Anna Smol: A Single Leaf

Category: Medievalisms

  • Talks on Tolkien II: summer series. Flieger on Kullervo

    In the winter months of 2015, I posted a series, Talks on Tolkien, which consisted of presentations by Tolkien scholars that had been previously recorded and made available on the internet. As I was watching a live stream this morning from the New York Tolkien Conference Facebook page, I was reminded of how much I…

  • Tolkien events in Leeds

    If you’re in the vicinity of Leeds, you can attend a number of Tolkien papers over the next few days.  On Sunday July 3, the Tolkien Society Seminar will take place in the Hilton Leeds City.  This one-day series of presentations focuses on the theme of Life, Death, and Immortality.  You can read the full…

  • Kzoo 2017 calls for Tolkien papers

    The approved sessions for Kalamazoo (the International Congress on Medieval Studies) have just been announced. In spite of very well attended sessions in the past and plenty of paper submissions, the Tolkien at Kalamazoo group has once again been reduced by the conference organizers, as have other groups attending the Congress.  For 2017, only two…

  • The Child, the Primitive, and the Medieval: making medieval heroes in the 19th and early 20th centuries

    I wrote “The Child, the Primitive, and the Medieval: Making Medieval Heroes in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” in an attempt to answer the questions, why would people think that stories of King Arthur or Beowulf or Robin Hood or stories written by Chaucer were appropriate for children? Why did late Victorian and…

  • Tolkien conference season 2016

    Here are some Tolkien conferences coming up in the spring and summer — prime conference season! I can’t claim to list every event that’s going on, so if you’d like to add something to the list, please let me know in the comments section. If you want to know about Tolkien-related events around the world,…

  • Tolkien & medievalism at K’zoo 2016: sneak peek

    The preview of the conference program for the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies has now been posted. Although there may still be changes made to the program before the final version is published in February, I’m always eager to see what sessions have been accepted and to plan how I’m going to spend my…

  • Tolkien’s nod to the medieval homage ritual in LotR

    As I indicated in a previous entry, I wanted to post some of the images that I used when delivering my Tolkien 2005 conference paper. That paper (without the images) is included in the proceedings now on sale by the Tolkien Society. Back in 2005, my presentation, “Male Friendship in The Lord of the Rings:…

  • Tolkien 2005 Proceedings on sale

    It’s hard to believe that the Tolkien 2005 conference — The Ring Goes Ever On — was held ten years ago at Aston University in the UK. Looking over the list of participants in the mammoth proceedings published after the event, I see names of people I had met just a little while before; some…

  • Travels with Tolkien; or, What I Did Last Summer

    A couple of weeks ago, my department held a reception for our students, and the event included a series of brief talks called  “What I Did Last Summer.”  Our intention was to introduce our work to our students and also to combat the popular misconception that professors have the summer “off.” We wanted to give…

  • Eala! Unlock your word hoards!

    I’ve just heard about a new project, the journal Eala, which will publish compositions in Old English and other medieval Germanic languages. The founding editor and editor-in-chief of Word Hoard Press, Richard Littauer, plans to publish the journal online and include original compositions in Old English, Old Norse, and the like, as well as translations.…