Talking of elves / elfs … have no great problem with people believing in whatever they want on their own time / dime.

What I object to is when loonies like the homeopaths demand that they should get this claptrap on the National ‘Elf Service/

‘Is it peer reviewed?’ is a start, but what kind of peers? what quality journal?

Draust, unbelievably and beyond parody, Liz Lalor has apparently written essays on the personalities of Tolkein’s characters from a homeopathic perspective.

Good grief…. Sadly (or perhaps thankfully, since I wouldn’t really want to think my Univ library was paying money to subscribe to this) I can’t access the “full text article”… though it is published by a respectable academic publishing house. But simply the idea is…. well, beyond parody, as you say.

Of course, it is just another example of the inadvertently comic high seriousness with which homeopaths regard their cult. The “Emperor’s New Clothes”, in spades.

The real eye-waterer is that this is listed as an actual “journal”, though it is really a collection of essays about homeopathy, written needless to say by enthusiasts.

Sometimes I find it hard to disagree with the proposition that “there are too many academic journals”. I once had a Head of Department whose mantra about academic science journals was:

“Do you publish in [one of] the top two hundred journals… or [one of] the BOTTOM TWO THOUSAND?”

Of course, this was really an RAE “try harder you slackers” message, and I thought he was a hectoring bully. But in the context of AltMed loonery and the proliferation of journals devoted to it the idea takes on a different significance.

I imagine that since he was telling us this (a decade plus ago) the total number of journals has increased substantially, so it is probably “…the bottom four thousand” by now.

to paraphrase (reportedly) Hugo Dyson:

“Oh, fuck! Not another light sabre!”

I think my wrong attitude is probably incurable.

“On one memorable occasion a small group had gathered in Lewis’s rooms and were listening to Tolkien read the last installment of The Lord of the Rings. They were sitting there puffing on pipes and sipping tea when Hugo Dyson, who had been lounging on a sofa and growing increasingly bored with the proceedings, suddenly exclaimed: “Oh, fuck! Not another elf!”

* As quoted in C.S. Lewis: Creator of Narnia (2005) by Michael White, p. 152

and disregard without question anything a critic tells them to be is false.
It really is like arguing with the more dogmatic religious types.

Draust, unbelievably and beyond parody, Liz Lalor has apparently written essays on the personalities of Tolkein’s characters from a homeopathic perspective.

That should be a fairly easy challenge. But of course no homeopath will take it because homeopaths never argue with each other. In any real scientific discipline, a challenge along those lines would have people rushing to their notes and files to see whether they could prove this claim to be false. But homeopaths, indeed CAM practitioners in general, simply accept without question anything that any other homeopath tells them to be true.

Talking of words, Whenever I hear homeopaths babbling about the “Simillimum”, I can’t help thinking of Prof JRR Tolkien. Strangely appropriate in a way, since Tolkien was a devout Catholic and his works contain many of the same ideas about “healing through spiritual force” as Kentian-style homeopathy.

Of course, Tolkien’s oeuvre, while widely read and even taught in Universities, is an admitted work of imagination. Whilst homeopathy is a work of imagination, but hasn’t noticed.