James Enge's Blog

Some discussion of thews and thewbilation in the Sword and Sorcery Tavern on Discord made me curious about the etymology of thew.

I consulted my friend, the democratic AHD, and it hit me in the face with this.

Did not expect it to derive from a word meaning “habit; custom”. That seems a pretty abstract origin for such a fleshy word. But I guess you don’t develop thews in the modern sense without the habit of exercise. Or so I’m told by those who have them.

I like the word thewy, tho...

I’ve been dabbling in the used-record market to feed the maw of my newish turntable. One thing I’ve really wanted was Cal Tjader’s Tjader Plays Mambo (1956), which is long out of print.

I managed to find a copy in the old red vinyl format that Fantasy Records used in the 50s (along with Tjader Plays Tjazz which is a fun album, but less of a must-have).

The discs themselves are less than pristine (few of us are as we approach our 70s), but it’s hard to express how magical these things ...

At the Fortress of Engitude, we’re celebrating the Day of Might, proclaimed by the late, unceasingly great Howard Jones as a day for celebrating sword and sorcery, heroic fantasy, and heroic fiction generally.

One of the long-lost pleasures of vinyl that I’m recently recovering is going through stacks of used LPs at record stores. These are thinner on the ground than they were in the 20th C, but when I find one I almost always come away with something great.

I don’t remember being crazy about Orff’s Carmina Catulli, but it is the most famous setting of Catullus’ verse, which I’m teaching again next semester in my Upper Latin class.

There’s some Latin in Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, too: the ...

I finally replaced the turntable that broke a couple of moves ago, and have been enjoying long soaks in analogue sound. It’s fun to finally listen to the vinyl I’ve been buying to support bands over the last few years, & also to drag old favorites out of boxes in the basement.

The Prokofiev is the first album I bought with my own money. Weird that I still have it when so many other things and people have been lost over the years.

The aforesaid boxes are completely disorganized, so disco...

I’ve never seen the Danny De Vito film The War of the Roses (1989). It came out during the first Christmas season that I celebrated with my first wife and my first child. I had lots of things to occupy me in those days, and going to see a dark comedy about a nasty divorce didn’t seem like a worthwhile thing to add to the list. Much later on I had my own divorce to contend with, and a movie like that seemed still less appealing.

But a remake has just been released (The Roses, 2025), featuring ...

Many things about Trumpism are disgusting, but there’s a specific kind of abject ecstacy in Trumpolatry that is really repulsive. “It’s like something from Tacitus,” I always think. Today I ran across the quote I’d been not-quite remembering.

clamor vocesque vulgi ex more adulandi nimiae et falsae: quasi dictatorem Caesarem aut imperatorem Augustum prosequerentur, ita studiis votisque certabant, nec metu aut amore, sed ex libidine servitii.

—Tacitus, Historiae 1.90

“The shouting and th...

Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
the saddest are “Prequel again?”

I’ve been following with interest Steven Silver’s great series of reviews of the Tor Double books at the Black Gate. His latest, scrupulously fair, review of Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon+de Camp’s Divide and Conquer reminded me of one of my favorite Latin sayings: de gustibus non disputandum est. Or, in the words of a cinematic classic:

People get to like what they like and not like what they don...

Fiction set at upper-class British schools was a popular genre in the 19th and early 20th C, and murder mysteries were the dominant form of popular fiction in the early and mid-20th century, so it’s only natural that cross-pollination would create a sub-genre: the murder mystery set at an upper-class school.

I’ve read three of these things: A Question of Proof by “Nicholas Blake” (really C. Day Lewis), A Murder of Quality by “John Le Carré” (really David Cornwell) and Was It Murder? by “Glen ...