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Anna Smol

~ Department of English, Mount Saint Vincent University

Anna Smol

Monthly Archives: March 2017

Tolkien in Vermont 2017: Romance in Middle-earth

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Anna Smol in Conferences, Tolkien

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Romance in Middle-earth, Tolkien in Vermont

Tolkien in Vermont conferenceThe program for the 14th annual Tolkien in Vermont conference has been posted. This year’s theme is Romance in Middle-earth, and the keynote speaker is Corey Olsen. There’s a modest registration fee, except for University of Vermont students and high-school students, who get in free. This is a small and friendly conference where everyone — whether professor, student,  fan, or independent scholar —  gets a chance to talk to each other and listen to each other’s presentations.
Check out the Tolkien in Vermont website for this year’s and previous years’ programs. You can also join the Facebook event page. This year’s program information is copied below.

Registration fee: $25; $15 for students. UVM students and high-school students are free.


☼ Friday, April 7th, 2017
Lafayette Hall L207: 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Friday evening Tolkien fireside readings 2017
Organized and hosted by The Tolkien Club of UVM


☼ Saturday, April 8th, 2017

Lafayette Hall L207: 8:00 – 5:00 p.m.

8:00 – 8:30: Continental breakfast with coffee & tea


8:30 – 9:00: Session #1

• Freawaru and Tolkien’s Beowulf
Dr. Christoper T. Vaccaro • Senior Lecturer • University of Vermont

• The broken sword, a meme: Beowulf, Arthur, and Elendil
Zachary Dilbeck • Columbus State Community College

9:30 – 10:45: Session #2

• The tale of Turin, a hapless helpless boy with a doom for failed romance
Gerry Blair • independent scholar

• Ill-met by moonlight: Aredhel and Eöl as the upside down of Beren and Lúthien
Katherine Neville • Signum University

• “Thus wrote Pengolodh”: Historical bias, its evidence, and its implications in The Silmarillion
Dawn M. Walls-Thumma • Coventry Village School

10:45 – 12:00: Session #3

• Realistic or fantastic narratives in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
Peter Kao • National Chung Cheng University

• “I have loved you, and that love shall not fail”: Tolkien’s philological explorations of friendship, love, and romance in The Lord of the Rings
Dr. Marc Zender • Assistant Professor • Tulane University

• “And with him was Elrond Half-Elven”: The high king and his herald (still a better love story than Twilight)
Dr. Kristine Larsen • Professor of Physics and Astronomy • Central Connecticut State University

12:00 – 12:45: Keynote

• The turning point in Tolkien’s career
Dr. Corey Olsen • Signum University

12:45 – 1:45: Lunch


1:45 – 3:00: Session #4

• Dispelling misogyny in Tolkien’s women — through reflection of Medieval lyric and personal relationships
Annie Brust • Kent State University

• Sounds in the dark: Assimilation and continuity in The Hobbit: An unexpected journey
Jeffrey Bullins • SUNY Plattsburgh

• Weberian “vocation” in The Lord of the Rings
Paul Fortunato • University of Houston-Downtown

3:00: Coffee and tea

3:00 – 4:30: Session #5

• “Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars” — Tolkien’s exploration of courtly relationships through the Lady Galadriel
Andrew Peterson • Harvard University

• Romance and romance
James Williamson • Senior Lecturer • University of Vermont

• The evolution of the animal to magical beast in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
Heather Dail • Instructor • University of South Alabama

The Tolkien in Vermont site is made possible by Vermont Softworks, LLC

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Tolkien Reading Day: 2 poems to memorize

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by Anna Smol in Tolkien

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Brad Leithauser, Eilmann and Turner, Geoffrey Russom, In western lands, Lynn Forest-Hill, Petra Zimmermann, Poetry and Songs in Tolkien's Fiction, The New Yorker, Tolkien Reading Day, Tolkien Society, Tolkien's poetry, Upon the hearth, Why We Should Memorize

March 25th is a significant date in Tolkien’s secondary world, the downfall of Sauron. Since 2003, the Tolkien Society has celebrated by naming March 25  Tolkien Reading Day. This year’s theme is Poetry and Songs in Tolkien’s Fiction. You can check out the Tolkien Society website to see what various individuals, groups, libraries, and museums around the world are planning for this day, or look for #TolkienReadingDay on Twitter, Instagram, or any number of other sites such as Facebook.

In honour of Tolkien Reading Day, I’d like to present two of my favourite poems from The Lord of the Rings to try to convince you that these are great poems to memorize: “Upon the hearth the fire is red” and “In western lands.”

Walking in Nova Scotia. copyright Anna Smol

Some of you may be wondering why you would want to memorize a poem when you can have it at your fingertips in a book or online. A number of reasons come to mind, but I think that the best one was summarized a few years ago in a New Yorker article, “Why We Should Memorize” by Brad Leithauser:

…you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen.

A good example of a poem that you can know in both your brain and your body is the walking poem “Upon the hearth the fire is red” (in “Three is Company” in The Fellowship of the Ring ) — especially if you recite it while walking!

I find that the 4-beat lines make the perfect rhythm for a walk. Look at the first few lines, where I’ve put the stressed syllables in caps:

UpON the HEARTH the FIRE is RED

or

Still ROUND the CORner WE may MEET

a SUDden TREE or STANDing STONE

that NONE have SEEN but WE aLONE

If you lift and advance your foot on the unstressed syllable and place it down on the ground on the stressed syllable, you’ll feel the rhythm. Stand up and try it! The poem can adapt to your pace. Say it faster for a brisk walk; slow it down if you’re tired or would like to take in the scenery.

If we’re being technical, not all of the lines fit as neatly into this stress pattern. For example,

beNEATH the ROOF there is a BED

If you want to exaggerate the stress pattern and keep it consistent, you’d put more stress on “IS”  than it typically would hold. But if it feels right, go ahead. (Geoffrey Russom, in his article “Tolkien’s Versecraft,” identifies this replacement of a weak syllable where a strongly stressed one should be as fairly common practice in English poems. Read his article if you want to know about “pyrrhic substitution”).

Walking in Nova Scotia copyright Anna SmolNow, to walk and recite while looking about you, you’ll need to memorize the poem. I always find that writing out the poem by hand — not typing it — is the best way to start connecting the words to the body and the mind. Then it will require repetition. Saying the lines aloud helps. Let the rhymes remind you of what comes next. Repeat, repeat, repeat until you’ve made it your own. I admit that when I was memorizing this poem, I could be seen walking around town with a little card in my hand that contained the written poem, a memory aid for my repetitions until I could recite it confidently without props.

If you’re reading the poem aloud, you’ll notice that some lines are shorter than the opening lines in each stanza. For example, “Let them pass! Let then pass!” I find this just makes me pick up the pace a bit and fuels my energy.

It also helps to think about the structure of the poem when trying to remember what comes next. We start at home — “Upon the hearth the fire is red, / Beneath the roof there is a bed” (lines 1-2) but then we leave this comfortable place pretty quickly on a walking trip in the first stanza, heading out into the world. In the middle stanza, we realize that there are other paths that could be taken some day — “Still round the corner there may wait / A new road or a secret gate” (lines 11-12), and in the final stanza we return home to food and a good night’s sleep, “Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, / And then to bed! And then to bed!” (lines 29-30).

Elvenking's gate from across the river (detail) by Tolkien

Elvenking’s gate from across the river (detail) by Tolkien

Another reason to memorize a poem would be to have some beautiful words or images ready at hand to describe what you’re seeing or doing, or just because something reminds you of a line.  For me, “In western lands” (in “The Tower of Cirith Ungol” chapter in Return of the King) contains this beautiful image:

Or there maybe ’tis cloudless night
and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
amid their branching hair. (lines 5-8)

[the second and fourth lines above should be indented; my program is not co-operating]

I love the way the branches of the trees are seen as strands of hair — reinforced by the image of the trees as “swaying” — and the stars that you can see through the branches become the jewels in their hair. I remember sitting out in the backyard one summer evening and looking up to see exactly what Tolkien is describing in this passage, a beautiful sight that needed his words to complete the scene.

Of course, there’s more to this poem than just one striking image. This is a poem about hope; it goes from normal life to despair and then finds a reason for going on. Sam sings this song as he despairs of finding Frodo in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, and it leads to his discovery of his friend.

I like the movement of the poem. It starts by having us look down to the earth, “beneath the Sun” to see a world starting to grow and bloom. Then we look up through the trees to the stars. In the second stanza, we’re buried deep and far from all this loveliness — “Though here at journey’s end I lie / in darkness buried deep” (lines 9-10). But even so, we know that “above all shadows rides the Sun/ and Stars for ever dwell” (lines 13-14).  The poem ends with an affirmation that no matter how deeply buried in darkness we might be, we can find hope: “I will not say the Day is done, / nor bid the Stars farewell” (lines 15-16).

You can spend a lot of time contemplating a good poem, and there is much to say about this one that won’t fit into a blog post. If you’d like some good ideas to spur your thinking, you can try a couple of essays in the book, Tolkien’s Poetry, edited by Julian Eilmann and Allan Turner (Walking Tree Publishers, 2013).  In that book, Petra Zimmermann’s essay explores the development of “In western lands” through several drafts and discusses Sam’s creative process. And Lynn Forest-Hill’s essay looks at the connection of earthly and spiritual imagery in the poem.

If you have your own favourite poems for memorizing, let me know in the comments!

***

Works Cited

“Upon the hearth” can be found in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring and “In western lands” is in The Return of the King.

Tolkien’s artwork, “Elvenking’s gate from across the river,” can be found in The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, HarperCollins, 2011, fig. 50, p. 79.

The other photos are copyright Anna Smol. They were taken in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Secondary sources:

Forest-Hill, Lynn. “Poetic Form and Spiritual Function: Praise, Invocation and Prayer in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien’s Poetry, edited by Julian Eilmann and Allan Turner. Walking Tree Publishers, 2013, pp. 91-116.

Leithauser, Brad. “Why We Should Memorize” The New Yorker  25 Jan. 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-we-should-memorize

Russom, Geoffrey. “Tolkien’s Versecraft in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons. Greenwood Press, 2000, pp. 53-69.

Zimmermann, Petra. “‘The glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space’: The Function of Poems in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien’s Poetry, edited by Julian Eilmann and Allan Turner. Walking Tree Publishers, 2013, pp. 59-89.

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New symphony by Johan de Meij to premiere at 2018 Tolkien Conference

12 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by Anna Smol in Conferences, Tolkien

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Johan de Meij, Simon Tolkien, Symphony #1 (Lord of the Rings), Valparaiso

Mark you calendars! November 1 – 4, 2018 is the date for a large, international Tolkien conference to be held at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Organizer Brad Eden has commissioned a new composition to be premiered at this conference by Johan de Meij, composer of Symphony #1 (Lord of the Rings), which he conducted during the 2013 Hobbit conference at Valparaiso. You can listen to part of that performance here:

 

Brad has set up a  GoFundMe page to raise the funds to pay Johan for this commission. As Brad notes, “those who give $250, $500, and $1,000 or more will be listed in the program at various levels of support and forever linked to this composition.”

https://www.gofundme.com/return-to-myddle-erde-symphony

You can read more about Johan de Meij’s work on his website, The Music of Johan de Meij. Brad has also invited Simon Tolkien, the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien, to talk about his novels, and he is currently lining up plenary speakers as well as topics and themes for papers and panel discussions. He will have more details in the next few months. If you’re attending the PCA/ACA, Kalamazoo, or Leeds conferences, be sure to ask Brad for more information.

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Dr. Anna Smol

This site includes my blog, "A Single Leaf," and webpages about my research and teaching in Tolkien studies, medievalism, Old English, and higher education pedagogy. Creative Commons License: <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License</a>.

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