Category Archives: Old English

Widsith, D&D, Fanworks, and Films: Another Year in ENGL 4475

27 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Fan studies, Medievalisms, Old English, pedagogy, Teaching, Tolkien

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ENGL 4475: the year in review

I’ve filed away my course notes and given out the final grades. ENGL 4475: Tolkien & Myth-making is officially over for the 2016-17 academic year. The project proposals, annotated bibliographies, abstracts, research papers, and exams are all done now. What’s left is my delight at the many ways my students found to explore Tolkien’s fiction in relation to adaptation, medievalism, and fandom.

ENGL 4475 gift of lembas

Gift of lembas by a student from ENGL 4475

Our last class of the year is a celebration of the work students have done. We set up in a party room with snacks and drinks and read excerpts from each other’s essays. After all, it’s more interesting if you’re writing for your peers and not just for your teacher. My students then present their research projects to the rest of the seminar. I give them a range of general options for these projects, from studying Tolkien’s adaptations of texts such as Beowulf to producing their own adaptations based on Tolkien’s fiction. Because this is a senior-level English course, all of the projects require a written researched analysis of the texts and, if relevant, of the students’ process of adaptation or their participation in fandom.

On presentation day, the class had assembled around the seminar table but for one student, who at the last moment made quite an entrance in full costume, much to our delight. Gavin Rollins’ project was about cosplay, but he didn’t just write about it; he arrived as a living example of his research. (He also brought us some delicious lembas).

ENGL 4475 cosplay Gavin Rollins

Part of Gavin Rollins’ cosplay project

Gavin’s paper dealt with the immersive, communal experience of cosplay and the intertextuality of Tolkien’s fiction and Jackson’s films.

A couple of other students were thinking along the same lines when they conducted their study of Dungeons and Dragons gaming. Andrew Potter used his and his friends’ experiences to investigate the question, can a D&D adventure feel like a “faerian drama“?  Andrew’s answer is maybe, and certainly more likely than the experience of playing a video game or watching a film.

Luke Hammond and his D&D research team

Luke Hammond (centre) and his D&D research team

Luke Hammond created his own D&D-style adventure based on Tolkien’s Mines of Moria episode and experimented with his friends in a campaign lasting several hours to see how Tolkien’s place descriptions worked (they worked well) and what kind of choices would be made by players who didn’t know the books or the movies. (Turns out the Frodo-character put on the Ring every chance he could get!). Luke’s analysis also considered how the role-playing genre could fulfill Tolkien’s ideas expressed in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” about fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation.

D&D dice from diceaholic.wordpress.com

Image from diceaholic.wordpress.com

It would take too long to summarize every student’s project, but at least I can give you a taste of the variety we enjoyed. Courtney Francis wrote about Legolas/Gimli fanfiction; Megan Bruce about surveillance in The Lord of the Rings, including her poem about Galadriel’s mirror as a surveillance tool. Nicole Martina tackled Tolkien’s descriptive landscapes and his artistic style. And Allyson Roussy adapted the Old English poem “Widsith,” in which a widely-travelled poet recounts all the great rulers and places he has been, thus recording legends and histories in his verse. Allyson transposed the style of “Widsith” to the history of Middle-earth, beginning with Silmarillion tales and ending with The Lord of the Rings. Her speaker is Gandalf, someone who has travelled widely and seen a great deal in Middle-earth. Although she does not attempt to write consistently in alliterative verse, she typically captures the four-beat style of her Old English model. Here is a passage spoken by Gandalf:

…I acted as guide in the war against Sauron.
I counselled men and elves and exiles,
sought those who desired to aid our cause,
who strengthened the armies of Middle-earth.
I was with Aragorn, of the House of Isildur,
Beren’s mirror, with Barahir’s ring,
last heir to the throne of Gondor and Arnor,
A true leader with patience and humility,
The hands of a healer and the hands of a king….

Film adaptations of Tolkien’s work also provided fertile ground for analysis. Kimia Nejat studied Jackson’s film representations of Frodo and Sam. Samantha VanNorden, starting with the premise that Middle-earth is a character in The Lord of the Rings, analyzed Jackson’s representations of certain landscapes. And Alexandra Rudderham examined Tolkien’s representation of Galadriel along with the film adaptations by Ralph Bakshi and Peter Jackson. Tolkien’s handling of gender and women has long been a topic of debate, and Alex further asked, have filmmakers captured all of Galadriel’s qualities as a beautiful, perilous, powerful queen? Compare for yourself; first, Bakshi’s animated 1978 version:

and then Peter Jackson’s 2001 Fellowship of the Ring:

Fan Studies in the Classroom

I’ve had an opportunity to write about the kind of work I ask my students to do in this course. My essay “Adaptation as Analysis: Creative Work in an English Classroom” is forthcoming in the book Fan Studies in the Classroom, edited by Katherine Howell, to be published by the University of Iowa Press. In this essay I discuss the theory behind my ENGL 4475 assignments, the practical details of how they’re done, and why I think the assignments  encourage intertextual engagement, creativity, and textual analyses. I’ll post more when the book is published. In the meantime, some of my former students’ assignments can be seen on the ENGL 4475: Studies in Medievalism – Tolkien & Myth-making course page.

Selected Bibliography

This is not meant to be a complete bibliography by any means, but I thought that a few readers might like to sample some of the sources, especially those dealing with fandom and adaptation, that my students have read as part of their research. I’ve culled one or two sources from each essay in case anyone wants to look further into some of the topics my students have written about.

Abrahamson, M.B.  “J.R.R. Tolkien, Fanfiction, and the Freedom of the Reader.” Mythlore, vol. 32, no. 1, 2013, pp. 53- 72.

Allington, Daniel. “‘How Come Most People Don’t See It?’: Slashing The Lord of the Rings.” Social Semiotics, vol. 17, no. 1, Mar. 2007, pp. 43–62.

Amendt-Raduege, Amy. “Dream Visions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 3, 2006, pp. 45-55.

Barker, Martin. “Envisaging ‘Visualisation’: Some challenges from the international Lord of the Rings audience project.” Film-Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 3, 2006, pp. 1-25.

Battis, Jes. “Gazing upon Sauron: Hobbits, Elves, and the Queering of the Postcolonial optic.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, 2004, pp. 908-26.

Clark, George. “J.R.R. Tolkien and the True Hero.” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-Earth, Greenwood Press, 2000, pp. 39–52.

Cohen, Cynthia M. “The Unique Representation of Trees in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 6, 2009, pp. 91-125.

Croft, Janet Brennan and Leslie Donovan, editors. Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien. Mythopoeic Press, 2015.

Enright, Nancy. “Tolkien’s Females and the Defining of Power.” Renascence, vol. 59, Issue 2, 2007, 93-108.

Ewalt, David M. Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People Who Play It. Scribner, 2013.

Gygax, Gary. “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games.” Dragon, vol. 95. March 1985. pp. 12-13.

Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull.  J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. HarperCollins, 2004.

Haydock, Nickolas. The Imaginary Middle Ages: Movie Medievalism. McFarland, 2008.

Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse, editors. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. McFarland, 2006.

Hutcheon, L. with S. O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed, Routledge, London and New York.

Jenkins, Henry. “About: Aca/Fan Defined.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan.

Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend, Seren, 2005.

Rahman, Osmud, Liu Wing-Sun, and Brittany Hei-Man Cheung.  “’Cosplay’: Imaginative Self and Performing Identity.”  Fashion Theory-The Journal Of Dress Body & Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, Sep 2012, pp. 317-342.

Rateliff, John. “Tolkien Moot 2008 MerpCon IV John D. Rateliff  solo speech History of the Hobbit author.” YouTube, 28 Jun 2012.

Reid, Robin Anne. “Thrusts in the Dark: Slashers’ Queer Practices.” Extrapolation, vol. 50, no. 3, 2009, pp. 463–483.

_________.  “Tree and flower, leaf and grass: The Grammar of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings.”  Fantasy Fiction into Film.  Edited by Stratyner, Leslie and James R. Keller.  McFarland, 2007.

Russell, Gary.  The Lord of the Rings: Art of the Fellowship of the Ring.  HarperCollins, 2002.

Shank, Nathan. “Productive Violence and Poststructural Play in the Dungeons and Dragons Narrative.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol 48, no.1, 2015.

Smol, Anna. “ ‘Oh…Oh…Frodo!’: Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of the Rings..” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 2004, pp. 949–979.

Tolkien’s King Sheave story

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Conferences, Old English, Research, Tolkien

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Atlantic seashore

I’m finding Tolkien’s Notion Club Papers* a fascinating and deep well of ideas. Last summer at the New York Tolkien Conference, I commented on the sub-creators who appear in the story; this year, for my conference presentation at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, I talked about another part of Notion Club, the embedded legend of King Sheave (which was also part of the Tolkien’s plan for the earlier and unfinished The Lost Road).

According to Christopher, his father called the King Sheave legends “an astonishing tangle.” My presentation was an attempt to untangle at least one or two threads, but I had to ignore how tightly woven into the picture are texts such as  “The Seafarer” and “The Death of St. Brendan.” There’s only so much you can do in a 15-minute presentation.

I started with what is likely to be the most recognizable appearance of Sheave in English literature: the Scyld Scefing story that opens the Old English poem Beowulf. The Beowulf-poet merges two mythical or legendary figures. The first is the warlike Scyld, the eponymous founder of the Scyldings, another name for the Danes in the poem; (“sc” is pronounced like “sh” in Old English). The other figure is Scef (or Scéaf / Scéafa): Sheaf, who is an ancient culture-hero or corn-god. In numerous sources, this Sheaf is said to arrive from an unknown land as a child sleeping on a boat with a sheaf of grain by his head. In his Beowulf commentary, Tolkien finds this Sheaf figure “the more mysterious, far older and more poetical myth” of the two.

Atlantic salt marsh

Other medieval sources also mention one or both of these figures. Alexander Bruce, in his book Scyld and Scef, publishes and discusses 43 references from English, Danish, and Icelandic sources, in chronicles, poems, and genealogies, covering several centuries — in other words, the legends must have been well known in early Germanic cultures. In my talk, I enumerated a few sources that Tolkien used and reshaped in his own version of Sheaf / Sheave (Tolkien spells it differently in different places), including the one unique version of the legend, the Beowulf story in which Scyld Scefing is given a ship burial at the end of his life, sent back out to an unknown destination with treasures piled around his body.

But what is even more interesting to me are the ways in which Tolkien’s version is different from his medieval sources.  For one thing, Tolkien’s story is remarkable for its vivid visualization of details added to the legend. Here you can see Tolkien’s characteristic descriptive style, with an attention to the visual qualities of light: “a ship came sailing, shining-timbered, without oar or mast, eastward floating. The sun behind it sinking westward with flame kindled the fallow water.” (NCP 273-74).

Tolkien adds other elements to the story, such as the harp that comes with the child, and how Sceaf reveals his extraordinary powers through song. In most legends, Sheaf is meant to bring agricultural fertility; in Tolkien’s version, he also brings linguistic and artistic ripeness to the people. Tolkien’s version brings us right into the events of the story imaginatively and vividly, as if we too are there witnessing the scene along with the other marvelling people who rush out of their houses to gaze on and listen to Sheaf.

Atlantic seashore and clouds

Finally, Tolkien adds hints or glimpses of how his King Sheave is tied to his own mythology of Númenor and the Blessed Lands to the West. For example, Sheaf’s ship sails in from the West to a dark, shadowed, deprived Middle-earth. There are also premonitions of the Eagles of the Lords of the West, a repeated refrain in NCP deriving from the story of Númenor as several characters experience or see it.

As interesting as I find Tolkien’s version of King Sheave, the full meaning of the story has to take into account not only what Tolkien makes of the legend but where he puts it. For Tolkien’s story of Sheaf is only one layer, deeply embedded, in a narrative about envisioning the past and about sea-longing. The Sheaf story is told in an Anglo-Saxon hall in King Éadweard’s reign, recited by Tréowine and concluded by his friend Ælfwine. This layer comprising of Ælfwine and Tréowine is in turn framed by the 20th-century story of Lowdham and Jeremy, two members of the Notion Club who are experimenting with time travel and are telling the story of Ælfwine and Tréowine to their friends.

Layer upon layer upon layer, with connections in word and image between layers “coming through” or “glimpsed” as the characters frequently say — the layers create a palimpsest or a pattern of recurring elements, made up of history and myth, including Tolkien’s own mythology. Verlyn Flieger has pointed out that framing has thematic significance in NCP, and the framing of the King Sheave story in several layers of time creates a tightly woven pattern that is impossible to unravel completely in this short summary.  Obviously, I have more untangling work to do this summer.

* NCP is an unfinished text published by Christopher Tolkien in Sauron Defeated, volume 9 of The History of Middle-earth.

 

 

 

 

 

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

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Medieval, Medievalisms, Old English, Publications, Research

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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 early twentieth-century writers turn to medieval stories in such numbers to translate and adapt medieval tales for young readers?

The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark (CB)I was glad to contribute the essay to the festschrift for George Clark* titled The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark, edited by Robin Waugh and James Weldon, and published by Medieval Institute Publications in 2010. But as an expensive scholarly book, The Hero Recovered has limited circulation, and so I am posting a pdf of my essay here for anyone interested in the subject of children’s literature and medievalism.

The Boy's King Arthur by Sidney Lanier

S. Lanier. 1880

My essay focuses on the period between approximately 1875 and 1914 which saw many publications for young readers featuring King Arthur, Beowulf, King Alfred and other medieval heroes. Although children had been given medieval folktales, myths, and legends to read before this time — usually in drastically reduced, inexpensive chapbook versions — these tales were not generally seen as meriting serious attention. Samuel Johnson’s attitude in the 18th century is typical when he comments on the Middle Ages: “at the time when very wild and improbable tales were well received, the people were in a barbarous state, and so on the footing of children” (see essay, p. 210). In other words, the idea of an uncivilized, child-like medieval era has a long history.

…at the time when very wild and improbable tales were well received, the people were in a barbarous state, and so on the footing of children.

(Samuel Johnson)

Stories of Beowulf told to the children 1908

H.E. Marshall. 1908

What changed in the 19th century, however, was the value and interest that the medieval period held for scholars and general readers. In my essay, I discuss how imperial interests and racial politics, along with the study of national origins in Indo-European languages and in evolutionary anthropology, combine to create a widespread interest in the idea of progress from medieval and/or primitive origins. The evolutionary theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (i.e. the stages of development in the individual recapitulate or repeat phylogeny, the states of evolutionary development of the human) meant that children could stand in for cultural “primitives” as objects of study. Andrew Lang in his series of fairy tale books did much to popularize this notion of the child as a representative of an earlier stage of human development.

The children to whom and for whom [fairy tales] are told represent the young age of man.

 (Andrew Lang, Introduction, Blue Fairy Book)

To illustrate how a child could represent the evolutionary progress of a nation, I comment on a serialized story, “Progress of the British Boy: Past and Present,”  published in the periodical Boys of the Empire in 1888. The illustration accompanying the article wasn’t published with my essay, so I provide it here:

Progress of the British Boy: Past and Present 1888

…as the ‘boy is the father of the man,’ it may not be amiss to draw the attention of our young readers to the boyhood, if we may so term it, of England…

(Edwin J. Brett, “Progress of the British Boy” Boys of the Empire no. 1, p. 12)

As I state in my essay: “These children’s periodicals, schoolbooks, and anthologies demonstrate a conflation of ideas about the child and the medieval through a primitivist and evolutionary discourse, which often determined the kind of reading material that would be given to children” (218).  You can read the entire essay if you’re interested in the details of my discussion and in my examples of various texts. I’ll just reprint here part of my concluding paragraph:

…one may well question what effect the persistent association of the child and the primitive with the medieval has had on the contemporary status of medieval literature. Even today, if someone were to ask for stories of King Arthur or Robin Hood, it is likely that most people would assume that simple children’s stories or at least stories that appealed to adolescent tastes were being requested — in other words, literature that is not as complex or as serious as that typically defined as modern, adult literature. Medievalists, of course, know better, but in order to understand clearly how medieval studies developed to this point, it is important to recognize the conflation of the child, the primitive, and the medieval in the disciplinary formations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That intersection is perhaps most evident to us when we examine the particular kind of medieval hero presented to us in texts from this time, an exemplar of the nation and the race, who reveals to us quite sharply the primitivist and evolutionary foundations on which he was constructed.

You can download the pdf here: “The Child, the Primitive, and the Medieval: Making Medieval Heroes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”

Chaucer for Children A Golden Key Mrs. Haweis

from Chaucer for Children. A Golden Key by Mrs. Haweis (1907; 1st ed 1887)

*Medievalists will know George Clark mainly from his work on the Old English poems The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf. Tolkienists might recognize him as the author of “J.R.R. Tolkien and the True Hero” published in the book that he co-edited with Daniel Timmons, J.R.R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances, Greenwood Press. The Hero Recovered includes an interview conducted by Daniel Timmons with George Clark on heroism in Tolkien’s work and in Old Norse literature.

View the table of contents of The Hero Recovered [pdf].

 

 

 

Tolkien & medievalism at K’zoo 2016: sneak peek

23 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Conferences, Medieval, Medievalisms, Old English, Tolkien

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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 days in Kalamazoo this year.

The conference runs from May 12 – 15 at Western Michigan University. Keep in mind that the following are excerpts from a preliminary program; for the final version and most accurate information, check out the published schedule when it comes online here.

I’ve highlighted sessions on Tolkien and on medievalism. Even with this narrowing down, you can see that it’s impossible to attend every panel that might be of interest.

Sessions on Tolkien

The conference always features two plenary addresses.  This year, one of those lectures will be delivered by Jane Chance, speaking on Tolkien.

Friday 8:30 a.m. Plenary Lecture:
How We Read J. R. R. Tolkien Reading Grendel’s Mother.  
Jane Chance (Rice Univ.)

Other sessions focusing on Tolkien:

Thursday 10:00 a.m.
Fathering, Fostering, Translating, and Creating in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien
Session 11 Fetzer 1040
Sponsor: Organizer: History Dept., Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce Judy Ann Ford, Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce; Presider: Anne Reaves, Marian Univ.

  • Medieval Fostering in the First and Third Ages of Middle-earth: Elrond as Fóstri and Fóstr-son. Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State Univ.
  • A Stylistic Analysis of Fatherhood and Fostering in The Silmarillion. Robin Anne Reid, Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce
  • Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation of Scholar and Poet. Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College
  • Imagined: Tolkien in the Mind of God. Skyler King, College of the Desert

Thursday 1:30 p.m.
Tolkien and Beowulf
Session 58; Fetzer 1040
Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
. Organizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ. Presider: Andrew Higgins, Independent Scholar

  • “A Tight Fitt”: Strategies of Condensation in The Lay of Beowulf. John R. Holmes, Franciscan Univ. of Steubenville
  • Tolkien’s “Freawaru and Ingeld”: A Love Story? Christopher T. Vaccaro, Univ. of Vermont
  • The Christian Singer in Tolkien’s Beowulf. Michael D. Miller, Aquinas College
  • Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary as a Teaching Text. James L. Baugher, East Tennessee State Univ.

Thursday 3:30 p.m.
In Honor of Verlyn Flieger (A Roundtable)
Session 107; Fetzer 1040
Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo. Organizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ. Presider: John D. Rateliff, Independent Scholar

  • Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” as a theory of literature. Curtis Gruenler, Hope College
  • The Well and the Book: Flieger and Tolkien on “the Past in the Past”. Deborah Sabo, Univ. of Arkansas–Fayetteville/Arkansas Archeological Survey
  • So Many Wonders: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight according to Tolkien and Flieger. Amy Amendt-Raduege, Whatcom Community College
  • “Linguistic Ghosts”: Anglo-Saxon Poetry as Tolkien’s Tether between Past and Present. Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State Univ.
  • An Elf by Any Other Name: Naming, Language, and Loss in Tolkien’s Legendarium. Benjamin S. W. Barootes, McGill Univ.

Friday 10:00 a.m.
Tolkien and Invented Languages
Session 219; Bernhard 209
Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo. Organizer & Presider: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ.

  • From Goldogrin to Sindarin, or, How Ilkorin Supplanted the “Sweet Tongue of the Gnomes”. Eileen Marie Moore, Cleveland State Univ.
  • Early Explorers and Practicioners of a Shared “Secret Vice”. Andrew Higgins, Independent Scholar
  • “Art Words”: Tolkien’s “Secret Vice” Manuscripts and Radical Linguistic Experimentation. Dimitra Fimi, Cardiff Metropolitan Univ.
  • Tolkien’s Concept of “Native Language” and the English and Welsh Papers at the Bodleian Library.  Yoko Hemmi, Keio Univ.

Saturday 10:00 a.m.
Asterisk Tolkien: Filling Medieval Lacunae
Session 345; Fetzer 1060
Sponsor: Dept. of Religious Studies and Philosophy, The Hill School. Organizer and Presider: John Wm. Houghton, Hill School

  • The “Lost” Language of the Hobbits. Deidre Dawson, Independent Scholar
  • “To Recall Forgotten Gods from Their Twilight”: Tolkien, Machen, and Lovecraft. John D. Rateliff, Independent Scholar
  • “Backdreaming” Beowulf’s Scyld Scefing Legend. Anna Smol, Mount Saint Vincent Univ.
  • Bred in Mockery. Michael Wodzak, Viterbo Univ.

Saturday noon
Tolkien at Kalamazoo business meeting. Bernhard 212.

Saturday 2:00 – 5:00 p.m. Off-campus session sponsored by Tolkien at Kalamazoo:
Tolkien Unbound
Kalamazoo College, music recital hall, 2-5 p.m.  (Come to the business meeting to arrange transportation)

  • Readers’ theater performance of Tolkien’s Kalevala
  • Eileen Moore, Maidens of Middle-earth 6.

 

Other sessions on medievalism

Thursday 10 a.m.
Looking Back at the Middle Ages. Presider: Audrey Becker, Marygrove College. Session 35.

  • Discovering and Inventing Early Medieval Lincolnshire, 1710–1755. Dustin M. Frazier Wood, Bethany College
  • A Corruptly Nostalgic Crusade: Horace Walpole’s Medievalism of the Crusades in The Castle of Otranto. Rachel Landers, Univ. of Alabama–Birmingham
  • “Better than Anything Ancient”: Artifce, Authenticity, and William Morris’s Created Scandinavian Past. Mimi Ensley, Univ. of Notre Dame

Thursday 3:30 p.m.
Digitally Teaching the Middle Ages: Case Studies (A Poster Session)
Sponsor: Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (MEMO). Organizer: Carol L. Robinson, Kent State Univ.–Trumbull
. Presider:Pamela Clements, Siena College. Session 138.

  • Teaching with King’s Quest Part I
. Kevin A. Moberly, Old Dominion Univ.
  • Teaching with King’s Quest Part II
. Jessica Dambruch, Old Dominion Univ.
  • Game Theories and Teaching Medieval Literature. John McLaughlin, East Stroudsburg Univ.
  • Teaching with Lord of the Rings Online. Carol L. Robinson
  • Role-Playing Games and the Multimedia Wife of Bath Project. Daniel-Raymond Nadon, Kent State Univ.

Friday 1:30 p.m.
Medievalism and Labor (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: International Society for the Study of Medievalism. Organizer and Presider: Amy S. Kaufman, Middle Tennessee State Univ. Session 276.

  • Adjunct Serfs in a Feudal Academy?. Michael R. Evans, Delta College
  • Life in Another Castle: Medieval Studies and Game Design. Serina Patterson, Univ. of British Columbia
  • King’s Scab: Economic Chivalry and Immaterial Labor in the Age of the Sharing Economy. Brent Addison Moberly, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington, and Kevin A. Moberly, Old Dominion Univ.
  • Should I Put This on My C.V.? Medievalism and Academic Labor in Graduate School. Usha Vishnuvajjala, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington
  • Contractions and Expulsions of the Retro-medieval toward the Female Body. Carol L. Robinson, Kent State Univ.–Trumbull

Friday 3:30 p.m.
Medievalism and Anti-Semitism
Sponsor: International Society for the Study of Medievalism. Organizer: Amy S. Kaufman, Middle Tennessee State Univ. Presider:Martin B. Shichtman, Eastern Michigan Univ. Session 328.

  • Medieval Heritage and Nazi Rituals: Historical Pageants in the Upper Palatinate. Richard Utz, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • William Dudley Pelley: An American Nazi in King Arthur’s Court. Kevin J. Harty, La Salle Univ.
  • Medievalism in Contemporary American Anti-Semitism. Paul B. Sturtevant, Smithsonian Institution

Friday 3:30 p.m.
Premodern Rulers and Postmodern Viewers: Gender and Sex in Medieval Film and Television 
Sponsor: Royal Studies Journal. Organizer and Presider: Janice North, Univ of Arkansas-Fayetteville. Session 313.

  • Melusine, Magic, and Maternal Blood in The White Queen. Misty Urban, Muscatine Community College
  • “Men go to battle, women wage war”: Gender Politics in The White Queen (2013). Kavita Mudan Finn, Independent Scholar
  • A New Isabel for the Twenty-First Century. Emily S. Beck, College of Charleston
  • Queering Isabella: The “She-Wolf of France” in Film and Television. Michael R. Evans, Delta College

Friday 3:30 p.m.
Medieval Studies and Medievalism, Past and Present
Organizer: Christina M. Heckman, Augusta Univ. Presider: Christina Heckman. Session 295. [updated listing]

  • Gower among the Protestants: A Medieval Poet, Post-reform. F. Yeager, Univ. of West Florida
  • Church History and the Sound of Words in N. S. F. Grundtvig’s Brunanburh and Phoenix Ballads. Robert E. Bjork, Arizona State Univ.

Saturday 1:30 p.m.
A Session of Ice and Fire: Medievalism in the Game of Thrones Franchise
Sponsor: Tales after Tolkien Society Organizer: Helen Young, La Trobe Univ. Presider: Geoffrey B. Elliott, Oklahoma State Univ.–Stillwell. Session 417.

  • Forging and Reforging Valyrian Steel: The Role of Arthurian Sword Motifs in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Alexandra Garner, Bowling Green State Univ.
  • Peaceweaving in Westeros. Carol Parrish Jamison, Armstrong State Univ.
  • Dragons, Alliances, Power, and Gold: Disruptor Beam’s Game of Thrones Ascent. Shiloh R. Carroll, Tennessee State Univ.

Saturday 1:30 p.m.
Childhood/Innocence in Victorian Medievalism
Organizer: Daniel Najork, Arizona State Univ.; Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group Presider: Daniel Najork. Session 386.

  • Alice, Dream Visions, and Victorian Childhood. William Racicot, Independent Scholar
  • Victorian Medievalism and the Construction of the Innocent Male Body in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Cheryl Jaworski, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara
  • Medieval Fantasy and the Neo-Victorian Child in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia Heather L. N. Hess, Univ. of Tennessee–Knoxville

Saturday 3:30 p.m.
In Fashions Reminiscent: The Overlapping Objects, Discourses, and Ideas of the Sixties and the Middle Ages
Sponsor: punctum books. Organizers & presiders: Geoffrey W. Gust, Stockton Univ.; John F. O’Hara, Stockton Univ.; Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group
Geoffrey W. Gust, John F. O’Hara, and Eileen A. Joy. Session 465.

  • Chaucer in the Stoned Age. Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State Univ.
  • Trees Again: Time Travel with Plants. Lara Farina, West Virginia Univ.
  • Medievalism and the End(s) of Empire in 1960s Science Fiction: Frank Herbert’s Dune and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Scott Wells, California State Univ.–Los Angeles
  • Sounds of Silence: Popular Existentialism and Medieval Autofiction. Christopher Jensen, Florida State Univ.

Sunday 10:30 a.m.
Fanfiction in Medieval Studies
Organizer: Anna Wilson, Univ. of Toronto Presider: Anna Wilson. Session 524.

  • Strange Attraction to Sacred Places: Reading Fannish Fantasies in a Copy of Mandevilles’s Travels. Alison Harper, Univ. of Rochester
  • Choose Your Own Arthur: Canon and Agency in Choice of Games’ Pendragon. Rebecca Slitt, Choice of Games, LLC
  • Code-Switching Media: Vernacular Medievalisms and the Queer Lives of Mulan. Jonathan Hsy, George Washington Univ.
  • Charlemagne Fanfiction and Collective Identity in Fourteenth-Century England. Elizabeth Williamsen, Minnesota State Univ.–Mankato

 

Let me know if I’ve missed any sessions on Tolkien or medievalism.

 

Travels with Tolkien; or, What I Did Last Summer

27 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Medievalisms, Old English, Research, Tolkien

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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 students a glimpse of what their professors do when they’re not teaching. The talks — which had to be under 10 minutes — described various tasks that we performed over the summer, from collective bargaining on behalf of the faculty union, to the writing of short stories, to doing research for articles and conference papers. I offered to talk about my research and conference trips to Oxford and New York, but the time limit was a challenge!

I’ve already written in this blog about my research trip to Oxford and my conference trip to New York, but in case you’re still interested, here is another version of the story; I’ve recorded the talk that goes with my slides. I hope this presentation gives some insight into the main ideas that are fuelling my work these days.

Eala! Unlock your word hoards!

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Medieval, Medievalisms, Old English, Old Norse, Publications, Tolkien

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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.

I can’t help thinking that Tolkien would be pleased to see this kind of venture, as he was a proponent of writing in the alliterative verse styles of Old English and Old Norse, either in the original languages or in modern English. As readers of his recently published Beowulf know, Tolkien was adept at composing in Old English – see his prose story “Sellic Spell” in that volume as an example. Tom Shippey has written about the difficulties of counting just how many poems and fragments Tolkien wrote in alliterative meter in both modern and Old English; in his essay “Tolkien as a Writer of Alliterative Poetry” in the book Tolkien’s Poetry, Shippey counts 22 compositions in modern English alliterative meter plus “The Homecoming”; another nine complete poems and five fragments in Old English, and that’s not including modern English poems imitating Old Norse alliterative style. In other words, Tolkien wrote a lot of alliterative verse.

Although Tolkien did write in other verse forms besides alliterative meter, he believed that alliterative verse was a natural form for English speakers and advocated its use – but who was listening? Lately, though, I’ve seen signs of interest in bringing medieval poetry more in contact with modern writers. Jane Chance, for example, is hosting an “Original Medievalistic Poetry Reading and Open Mic” at next year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’ll have to check it out next May in the hopes of hearing some alliterative compositions. And here’s another sign of interest from a couple of years ago: Modern Poets on Viking Poetry: A Cultural Translation Project resulted in the publication of poems in modern English, which can be downloaded here.

These last two are projects that highlight the influence of medieval poetry on modern writers, but to write “correct” alliterative verse in a medieval language like Old English is another matter entirely. I’m looking forward to seeing what shows up in Eala.

Tolkien at UVM conference April 10-12

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Conferences, Medieval, Medievalisms, Old English, Tolkien

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The 12th Annual Tolkien at University of Vermont conference is just days away.  The conference is free and open to the public. It starts with a Friday night Fireside reading at which participants can get up and read their favorite passages, and continues on Saturday with a day of conference presentations. On Sunday afternoon, the University Tolkien Club organizes a “Springle-Ring Shire Festival” with all kinds of fun activities.

This year’s conference theme is Medieval Verse Narratives, and the keynote speaker is Dr. Michael D.C. Drout, who will be speaking about “Scholarship as Art, Art as Scholarship: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf.”

The other presentations are:

Gerry Blair (Independent Scholar). “J.R.R. Tolkien, Performance Artist and Modern Medievalist.”

Jamie Williamson (University of Vermont). “Verses and Prose: Medieval Narrative, Nineteenth Century Medievalism, and Tolkien.”

Andrew Liptak (Independent Scholar/Norwich University). “Modern Fantasy’s Roots in Medieval Verse.”

Kristine Larsen (Central Connecticut State University). “Guinevere, Grimhild, and the Corrigan: Witches and Bitches in Tolkien’s Medieval Narrative Verse, or, Good Girls Don’t Use Magic (Except if You’re Galadriel, but Elf Magic is Diff erent, and Who Ever Said Galadriel was a Good Girl?)”

Andrew C. Peterson (Harvard). “A Brief Exploration of Tolkien’s Alliterative Verse and Echoes of The Fall of Arthur Heard in Middle-earth”

Christopher Vaccaro (University of Vermont). “’Dyrne langað’: Secret Longing in Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings.”

Anna Smol (Mount Saint Vincent University). “Poetic Time-Travel in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”

Cheryl Hunter (Independent Scholar). “Beowulf and Thorin as Ancestral Heroes: Their Choices, and the Dragons They Face.”

and Undergraduate Voices

For more information and to view past programs, you can go to the conference website.

Talks on Tolkien: Dimitra Fimi on Folklore and “Sellic Spell”

02 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by in Medieval, Medievalisms, Old English, Publications, Talks on Tolkien, Tolkien

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My weekly “Talks on Tolkien” series continues with a video presentation by Dimitra Fimi. Dr. Fimi was part of the Beowulf Launch Party organized by the Tolkien Society and Middle-earth Network last spring, when Tolkien’s Beowulf and other related texts were first published. Dr. Fimi’s talk is a little different from my previous video selections in that she is not reading a paper to a live audience at a conference. The Launch Party was an online event featuring several commentators throughout the day who were giving their first impressions of the Beowulf publication. If you’re interested, the other recordings from that day are also worth a look.

One reason I chose this talk was to highlight the fact that the publication of Tolkien’s Beowulf includes more than just his translation of and commentary on the poem — intriguing as that is to Old English and Tolkien scholars. Dr. Fimi’s presentation focuses on one of the texts included with Tolkien’s Beowulf translation: a folktale called “Sellic Spell” (which can be translated as “wondrous tale”) that Tolkien wrote in both modern English and in Old English. The other text that’s included in the volume is a poem, or two versions of a poem, titled “The Lay of Beowulf” which is written in rhyming stanzaic form, very different from the original Old English alliterative meter.

The publication of these texts has given us not only Tolkien’s translation of the Old English poem Beowulf (an interesting research topic in its own right), but also adaptations of the Beowulf story in different genres — ripe material for analysis! Further, I believe that Tolkien’s rendition of  “Sellic Spell” in Old English warrants study of his ability to think and write in Old English. In the following video, Fimi outlines another approach to the story through the lens of folklore research.

Dimitra Fimi is the author of Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, published in 2008, which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies and was shortlisted for the Folklore Society’s Katharine Briggs Award. She is a Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Recently, she filmed two short videos for a BBC iWonder guide on Why do the Elves in The Hobbit sound Welsh? You can find out more about her videos and interviews on her website’s Media page, or follow her blog or her Twitter account: @Dr_Dimitra_Fimi.

To read “Sellic Spell” or “The Lay of Beowulf” you’ll have to buy Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. But if you’re interested in the original poem itself, you can listen to a few lines of it on Michael Drout’s Anglo-Saxon Aloud website. The poem exists in a single manuscript called Cotton Vitellius A. XV, held in the British Library. You can find information about the manuscript in the British Library’s Online Gallery, and you can also leaf through the digitised manuscript (go to f.132r to see the beginning of Beowulf).

Adaptations of Beowulf have proliferated since the late nineteenth century in books for children and adults, and more recently as films. Some of you may know the 2005 Beowulf and Grendel movie, or more likely, the 2007 Robert Zemeckis version featuring Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s Mother. I especially enjoy the 1998 animated version made for TV featuring Derek Jacobi and Joseph Fiennes, which you can view below. It’s just one among many examples of Beowulf adaptations — and now we have more of Tolkien’s work that can be examined as part of this rich store of material.

If you have any favorite Beowulf adaptations, or if you want to say something about “Sellic Spell,” let us know in the comments!

Talks on Tolkien: Reflecting on Ruins with Michael Drout

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Medieval, Medievalisms, Old English, Talks on Tolkien, Tolkien

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In this week’s “Talk on Tolkien” listen to Michael Drout as he constructs a lecture on “How to Read J.R.R. Tolkien” out of personal reminiscences, a discussion of the features of oral tradition, and images of stone and textual ruins.

Professor Drout is best known to Tolkien scholars as one of the founding editors of the journal Tolkien Studies, and the editor of the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment and of Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics. You can find out more about his publications and projects on his website MichaelDrout.com, on his blog Wormtalk and Slugspeak, or by following him on twitter: @MikeDrout.

The following lecture was delivered in October 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University. Michael Drout was an undergraduate there, and in his talk he pays tribute to his former medieval literature professor, Peggy Knapp, while recalling some of his experiences as a student. But don’t be fooled into thinking that these are simply personal digressions from the subject of Tolkien; Drout masterfully interlaces the different strands of his talk to build to his concluding reflections on textual ruins and nostalgia in Tolkien’s work.

After listening to this talk, you might end up reflecting on the pastness of the past and the ways in which it is overlaid by the present. This “joyous and heartbreaking” feeling of longing is not only found in Tolkien’s work but also in many Old English poems. I thought it would be interesting to extend Professor Drout’s meditation on ruins by looking at a video adaptation of the Old English poem known as “The Ruin” which layers past and present in unexpected ways:

(You might note that the director, translator, and speaker in this film is Stuart Lee, a professor at Oxford University who is a medievalist and a Tolkien scholar.)

If you are interested in delving further into Professor Drout’s discussion of the features of oral tradition, such as “communicative economy” and “traditional referents,” I would recommend John Miles Foley’s book How to Read an Oral Poem as a great starting point.

As always, any comments are welcome. Does Michael Drout’s view of how to read Tolkien strike a chord with you? Do you see the same qualities in the text as he does? Other thoughts?

Jackson’s Lost Opportunity: The Death of Sister-Sons

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Fan studies, Medieval, Medievalisms, Old English, Review, Tolkien

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Thorin Fili Kili banner

Thorin, Fili, Kili banner. TheOneRing.net

I enjoy many things about Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films – the material realization of various Middle-earth cultures, the creation of the best movie dragon I’ve ever seen, Martin Freeman’s Bilbo, to name only a few – but of course Jackson is not making the films specifically for me, a medievalist with a love of Tolkien’s work. As such, I had hoped that Jackson would have given us a resonant scene focusing on an uncle and his nephews — Thorin, Fili, and Kili — making their heroic last stand in battle together. There is a long tradition of the special relationship between “sister-sons” and their uncles in medieval literature that Tolkien refers to in The Hobbit. Working out that relationship to its traditional end would have inserted Jackson’s scene more firmly in a body of stories about these deeply embedded emotional relationships that are a part of western Europe’s cultural history.[1]

Now wait a minute, you might be saying to yourself. Jackson [2] clearly indicates a strong relationship between Thorin and his nephews, and their death scenes in The Battle of the Five Armies are somewhat connected and set apart from others. Yes, but not exactly in the traditional way I’m talking about.

In The Hobbit, Tolkien simply reports, “Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother.” (“The Return Journey,” The Hobbit 268).[3] Yes, they defend each other because they’re family, but more specifically because Fili and Kili are Thorin’s “sister-sons” (sweostor sunu in Old English).

Fili, Kili

Fili, Kili. Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Image 235

Uncle-nephew relationships, and sometimes even more precisely maternal uncle-nephew relationships (therefore, “sister-sons”), are frequently represented as a special bond in medieval literature. In Beowulf, the poet alludes to the story of Sigemund, êam (maternal uncle) to Fitela (line 881), and how they fought together in times of need. In line 115 of the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” Wulfmær, one of the fallen warriors, is identified as the lord’s swuster sunu. Tolkien recognizes the appropriateness of Wulfmær’s place near his uncle in the verse drama “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” which is based on “The Battle of Maldon.”  In this play, two men are searching after the battle for the body of their lord when one of them finds Wulfmær:

This head we know!
Wulfmær it is. I’ll wager aught
not far did he fall from friend and master.

His companion answers:

His sister-son! The songs tell us,
ever near shall be at need nephew to uncle.  (“Homecoming” 127)

Other uncle-nephew relationships can be found in Charlemagne and Roland, Hrothgar and Hrothulf, Arthur and Gawain. The relationship isn’t always positive; in some stories, Mordred is Arthur’s sister-son, which makes his treachery even worse. Théoden and Éomer or Turgon and Maeglin provide some other examples in Tolkien’s work. Verlyn Flieger explains how we can even see the Bilbo-Frodo relationship in this light. [4]

So what does Jackson do with the uncle-nephew bond? In The Battle of the Five Armies, Thorin welcomes Fili and Kili to the kingdom of Erebor, addressing them as his “sister’s sons.” In Jackson’s movies the young dwarves Fili and Kili refer to Thorin as their uncle, and in The Desolation of Smaug Thorin tells Fili that one day he will be king.[5] In The Battle of the Five Armies, when Thorin finally bursts out of the mountain gate to join the battle, the two warriors running closest to him on either side are Fili and Kili. In their last fight, Thorin calls Dwalin, Fili, and Kili to go with him in an attempt to take down Azog. Gandalf comments that Thorin is taking his best fighters with him. In Old English they would be called his heorð-geneatas, his “hearth-companions,” a small group of noble, well-trained fighters who are closest to their lord, and it is reasonable to think that the young and courageous nephews would be among them. Fili and Kili, then, are appropriately represented as sister-sons in most of Jackson’s Hobbit.

But the uncle-nephew bond dissipates in their final scenes. While Tolkien recognizes in “The Homecoming” that “ever near shall be at need nephew to uncle,” in The Battle of the Five Armies the nephews end up nowhere near their uncle in a time of need. Instead, Thorin sends Fili and Kili away to hunt for Azog, and then the two nephews split up in separate searches as well. Fili is killed in the sight of both of his kinsmen (we don’t see him fighting heroically to the end; he’s just skewered and then thrown over a cliff) but both Thorin and Kili are too far away to do anything about that attack. Uncle and nephew cannot stand and defend each other. The killing of Fili enrages Kili, who runs off in a passionate Orc-killing spree, but his end is complicated by the arrival of Tauriel.

Now, I have to make clear that I do not object in principle to the creation of new characters like Tauriel. But her involvement in Kili’s last fight obscures the uncle-nephew bond that defines Thorin and his sister-sons. Instead of Thorin, Fili, and Kili fighting side-by-side until they are cut down, we get a different trio: Kili-Tauriel-Legolas defending each other. Kili’s last look is not to his uncle but to Tauriel; his uncle is too far away to be part of the scene. The special bond of an uncle with his nephews who “had fallen defending him with shield and body,” is nowhere to be seen.

Peter Jackson knows how to film emotional battle scenes, as he demonstrated in The Return of the King: sweeping music, slow motion, the melee of battle, the depiction of personal anguish.

Return of the King battle scenes

from Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. Return of the King. Aragorn, Image 1808; Eowyn with Theoden, Image 1811; Eomer with Eowyn, Image 1846

Had Jackson completed the Hobbit story with a heroic last stand of uncle and nephews fighting side-by-side on the battlefield, their tale would have participated in a long tradition of sister-son stories and allowed us to feel the emotional impact of that relationship in a visceral way.

Thorin, Kili

Thorin, Kili. Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. The Hobbit: trailers. Image 326.

Too bad the opportunity was lost so close to the end of the movie.

Endnotes

[1] These uncle-nephew relationships are important in other cultures beyond the European, but I am only familiar with the northern European literary uncle-nephew motif. It is likely that the practice of fostering high-born children – having a son educated in his uncle’s home, for example – contributed to the motif in medieval literature.

[2] I use “Jackson” throughout as shorthand. Although he was the director of the Hobbit movies, he was not the only writer. The full writing team consists of Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh, and Guillermo del Toro, who gets a writing credit for his involvement with the project in its earlier stages.

[3] Tolkien inserted this line about Fili and Kili dying in defense of their uncle late in the process of composition. According to John Rateliff: “The idea that the two most likeable of all Bilbo’s companions should also die in the battle…first appears in the continuation of the typescript that eventually (autumn 1936) replaced the Third Phase manuscript” (684, n. 11). Rateliff also points out that Thorin was originally Fili and Kili’s great-uncle, but Tolkien later moved him one generation closer. (See, for example, Rateliff  444 – 445, note 11). In Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, in the section on “Durin’s Folk,” Thorin appears in the genealogy as Fili and Kili’s uncle (1418).

[4] Verlyn Flieger discusses the Bilbo-Frodo kinship in the light of the uncle-nephew motif in her essay, “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero.” The essay has been reprinted in a couple of places, including Flieger’s collected essays in Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien. Kent State University Press, 2012 and in the 2004 volume, Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, published by Houghton Mifflin and partly available as a Google e-book.

[5] Rateliff comments on the line of succession in Tolkien’s conception of the Dwarves’ patriarchal line of kings which excludes the maternal nephews (704). In the early Middle Ages, young relatives in the maternal line might succeed a ruler; it is interesting that in this detail Jackson is closer to early medieval practice than the book.

Works Cited

Flieger, Verlyn. “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero.” Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien. Kent State University Press, 2012. 141-58. Print. Also available in Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism. Ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 122-45. Print and Google e-book.

Jackson, Peter, dir. The Battle of the Five Armies. New Line Cinema, 2014. Film.

____. The Desolation of Smaug.  New Line Cinema, 2013. Film.

Klaeber’s Beowulf. Ed. R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. 4th ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Print.

Rateliff, John D.  The History of the Hobbit. 2 Vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.

“The Battle of Maldon: Hypertext Edition.” Old English Literature: A Hypertext Course Pack. English Faculty, Oxford. 2009. Web. 14 Jan. 2015.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. 2 Oct. 2014. Screenshots. 14 Jan. 2015.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Hobbit: Trailers.” Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. Jul – Nov 2014. Screenshots. 14 Jan. 2015.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. n.d. Screenshots. 14 Jan. 2015.

“Thorin, Fili and Kili Banner in Super High-Resolution.” TheOneRing.net. 22 Nov. 2014. JPEG. 14 Jan. 2015.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Durin’s Folk.” Appendix A.iii. Return of the King, being the third part of The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins, 2007. 1406-19. Print.

_____. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Print.

_____.  “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” Tree and Leaf, including the poem Mythopoeia. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

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MLA citation of this post:  Smol, Anna. “Jackson’s Lost Opportunity: The Death of Sister-Sons.” A Single Leaf.  16 Jan 2015. Web.  [insert date of access here without brackets].

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What did you think of these final scenes in the film? Any other examples of sister-sons that you want to discuss or add?  Please feel free to comment!