I’M NOT SURE HOW I WENT A WEEK NOT KNOWING THIS, but J. R. R. Tolkien has a new book coming out in 2013. And it could be a good one.
Before Tolkien sat down to write The Hobbit, he took some time to retell the story of King Arthur as an epic poem. Poetry isn’t something foreign to Tolkien and his writing. His Middle Earth material is full of songs and poems. I have to admit that I skipped those poems for my first few read-throughs, but I’ve grown to appreciate them and the role they play in Tolkien’s world.
The Fall of Arthur will clock in at 200 pages of alliterative poetry. It will detail the final days of Arthur’s Camelot. Some hope that it accomplishes some rehabilitation of the story popularized by Malory. I’m a fan of T. H. White’s version, The Once and Future King (which begins with The Sword in the Stone). Either way, the story is epic and tragic and (hopefully) all kinds of good.
You can read more about it at the Guardian’s site here.
Space Enough, and Time 
It’s amazing how much a dead man can publish… though I dare not compare Tolkien to Biggie Smalls. I wonder whether the works are worse the longer it has been since author’s death.
What??? I am afraid to allow myself to be excited. By the way, I convinced my book club to read the Hobbit next month so I will have friends with whom to see the movie… unless you want to come up and be treated to a big tub of popcorn with M&Ms dumped in!