Morning Medieval Miscellany

For your Thursday morning reading pleasure:

• Per Omnia Saecula give us two weird medieval animals this week: The Yale (no word on whether this creature mates with "the Vassar") and Sciapods.
• Jennifer Lynn Jordan also sends us to this CNN piece about the Night Watchman, described in the piece as "flat-out the most entertaining hour of medieval wonder anywhere in Germany."
• Lots of people (too many to hat-tip) mentioned that Peter Jackson has agreed to do two films of The Hobbit for New Line Cinema. I actually heard about this at Dragon*Con, but I guess it wasn't official until now.
• JJ Cohen critiques the Washington Post's review of The Second Shepherds' Play, describing it as "lazy." Cohen's discussion of it gets at the heart of so much that is stupid in media discussions of the medieval.
• In the Middle also has a review of The Jew in the Medieval Book -- which is not described as lazy. Far from it.
• Over at Modern Medieval, Larry Swain discusses Beowulf as a fad subject (not just a feature-length film), pointing out that compared to other epics, it has gotten a lot of attention lately.
• Stephen Hart praises the audiobook version of Children of Hurin. He also includes for your viewing pleasure Leonard Nimoy singing the "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" -- which even makes me laugh now over about a zillion viewings over the years.