Christian A. Larsen

Catacombs

  • 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…