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 …
Novels
Nine Unusual Author Deaths
Sometimes authors don’t shuffle off this mortal coil quietly or – for want of a better word – normally. Sometimes they meet a sticky and untimely end, and sometimes myths build up around an author’s demise and we come to accept legend as fact. So what follows is part blog post, part quiz: we present you … Read more
Ten Myths about the Victorians
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Although not strictly confined to the literary sphere, the following ten ‘facts’ about the Victorians certainly touch upon literature many times, not least because our ideas about the Victorians are often misconceptions or misrepresentations which we’ve picked up from their literature. I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s superb book Inventing the Victorians
Twelve Literary Facts about Christmas
Since the festive season is almost upon us, we’ve gathered together the twelve most interesting literature-related facts about Christmas that we could find. So here they are, ‘The Twelve Facts of Christmas’ … with a literary link. We hope you like them. 1. Christina Rossetti wrote the words to the Christmas carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. Rossetti (1830-94) … Read more
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 in question.