aside those frameworks, the story begins to take on a different and much older shape. Beneath its surface lies a powerful mythic skeleton—one not tied to any single doctrine, but drawn from the…
-
The Discord of Melkor: From Pop Rock to Heavy Metal
In the beginning, there was the Music. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, the universe is sung into existence by the divine being Ilúvatar and his angelic Ainur. This harmonious creation—a symphonic act of beauty, balance, and order—is interrupted by Melkor, the most powerful of the Ainur, who introduces his own themes: dissonant, self-serving, and darkly…
-
If the Gods Spoke English: Reimagining Proto-Indo-European Religion
This article explores the parallels found in ancient mythologies across Europe and Asia, tracing these similarities to the Proto-Indo-European religion. It speculatively reconstructs how divine names could have evolved in English from PIE roots through sound changes, creating a lost pantheon of gods like Aff, Brin, and Fercken.
-
The Nazgûl’s Message for Frodo in the Shire
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien is full of mystery and tension, and few brief encounters illustrate this better than the moment when a Black Rider comes to the house of the Gaffer in Hobbiton, asking that a message be delivered to Frodo Baggins. The Gaffer refuses, and the Rider departs…
-
How did the D&D kids know each other?
In the 1980s Dungeons & Dragons animated series, six kids are transported to a fantasy realm after boarding a rollercoaster. Analyzing their seating arrangement and interactions suggests varying levels of familiarity and highlights how diverse backgrounds forge bonds through shared adventure.
-
The Greatest Adventure
There are stories we discover, and then there are stories that discover us. For me, the doorway into Middle-earth did not open through the pages of a book. It flickered to life on the silver screen, ground out frame-by-frame by a library movie projector sometime in the late 1970s. My earliest memory of consuming The…
Christian A. Larsen 