m. c. de marco

I retweeted this a while back, but now it’s made it to io9: The perfect home for the world’s tiniest hobbits. It’s beautiful, useless, and instructive: with enough obsession, you can do anything—even make a living at writing fiction.

If the template cuts this off, just click on it:

Via twitter: Razib at Gene Expression digresses from gene expression to the question of religion and fantasy. He manages to dig up more Jewish fantasy writers than Michael Weingrad did for his article in the Jewish Review of Books, Why There Is No Jewish Narnia:

To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion.

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I don’t remember where I found the link, but The DM of the Rings has provided me with hours of mock role-playing webcomic entertainment this week:

Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness.

Via SFScope: HarperCollins is apparently publishing another lost Tolkien work this coming May. This one is not his own fantasy, although it is once again edited by Christopher Tolkien:

The publication will make available for the first time Tolkien’s extensive retelling in English narrative verse of the epic Norse tales of Sigurd the Völsung and the Fall of the Niflungs.

I’ve been trying to catch up on the aggregator, and one interesting old link I found was a Tor.com post from mid-December about Verlyn Flieger’s “Tolkien and the Idea of the Book”:

[T]he Red Book of Westmarch was modeled in name after “the great medieval manuscript books whose names sound like an Andrew Lang color series for the Middle Ages … most important(ly) … the real Red Book of Hergest.” Yet Tolkien’s Red Book is more coherent narratively and more specifically traceable back to earlier manuscripts than most of these.