Fantasy (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Robert E. Howard did like ape monsters. Thak, the ape creature from “Rogues in the House” was already featured in this series. There was also the Winged Ape from “Queen of the Black Coast”. These may have been inspired by H. Rider Haggard’s Heu Heu the Monster (1924) with its statue of a giant ape god.

Cinema (Nerdrotic): Disney made male fans the enemy and now they want them back.

Reading (The Silver Key): Reading is in trouble. How deeply? There’s evidence it may be in a death spiral. A new study published in the journal iScience found that daily reading for pleasure plummeted 40% over the past 20 years. The data was taken from a study of more than 236,000 Americans, no small sample size. Study co-author Jill Sonke called it “a sustained, steady decline” and “deeply concerning.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (DMR Books): When I ‘came back’ to ERB about fifteen years ago–after over twenty years of considering him a ‘guilty pleasure’–one thing I did was reread my Burroughs collection that had miraculously survived the Flood of 2012. Many of those were the original books I bought back in the ’70s when I first became an ERB fan. Many/most of them were reprints from the ‘Burroughs Boom’ launched by Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books a decade earlier.

Art (Just Collecting): A painting by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta used as the cover art for a Conan the Barbarian novel will be auctioned next week and is already under off at $6 million.

Tolkien (Red Quills): J.R.R. Tolkien is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest worldbuilders in fantasy fiction. His meticulous construction of Middle-earth set the standard for immersive, believable secondary worlds. But what often goes underappreciated is how essential mapmaking was to his process. Tolkien didn’t just write stories – he mapped them. And in doing so, he embedded depth, realism, and narrative cohesion into his world.

Toys (Animation Magazine): Heroic Signatures, the entertainment studio which holds the IP to fantasy classic Conan the Barbarian, today premiered a new stop-motion video in collaboration with award-winning filmmaker, animator and life-long Conan fan Justin Rasch (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings) to launch pre-orders of their new limited-edition, handcrafted Conan the Barbarian Battle of the Black Stone action figure.

Tolkien (Tolkien Archive): In this article, a revised and extended version of my piece “1944: Michael H. R. Tolkien and the Soviet ‘mania’” published on Academia.edu, I present some information regarding Tolkien’s second son that is still unpublished for the general public and has never been cited by other scholars in their work. In particular, I am referring to several letters published between 1944 and 1948 in the Evening Despatch

Cinema (Art of the Movies): That’s where Kurt Russell comes in. Like the others, he has a pure everyman quality– whoever he plays, we can relate to this guy.

History (Cambrian Chronicles): Throughout history, both modern and medieval, Welsh history has been unfortunately malleable, often falling victim to hoaxes and mistakes. Today, I seek to trace the origins of a myth I have seen going around the internet for years, that the Welsh name for England (Lloegr), somehow translates as “the lost lands”.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (DMR Books): What better day to celebrate the birth of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the quintessential American ‘author of the working man’? For ERB was—and remains—exactly that. He gave the ‘common folk’ of America what they wanted—and also goals to aspire to. In return, Americans took Burroughs to heart, making him rich and influential beyond his dreams.

Myth (Lotus Eaters Dot Com): In this first ever episode of Chronicles, Luca discusses the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. He explores its pagan and Christian duality, its veneration of the Germanic heroic ideal, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s scholarship, which transformed it from a historical document into beloved literature.

Review (The Silver Key): I just closed the cover on DMR Books’ latest release, Celtic Adventures, and had to say a few words about the final entry collected therein: “Grana, Queen of Battle,” by John Barnett. Because it’s damned good.

History (Lotus Eaters Daily): 1,100 Years of Glory. Athelstan’s coronation.

Reading (Grognardia): In Grognardia’s early days, one of its signature features was Pulp Fantasy Library. If you glance at the “Popular Topics and Series” box down the right-hand column, you’ll see more than 300 entries under that heading. The idea was simple: highlight the works of pulp fantasy literature that shaped not only my own imagination but, more importantly, those that shaped founders of the hobby of roleplaying.

Horror (Old Style Tales): An elegant, poetic, and unnerving haunted-house-story, “The House of Silence” evokes the best works of Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe, and W. W. Jacobs with its emphasis on atmosphere and Nesbit’s muscular self-discipline. As such, it remains one of the most beautifully written of Nesbit’s entire oeuvre, an impressionistic prose poem percolating with suggestion and mood.

Review (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Books like Orty Ortwein’s The First Geeks (2024) are few and far between. To explain that, I have to back up a little. If you are like me there aren’t enough books about Science Fiction, the real Science Fiction. Sure, there are plenty of volumes that claim to be a history of the genre, books like Lester Del Rey’s The World of Science Fiction (1976) or Adam Roberts The History of Science Fiction (2006).

Clark Ashton Smith (Decadent Serpent): So declares the young poet of California in “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil” as the light goes out. With the cracked, bifurcated bust left to posterity — the dough-faced poet spliced into a moustachioed wizard, a worker in stone and paint — the reader will think modernity left Clark Ashton Smith behind; or that Smith left it behind by the end of his life in 1961.

Fiction (Michael K. Vaughn): Cimmerian September!

Myth (Public Domain Review): The terrifying Great Norway Serpent, or Sea Orm, is the most famous of the many influential sea monsters depicted and described by 16th-century ecclesiastic, cartographer, and historian Olaus Magnus. Joseph Nigg explores the iconic and literary legacy of the controversial serpent from its beginnings in the medieval imagination to modern cryptozoology.

Cold Steel (Frontier Partisans): Matt Easton of Schola Gladiatoria is a tomahawk man. He explores military history from medieval times to World War I with a focus on melee weapons. While the majority of his videos hone in on medieval topics, he confesses a fascination with Colonial North American melee combat — and, thus, the tomahawk.

Aviation (Real Engineering): The insane engineering of the P-38.

Classic Blogs (Achrive.org): The Best of The Cimmerian

Cinema (Nerdrotic): After years of production hell, the Red Sonja film has finally been released. Turn out this was a mistake.