Hey folks! Apologies for this coming out late – alas the pedant household has been struck by a nasty cold that has made keeping up with work this week quite challenging. No post this week, on account of it being Christmas time. May you all have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holidays or simply Friendly Season’s Greetings, whichever is your preference!
We’ll be back next week with some Tolkien (I am planning to post up the text of my keynote, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars” which I delivered this past week at the 2025 Prancing Pony Podcast Moot) and then we’ll be back to finishing out our discussion of hoplites in the New Year.
In the meantime, this is normally the spot in the calendar where I do a bit of ‘year in review’ so let me indulge in that. 2025 set a new record for t…
Hey folks! Apologies for this coming out late – alas the pedant household has been struck by a nasty cold that has made keeping up with work this week quite challenging. No post this week, on account of it being Christmas time. May you all have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holidays or simply Friendly Season’s Greetings, whichever is your preference!
We’ll be back next week with some Tolkien (I am planning to post up the text of my keynote, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars” which I delivered this past week at the 2025 Prancing Pony Podcast Moot) and then we’ll be back to finishing out our discussion of hoplites in the New Year.
In the meantime, this is normally the spot in the calendar where I do a bit of ‘year in review’ so let me indulge in that. 2025 set a new record for traffic on the blog – it looks like we’ll end up around 4.25m page views, at last dethroning 2022 which had held the record.1 The most popular post this year by far was “Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire” with more than 140,000 views. The distant-runners-up (but still doing quite well) were “Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold,’” and “How Gandalf Proved Mightiest.” Meanwhile I was pleasantly surprised that the series on “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant” also pulled in a decent number of readers despite being a pretty technical-in-the-weeds series without a strong ‘pop-culture’ hook. It ended up the year a bit short of 300,000 page views split over its 10 parts and subparts.
In the New Year, my plan is to get to a lot of lingering Patron requests, including the winners of the ACOUP Senate poll. We’re going to get some discussion of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, some on of how ancient polytheism interacts with ancient states and some of mercenaries and other things. I think 2026 is probably also the year for the nearly inevitable Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV (in which you can look forward to some praise but perhaps some sharper criticism of the Paradox approach; HoI4 is a remarkable game but it has some remarkable problems too).
- All of these stats are as WordPress counts. The Google Analytics numbers are generally modestly (c. 10-15%) lower, but it’s a little harder to easily compare post-specific and year-to-year data there, so I tend to use the WordPress numbers first. But if you want the Google Analytics numbers, you can generally just downward adjust by around 15% and you’ll get there.
Published December 27, 2025December 27, 2025