I’m now home from Westmoot, the first ever Tolkien Society conference in the US. I had a lovely time seeing friends old and new, listening to some great talks, and marvelling at the creative abilities of artists of various kinds. The social media links at the bottom of this page have many photos of the people who made the weekend so special.

Registered attendees can look forward to getting access to recorded sessions, but for those who couldn’t make it to the conference, here is a little more information about my talk. Also, because a few people uploaded their papers right after the event, you can get an idea of what they talked about as well in the links below.

My keynote, “Tolkien’s Myth-making and Dreams of Eärendil” sought to answer two main questions: 1. How does Tolkien create an impression of a full mythology centred on Eärendil that functions like a real-world body of myths? and 2. How does Eärendil offer a pathway to Faërian Dramas in The Notion Club Papers, The Lord of the Rings, and Smith of Wootton Major?

A springboard for my ideas came from Professor Verlyn Flieger’s 2021 talk, “Waiting for Earendel” in which she asks, why is Eärendil mentioned throughout Tolkien’s legendarium but is lacking a major and full treatment of his story like the Three Great Tales of Beren and Lúthien, Túrin, and the Fall of Gondolin? Professor Flieger’s sense of how the Eärendil story constitutes “the presence of an absence” has given me some ideas on how the Eärendil myth has some distinctive features from the other great tales. I think that we can find that distinctive quality in the way the story is retold and received by different characters in Tolkien’s fictions — because Eärendil’s story spills far beyond the boundaries of the First Age of Middle-earth and touches characters like a hobbit in the Third Age; men in 20th-century Oxford; and a blacksmith in a vaguely medievalised time and place.

I first looked at the Old English poem, Crist, in which Tolkien first found mention of Earendel (later he spelled it Eärendil) and then at a couple of his early poems and an earlier version of the Silmarillion to see how Tolkien explored what Eärendil meant to others and how the myth was transmitted in ways that are similar to real-world myths.

The second part of my talk dealt with Eärendil’s functions in The Notion Club Papers, The Lord of the Rings, and in Smith of Wootton Major, and how he seems to create a pathway to experiences in Faërie. I’ll be working on revising this talk for publication, so I hope I will be able to report on that in the future.

And some more….

Several people have uploaded their papers in the conference paper section of the Journal of Tolkien Research, so you can read what was said in a few sessions of the conference.

Janet Brennan Croft

Janet Brennan Crost was the closing keynote speaker at the conference.

““What Ship Will Bear Me Ever Back”: Woundedness and the Western Sea,” Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 21: Iss. 1, Article 11.

Kristine Larsen

This is a slightly expanded version of Dr. Larsen’s Westmoot talk.

“Riddles in the Dark (of Space), or, Further Adventures Romanticizing Astronomers’ Middle-earth Identified Research,” Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 21: Iss. 1, Article 10.

Tom Hillman

“Túrin Was Dead: To Begin With. Death, Fate, And A Happy Ending In The Book of Lost Tales,” Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 21: Iss. 1, Article 12.

Luke Shelton, closing remarks

Dr. Shelton was one of the organizers of the conference and gave these closing remarks.

Westmoot 2025 Closing AddressL

---

For pictures and accounts of the event, check out the Westmoot Facebook page or Westmoot 2025 Instagram or Bluesky @westmoot.org