There’s a weight to words when they are written by those who have never touched the landscapes they paint, yet summon them with such clarity you’d swear they had walked the paths themselves. Karl May never set foot in the…...
I first stumbled upon Irish Celtic mythology when I was a lad of fourteen, a scrawny thing with a wild imagination and a stubborn curiosity for the unknown. It was my older sister who planted the seed, gifting me a…...
The Archer’s Compass, Part I Sophocles’ Philoctetes is such a tale. A story, not of victory, but of exile. Picture him there on that rocky isle of Lemnos, its crags jutting up like broken teeth from the indifferent sea. The…...
A life spent among words—their ripples, their surges, their deceptive ebbs—is also a life surrendered to a quiet yet consuming enchantment. The strangely beautiful paths they carve alternate between the solid ground of reality and the mercurial landscapes uplifted in…...
C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia is a work so steeped in allegory that every element feels laden with meaning. Among these, the bow—gifted to Susan Pevensie—stands out as a symbol not only of strength and discipline but of choice, a curious mix of autonomy and submission to a higher purpose. I often reflect on this choice as I hold manuscripts in my hands, wondering if the writer truly understands the weapon they wield. A bow, after all, is not a casual gift. It demands skill, precision, and faith, not unlike the very act of writing itself. Lewis was a writer who understood the importance of symbols. His life, punctuated by tragedy and a long wrestling match with faith, shaped his fiction in profound ways. Raised in a bookish home, he lost his mother at a young age and endured the horrors of the First World War—a crucible that left him both skeptical of shallow optimism and hungry for meaning.
(A monthly column) As someone who has invested a considerable portion of his life in studying literature and the elaborately oiled machinations at work in the construction of narratives, I am constitutionally fascinated by the representation of archery in canonical…...
By Marcin Malek Amid the swirling eddies of ancient epic and brisk modern sensibility, the legend of Odysseus, our perennial navigator through the tempestuous seas of fate and time, shines forth as a beacon of cosmic order, much like a…...
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