Robin Hood is first mentioned in print in the late fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, which is commonly attributed to William Langland, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. It was a timely moment for the outlaw to enter literature: English literature as we know it was starting to emerge, and the Peasants’ […]
Children’s Literature
The Word ‘Hobbit’
The word ‘hobbit’ was supposedly invented by J. R. R. Tolkien. This fact both is and is not true. To explain why this is the case (or isn’t the case) we must do a bit of delving into the world of witchcraft … Tolkien’s book was published in 1937, but […]
Ten Words We Got from Literature
Often you hear, fifth-hand, someone say, ‘Shakespeare gave us the word puking’ or ‘Milton coined the word dreary’. The problem with this is, of course, that we cannot be sure that those writers actually invented these words – they may merely have written the texts containing the earliest surviving record of the words […]
C. S. Lewis and the Inklings
One of the most celebrated pubs for writers is the Eagle and Child in Oxford. This public house on St Giles’, known informally as the ‘Bird and Baby’, was the place where the Inklings met during the mid-twentieth century. The ‘Inklings’ were a group of writers living in Oxford who […]
Peter Pan in Neverland
In which book did Peter Pan first appear, and what was the target readership of the book? Peter Pan, the play for children? Think again. The boy who wouldn’t grow up first appeared, ironically, in a book for adults, a little-known 1902 novel called The Little White Bird. However, it […]