From French Mediaeval Romances, which is also available as an eBook Select Bibliography Bloch, R. Howard. The Anonymous Marie de France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Burgess, Glyn S., and Keith Busby. The Lais of Marie de France. London: Penguin, 1999. Stein, Robert M., and Sandra Pierson Prior. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of [...]

From Canto I of Dante’s Inferno: Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. These are the opening lines to Dante’s great poem, and probably the most famous poem of the Middle Ages. What better way to start [...]

These are my top 5 “Straight” Historical Novels. That means there’s no alternate version of history or any fantasy element to them. I might do a couple more favourite lists to cover alternate history and historical fantasy another time. They do of course feature characters that are fictional in some cases rather than historical. 1. [...]

The Bookseller released some statistics today on the top 100 selling authors in the UK market from 2000 to 2009. I have extracted the fantasy authors from their data to put together the following list: 1          Rowling, J K                    27,556,478 units, revenue of  £215,876,812.77 6          [...]

My short story seems to be going fairly well at the moment. I’m working on it by going through iterations of more and more detailed outlines. Basically I started with a general outline of what the story was about, then went away to think about the characters and setting – giving things names and brief [...]

I have been having a go at writing a sonnet recently, and really I didn’t know how hard it was going to be. I have had to abandon my first attempt as I realised that I was going to find it difficult to find the right rhymes for each line. Scansion But, undeterred I am [...]

A bit of a rant about Genre As a participant in some online critiquing networks I come across a fair amount of unpublished stories written by authors, like myself, who want to get publish. These networks tend to be genre orientated – so for fantasy and science fiction for instance. I hope I’m not slagging [...]

The latest Inside the Blogosphere asked: What are the worst or most disappointing endings in science fiction/fantasy novels? Why? Here’s my, no doubt blasphemous, suggestion that the worst ending is for The Lord of the Rings: “It pains me to say this, as it’s one of my favourite books, but one of the most disappointing [...]

In this section I have compiled information about medieval history and literature, in particular the areas I am most interested in. The Court in English Alliterative Poetry, 1350-1450 – my M.Phil. Thesis   The Style of Middle English Alliterative Verse Frederick II   Everyday Life in Medieval England   England in 1376       [...]