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’ […]
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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 […]
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, […]
The Stories behind Shakespeare’s Plays
Since Twelfth Night is just round the corner (and remember, while we’re at it, that Twelfth Night is arguably the night before Epiphany, not the same day – i.e., Twelfth Night is January 5th), we thought we’d bring you some of the lesser-known facts about some of William Shakespeare‘s most […]
Ten Myths about the Victorians
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 […]