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Half A Century of Reading Tolkien: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by JRR Tolkien

Half A Century of Reading Tolkien: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by JRR Tolkien

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From beside the queen Gawain
to the king did then incline:
‘I implore with prayer plain
that this match should now be mine.’

Somehow, I’ve never read Prof. Tolkien’s, let alone anyone’s, translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th cent.), an English poem written by an unknown poet. Thinking on it, I  know there’s a cheesy looking movie, Sword of the Valiant, from the eighties starring Miles O’Keeffe and Sean Connery, but it was only David Lowery’s 2021 The Green Knight and its critical acclaim that made me think it was maybe time to read the poem. Now I have. Additionally, and most valuable to me wrestling with my understanding of the poem, I’ve also read the professor’s 1953 WP Ker lecture on work.

The poem recounts the temptations of Sir Gawain, youngest member of King Arthur’s Round Table, as he attempts to meet the suicidal obligation he accepted when he entered a contest with a mysterious green knight. More precisely, as told, it’s about the conflict between chivalrous virtues  of honor and courtesy and, specifically religious, morality.

Gawain was written in Middle English, the evolution of the language used between the Conquest in 1066 and the late 15th century. Gawain, son of Morgause, one of King Arthur’s half-sisters, is a major figure in many of the assorted Arthur tales. His roots descend back into older Welsh tales, where he was known as Gwalchmei. Pre-Christian elements, including the Beheading Game and the Wild Hunt, are integral parts of the story, despite the tale’s overt Christianity. The Beheading Game is a recurrent motif that tracks back to at least the Irish tale Fled Bricrenn featuring the hero Cú Chulainn and the Wild Hunt occurs across various Northern European myth cycles.

The poem begins with a recounting of Britain’s founding by Brutus of Troy. Noble as he was, young King Arthur of Camelot was nobler still. One Christmas season, as Arthur’s knights were celebrating with a games and contests, a strange figure entered the hall.

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Exploring the Dark Side of Life: Remains, edited by Andrew Cox

Exploring the Dark Side of Life: Remains, edited by Andrew Cox

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Remains, issues 4 and 4. Cover art by Richard Wagner

There are readers who, like me, prefer dark fiction in short form, because their suspension of disbelief is too brief to sustain — with a few exceptions — a full novel.

For people like us here’s a real treat: the new magazine/anthology Remains, edited by Andy Cox and illustrated by Richard Wagner, both well known for their previous work with the mythical Black Static magazine.

The first two issues are already sold out, but volume 3 ( published in late 2025) and the brand new volume 4 are available to entertain and disquiet.

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Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski: A Really Big Book

Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski: A Really Big Book

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Tom’s Crossing (Pantheon, October 28, 2025)

Every now and then I reach for a copy of Anna Karenina on my TBR bookshelf, but hesitate to wonder, “Do I really have time to get into this kind of heavy reading of some 800 plus pages right now?” So far, the answer has been, “No.” I really do intend to get to it at some point because, well, it’s Anna Karenina. Just not quite now.

Why then, did I pick up the 1,227 page opus by Mark Z. Danielewski, Tom’s Crossing?

Mainly because of the one and only blurb on the book jacket:

This is an amazing work of fiction. I absolutely loved it. At the heart you’ll find a blood drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there’s so much more. I immersed myself in. Have never ready anything like it.

So, despite what we know about glad-handing you-blurb-my-book and I’ll blurb yours endorsements, this is the only blurb on a book by an author with a low profile and cult status, and the if it’s genuinely that great a read for Stephen King, it’s certainly good enough for me. (And, besides, I was going on a long trip where it made as much sense to take one big book rather than several. Sorry Tolstoy.)

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Here Comes Everybody: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Here Comes Everybody: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

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Stand on Zanzibar (Del Rey/Ballantine, June 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman

Watching their sets in a kind of trance
Were people in Mexico, people in France.
They don’t chase Jones but their dreams are the same—
Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that’s the right name!
Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,
A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

Stand on Zanzibar is perhaps John Brunner’s most significant novel. Up until then, he had written competent science fiction on familiar themes such as psionics (Telepathist) and time travel (The Productions of Time). With Stand on Zanzibar he began writing larger books that were no longer purely ways of playing with such standard ideas, but examinations of our own world in a fantastic mirror. At the same time, they used a more sophisticated literary method — not the surrealism that inspired much of the New Wave, but a naturalism similar to nineteenth-century fiction.

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Classics of Sword & Sorcery: Echoes of Valor, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Classics of Sword & Sorcery: Echoes of Valor, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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Paperback editions of all three volumes of Echoes of Valor, edited by Karl Edward Wagner (Tor Books, February 1987, February 1991, and September 1991). Covers by Ken Kelly, Rick Berry, and Rick Berry

The three book Echoes of Valor anthology series from TOR was edited by Karl Edward Wagner, who wrote excellent Sword & Sorcery tales himself, and could recognize good ones when he saw them. These were not anthologies of new stories, but reprints. Each contained a Robert E. Howard tale. Here are some capsule reviews.

Echoes of Valor (1987, Cover Ken Kelly)

Contains one story each by Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Henry Kuttner. Howard’s story is “The Black Stranger.” It’s a Conan tale but wasn’t published in REH’s lifetime. He rewrote it as a pirate tale featuring Black Vulmea called “Swords of the Red Brotherhood.” It still didn’t sell. Long after Howard’s death, L. Sprague de Camp rewrote it as “The Treasure of Tranicos” and it was published. It didn’t really need the rewrite in my opinion, so who knows why it wasn’t published initially.

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Dark Muse News: Reviewing Conan – Spawn of the Serpent God by Tim Waggoner

Dark Muse News: Reviewing Conan – Spawn of the Serpent God by Tim Waggoner

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Conan: Spawn of the Serpent God by Tim Waggoner (Titan Books, October 28, 2025). Cover artist unknown

Titan Books is on a roll, publishing Conan novels in quick succession: S. M. Stirling’s Blood of the Serpent (2022), John C. Hocking’s City of the Dead (2024), James Lovegrove’s Cult of the Obsidian Moon (2024), Tim Lebbon’s Songs of the Slain (2025), and Tim Waggoner’s Spawn of the Serpent God (2025).  And their 2026 schedule promises more with John Langan’s The Brides of Crom.

Here we delve into Tim Waggoner’s Spawn of the Serpent God. He’s a Bram Stoker Award-winning author known for horror and media tie-in fiction. Recently, he was honored for his Terrifier #2: The Official Movie Novelization with a Scribe Award for Best Adapted Novel from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. With approval from movie writer and director Damien Leone, Waggoner had doubled the size of the hack-and-slash script by adding lore and characterization (I plan to interview Tim Waggoner about this for Black Gate‘s Beauty in Weird/Horror series). Anyway, Waggoner’s knack for tie-ins and deepening characters is demonstrated again in Conan: Spawn of the Serpent as he highlights the dangers of Zamora.

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Intrigue, Betrayals, and Plenty of Swordplay: Eda Blessed III by Milton Davis

Intrigue, Betrayals, and Plenty of Swordplay: Eda Blessed III by Milton Davis

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“I’ve been away from Sati-Baa for ten years,” Omari said. “I’ve walked every inch of Ki Khanga and never truly felt at home. Now I have the means not only to return but establish something of my own. The closer I get, the more eager I am to see it done.”

I first encountered Milton Davis way back in 2012 when I bought Griots (2011), a collection of sword and soul tales he co-edited with Charles Saunders. I bought it on the combined strengths of Saunders’ name and the cover. As a quick side note, if you don’t own it, you can buy an e-book for $3.99, so you have no excuses. It and its companion volume, Sisters of the Spear (2013), are fantastic collections and deserve way more recognition than they’ve received.

I enjoyed Davis’ own story in the book so much, I immediately bought the first Changa book. Changa Diop is a noble adventurer and merchant in 15th century Africa who travels to the Far East and back, ever intent on regaining his father’s kingdom from an usurper. At the heart of the sword and soul explosion of the last two decades, these are great additions to the catalog of heroic fantasy.

Davis’ other major character, Omari Ket, is a very different sort of adventurer. He is a rake, a gambler, a mercenary, but, most importantly, blessed by the goddess Eda. She is the wife of the god Daarila, and with him, co-creator of the heavens and the earth. This has protected him in many instances as well as altered his plans as Eda has used him for her own greater plans.

Omari’s adventures take place in the African-inspired world of Ki Khanga. The setting was created by Davis and Balogun Ojetade for a RPG. To christen it, they released an anthology of stories places, Ki Khanga (2013), in the setting and one of my favorites was “Simple Math” featuring Omari. It’s a fun book, filled with warriors and sorcerers, talking gorillas and elephants with guns, and I reviewed it over at my site. …

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A Kind of Thought Experiment: The Weigher by Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin

A Kind of Thought Experiment: The Weigher by Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin

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The Weigher (Baen Books, November 1992). Cover by C. W. Kelly

First contact stories are one of science fiction’s major subgenres, an important branch of stories about aliens, going back at least to H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. The usual point of view is a human one; after all, humans are familiar and nonhumans are not, and that way the reader can share the protagonist’s discovery of a new species and culture. But every so often, a writer tells the story from the nonhuman point of view. The Weigher, published first in Analog in 1984 and then expanded into a novel in 1992, is one of these ventures.

What adds interest to this is that the culture of the aliens is worked out in some detail, and is different from our own culture in major ways, and probably from a lot of human cultures. Some of these differences reflect different biology and psychology; others probably don’t, such as the version of money in use.

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Dark Muse News: Anna Smith Spark’s A Sword of Bronze and Ashes

Dark Muse News: Anna Smith Spark’s A Sword of Bronze and Ashes

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A Sword of Bronze and Ashes, September 12, 2023, FLAME TREE PRESS (Cover illustration by Broci)

Welcome to more Dark Muse News. This post reviews Anna Smith Spark’s A Sword of Bronze and Ashes. It was released in September 2023 (Flame Tree Press, cover illustration by Broci) and is the first book of the series The Making of This World: Ruined. The sequel, A Sword of Gold and Ruin, was recently published in October, 2025.

Anna Smith Spark is known as the Queen of Grimdark, a moniker she acquired with her Empires of Dust series. You can expect the same poetic brutality here.  Her style and approach are very unique but are reminiscent of Tanith Lee. Literary wording may keep you distanced as a reader, but the raw emotion expressed throughout is so real that it makes the fantasy feel real, too.  We interviewed Anna Smith Spark in 2019 – Disgust and Desire as part of our Beauty in Weird Fiction series, where she revealed all sorts of muses and inspirations. That year, we hosted a Q&A Session at Gen Con; there, she, John O’Neill, and I showed off our footwear (link); Anna’s footwear won hands down!
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The Conan novels of John Maddox Roberts

The Conan novels of John Maddox Roberts

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The Conan novels of John Maddox Roberts (Tor Books, 1985-1995). Covers by Boris, Ken Kelly, and Julie Bell

The name John Maddox Roberts (1947 – ) first came to my attention as a writer of Conan sword & sorcery pastiches from Tor. He wrote eight, and when I talk to other REH fans Roberts’ name is almost always listed near the top of the Conan pastiche writers.

Of the pastiches that were published by Tor between 1982 and 2004, I’d have to agree, although I like the earlier pastiches by Andy Offutt and Karl Edward Wagner better.

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