In my last post — an account of my day yesterday — I noted that I’d stayed up until the wee hours of the morn working on revisions for an article. I sent it back to the editor at something like 1:30 in the morning, and a little over 24 hours later it has been accepted.

The journal it will be published in is Mythlore, one of the most prominent journals that publishes academic work on J.R.R. Tolkien. It will actually be my third article to appear in its pages, and I’m quite proud to have hit the trifecta. I’m probably more proud, though, that one of my former students will also be published in the same issue, which is also a bit of a trifecta: this will be the third article to appear in Mythlore that began as a research paper under my tutelage.

This coming Wednesday evening, at 6:30pm, I’ll be presenting a free public lecture here at The Citadel (Bond Hall auditorium, room 165), entitled “Tolkien’s Creation by Edition: The Medieval Origins of The Hobbit.” It should be a really entertaining and informative time!

It is truly amazing how stacked up my semester got with lectures, and the thick of it is right now. Today I gave the keynote lecture at the Lowcountry Writing Project, and Wednesday night I give another lecture — this time free and open to the public, on Tolkien and Beowulf. Unlike my last two lectures, Wednesday night’s festivities should be a relatively easy prep. I gave a similar lecture last fall, so I just need to update and expand things a touch. And I have three days to do it, so no worries.

At the end of the week, this year’s edition of The Shako will be published, which will be yet another weight lifted.

Which surely means its time to load up again, no?

I’ve been so busy that I don’t think I posted notice of a review of The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook. The review is from a somewhat unexpected source, The Fortean Times, but it’s a very flattering one.

My favorite highlights:

Many books have been written on the subject over the years, but this will be the definitive text…. The Casebook will be of interest … as an exemplar of how to undertake research into legends of the past, as it goes back to original sources and weighs the evidence thoroughly and transparently, taking into account the contemporary historical context throughout.

Pretty awesome. I was also pleased the the reviewer, Rob Gandy, noted the “tough balance” that was involved in creating a volume that “aims to be useful and interesting to both the educated lay reader and the most specialised academics.” Judging from the ultimate “Fortean Times Verdict” we hit it pretty close to the mark: the book merits a 9/10, “an exemplar for researching historical legends.”

High noon this coming Saturday, 10 March, I’ll be giving the keynote lecture for the Lowcountry Writing Project’s Spring Conference here in Charleston, SC. As it’s a writing conference largely aimed at teachers, my talk features some pedagogical approaches to writing.

Entitled “From Beginning to End: The Universal Presence of Stories,” the lecture will focus on how we can utilize the narrative techniques of story-telling (creative writing in particular) to produce more effective analytical writing. In other words, I’m going to talk about how writing an essay isn’t really very different from writing a story — despite what my English teachers might once have told me.

Because of Robin Hood and mid-terms and many other things getting in the way, I couldn’t really work much on the talk until, well, this week. No pressure, eh? It’s also been a bit of a conundrum in terms of thinking about the audience: the attendees will run the gamut from kindergarten teachers to college professors. So finding the “sweet spot” for all comers has been tough.

Regardless, I’m just about finished with it. I probably won’t have time to test it out, but I’m thinking it’ll be close to the hour-long block I’m slated to take up. More importantly, I think it will be useful to folks.

This afternoon I learned that I’ve been chosen as The Citadel’s delegate to one of the Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminars at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

Be there soon!

The particular seminar I’ll be at is on the subject of early Christian Apocrypha (the “other” gospels and biblical books that most folks don’t know about), which has long been a fascination of mine. My first published article was on the subject of the first-century development of Christianity, in fact, and it has moved in and out of my work since (especially in things like the Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament).

That’s enough to make this awesome … but there’s more. The seminar will be led by Bart Ehrman, from UNC-Chapel Hill, who has taken his specialty in this somewhat arcane subject and made it popularly accessible: he’s had at least three books hit the NYT best-seller lists, and he’s a constant as a talking head whenever the subject comes up (like, you know, every Easter and Christmas).

As if that wasn’t enough, the seminar will also give me a chance to get a lot of research done (knock on wood) at the multitude of high-powered libraries that fall within the Research Triangle in North Carolina.

Oh, and then there’s this:

It costs me nothing.