This week’s talk by Dimitra Fimi applies concepts from childhood studies to Tolkien’s fiction. She begins by pointing out that the concept of childhood is a social construction that varies in different cultures and times, and then goes on to examine Tolkien’s ideas about childhood in “Laws and Customs of the Eldar,” The Children of Hurin, and The Lord of the Rings.
Dr. Fimi’s forthcoming monograph is on Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy, whichis part of the Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature series (http://www.palgrave.com/de/series/14930). In the book, Dr. Fimi explores the Celtic sources and perceptions of “Celticity” in the works of authors such as Lloyd Alexander, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Jenny Nimmo, and Pat O’Shea, as well as much more recent works by Henry H. Neff, Catherine Fisher, Kate Thompson.
Dimitra Fimi’s other books deal directly with Tolkien: Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History (Palgrave, 2008) and most recently the co-edited book with Andrew Higgins, A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages (HarperCollins, 2016). You can find out more about her research and teaching on her website, http://dimitrafimi.com.
Her presentation, “Constructions of Childhood in Tolkien’s Legendarium,” was given at Oxonmoot in September 2015 and can be found on the Tolkien Society YouTube channel.
This week, I turn to the work of Patrick Curry, best known to Tolkien readers as the author of Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (revised edition Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and Deep Roots in a Time of Frost: Essays on Tolkien (Walking Tree 2014); his publications also include works such as Ecological Ethics: An Introduction (revised edition, Polity Press, 2011) as well as many papers in journals and collections. He is a Canadian-born writer and scholar who has lived in London, England for over forty years. He holds a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from University College London and has been a lecturer at the University of Kent and Bath Spa University.
I’ve said that I wanted this Talks on Tolkien summer series to focus on interdisciplinary Tolkien studies, and Dr. Curry’s research is a good example. In trying to define his approach to Tolkien or his field of research, I’ve considered ecotheory, politics, cultural studies, philosophy, religious studies, history of science, literature … any one of these labels would suit and yet not cover the whole picture.
In the following talk, “The Third Road: Faerie in Hypermodernity,” recorded in 2011, Dr. Curry takes the concept of enchantment, primarily as defined by Tolkien, and examines how enchantment and disenchantment exist in our culture. Looking at the works of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Philip Pullman, he concludes with some thoughts on “hypermodernity.”
Dr. Curry has a wonderfully informative website where you can see a list of his books and his essays, reviews, and talks, with downloadable PDFs of many of them: http://www.patrickcurry.co.uk/.
As always, please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.
Continuing in this summer series of Talks on Tolkien II, in which I’d like to highlight pre-recorded talks on new books or on different disciplinary approaches to studying Tolkien, I turn to Irina Metzler’s presentation at the 2016 Tolkien Seminar in Leeds. Dr. Metzler outlines some of the basic concepts in the growing academic field of disability studies and discusses some of Tolkien’s characters in that light.
The Society for Disability Studies defines this field of study: “Disability Studies recognizes that disability is a key aspect of human experience, and that the study of disability has important political, social, and economic implications for society as a whole, including both disabled and nondisabled people.” Dr. Metzler, a historian of medieval culture and currently a research fellow at the University of Swansea in Wales, has written several books on disability in medieval culture, which you can read about on her blog.
Her talk demonstrates how characters from stories such as The Children of Húrin and The Lord of the Rings can be viewed through the lens of disability studies.
In this summer series of Talks on Tolkien I’d like to highlight new/forthcoming books or different disciplinary approaches to the study of Tolkien — Interdisciplinary Tolkien, as I like to think of it.
Dr. Kristine Larsen
Who better to exemplify the interdisciplinary study of Tolkien than Kristine Larsen, known to many as “The Tolkien Astronomer.” Dr. Larsen is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Central Connecticut State University and someone who is a prolific Tolkien scholar. In addition, she’s written about Stephen Hawking, Neil Gaiman, Dr. Who — and astronomy, of course.She’s also the person who runs the very popular astrolabe workshops every year at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo.
The following video is from the second New York Tolkien Conference, which took place a couple of weeks ago. Kristine Larsen was one of the keynote speakers, and as is evident from the title of this talk, she likes to make them long*: “Lewis, Tolkien, and Popular Level Science: What the Well-Educated Inklings Actually Knew about the Universe (As Reflected in the Details of Narnia, Middle-earth, and Other Secondary Worlds).” The talk concludes with a plea for “STEAM” rather than just “STEM” education.**
The video has a few buffering glitches, but with patience you can hear or understand almost the whole talk. Anyone who would like to know more about astronomy and Middle-earth can check out Dr. Larsen’s website, The Astronomy of Middle-earth.
* Dr. Larsen’s longest record-breaking title so far appeared in the Vermont Tolkien Conference program here.
**STEM = science, technology, engineering, math
STEAM= science, technology, engineering, art, math
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 like being able to hear other scholars give presentations on their research, and how wonderful it is when you can get access to these talks even if you can’t travel to various conferences and special lectures around the world.
For that reason, and the fact that my previous winter series apparently appealed to quite a few viewers, I’ve decided to do a summer series. For the next couple of months, I’ll post every week a previously recorded video or podcast by a Tolkien scholar, usually with some comments and/or links to more information about the speaker and their topic. Just to be clear, I haven’t recorded any of these talks myself; as with my winter series, I’m simply collecting and curating already available videos and podcasts.
In this summer series, I’m planning to focus on new or forthcoming books and on approaches from different disciplines to the study of Tolkien.
Verlyn Flieger on The Story of Kullervo
First up for this week is a podcast featuring the eminent Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, who has edited Tolkien’s Story of Kullervo. This is the latest in the “new” books by Tolkien that have been published in recent years, including his Beowulf,Fall of Arthur, and Sigurd and Gudrun. The Story of Kullervo was available in the UK and Canada late last summer but only a few months ago in the US, so the book is still fairly new to most Tolkien readers.
This edition includes the unfinished story about Kullervo that Tolkien wrote as a 22-year-old, inspired by the Finnish epic Kalevala. The book also includes drafts of an essay by Tolkien on The Kalevala, as well as Professor Flieger’s commentary on the material.
Professor Flieger’s talk offers an interesting view of this early work by Tolkien. She enumerates the ways in which Tolkien discovers and exercises his creative abilities in writing this story, and she presents ideas about how the story of Kullervo influences the tales that come later in The Silmarillion,The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings.
I had originally announced “Talks on Tolkien” as a winter series, and even though the snow is still slowly melting in my corner of the world, we have passed the spring equinox and the Fall of Sauron, which should be bringing us into a new age. So this post will present the last video in my series for this winter. That doesn’t mean that I won’t post a video here every now and then in the coming months, but I do have to move on to focus on other things.
The previous seven videos I’ve presented here have all featured established scholars who have published books in the field of Tolkien Studies (Flieger, Shippey, Drout, Croft, Garth, Fimi, Rateliff). I thought that for the last video, I would turn to a new scholar — though she is someone with plenty of experience in the area of fandom: Dawn Walls-Thumma, known as Dawn Felagund to some. Dawn’s talk, “Transformative Works as a Means to Develop Critical Perspectives in the Tolkien Fan Community,” was presented at Mythmoot III in January. If you’re wondering what the term “transformative work” means, here is the definition offered by the Organization for Transformative Works: “A transformative work takes something extant and turns it into something with a new purpose, sensibility, or mode of expression” — in other words, fanfic, vids, artwork by fans can all be classified as transformative works.
In her presentation, Dawn talks about the rise of Tolkien fandom and the development of different fan communities with the advent of Internet fandom. She presents the results of a survey asking people about their experiences in fandom and why they write fanfiction. You can follow along with the super handout that accompanies the talk.
If you’re interested in responding to Dawn’s Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey, she is keeping it open until December. A couple of other sources that she mentions include the OTW Fanlore wiki, which has a Timeline of Tolkien Fandom. She also made use of data from another fan survey by centrumlumina, which you can consult here.
Dawn is currently a Master’s candidate in the Humanities at American Public University where, following Tolkien’s inspirations, she is working on a thesis on Beowulf. She has presented at the Mythmoot II and Mythmoot III conferences, and will be at the New York Tolkien Conference in June speaking about the historical bias in Tolkien’s works and how this motivates the creation of fan fiction. She recently published an article in Mythprint. On her fan side, Dawn Felagund is the founder and owner of the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary, and a moderator on the Many Paths to Tread archive and Back to Middle-earth Month, an annual event that seeks to promote the creation of Tolkien-based fanworks. You can also find her on Tumblr: dawnfelagund; Twitter: @DawnFelagund; or her blog, the Heretic Loremaster.
If you have a favorite Tolkien fan community or transformative work (or want to mention any other matter) please let us know in the comments!
Other Tolkien videos and podcasts
In selecting the few talks that I’ve featured in the last two months, I’ve had many videos and podcasts to choose from. If you’re looking for more, there are excellent talks in the Tolkien at Oxford podcasts featuring recorded lectures by Dr. Stuart Lee and Dr. Elizabeth Solopova and others. Tolkien in Oxford: A Symposium held at Merton College last November has now posted audio recordings of most of their presentations.
Of course, no series of Tolkien videos or podcasts is complete without the work of Corey Olsen, aka “The Tolkien Professor,” whose Mythgard podcasts are available from his website or iTunes. Mythgard has also recently instituted an online guest lecture series — an excellent idea, especially for people who can’t get to conferences. The first lecture in the series delivered just last week by Dr. Michael Drout on “Lexomic Analysis of Beowulf and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Scholarship on the Poem: A Confluence” is now available in video or audio files. You can also find occasional videos of Mythgard lectures online by Dr. Olsen and others.
This list by no means covers all that there is. For example, I’ve just discovered this audio recording of a lecture delivered in January at Wheaton College by Dr. Olga Lukmanova: “Tolkien in Russia: There and Back Again.” Or you can try a lecture by Dr. Alaric Hall on “Tolkien in Leeds.” There’s so much more out there, but I have to stop myself now as this is getting far too long to be a postscript! Hope you enjoyed the Talks on Tolkien series.
One of the most exciting parts of scholarly research, in my opinion, is having the opportunity to read an original manuscript. This week’s “Talk on Tolkien” features the work of Dr. John D. Rateliff, who is an expert in Tolkien’s Hobbit manuscripts. Dr. Rateliff has studied Tolkien’s drafts and revisions of The Hobbit and these versions, along with Rateliff’s commentaries and notes, have been published in the two-volume History of The Hobbit. Recently, Dr. Rateliff announced that a shorter one-volume edition is forthcoming as well, a Brief History of the Hobbit. You can follow Dr. Rateliff’s work on his blog, Sacnoth’s Scriptorium, and on his website.
Although the video below is not a recording of a complete talk, it allows us to listen in on the question period after a presentation that Dr. Rateliff gave in 2012 at Marquette University, the home of The Hobbit manuscripts. You can hear all kinds of intriguing details in the video about Tolkien’s habits of revision, surprises in the manuscripts, different versions of The Hobbit, and more.
Dr. Rateliff talks about how Tolkien would often write on scraps of paper, including exam papers. Tolkien tells the story of how the first line of The Hobbit came to him one day as he was marking exams. Rateliff’s History of The Hobbit notes that this page does not survive, but here is Tolkien himself describing the moment in this brief clip:
I’ve found that people are sometimes surprised that all of Tolkien’s papers aren’t at Oxford where he was a professor for most of his life. But in fact, manuscripts of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Mr. Bliss, and Farmer Giles of Ham are all in the US at Marquette University (in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) in the J.R.R. Tolkien Collection How did they get there, you might well ask? Listen to the Marquette archivist, William Fliss, explain:
I’ve spent a number of happy hours in the Tolkien archives at Marquette, although my experience is a mere glimpse compared to the years that Dr. Rateliff studied there. I’ve felt quite privileged being able to work in the bright and peaceful reading room of the archive, aided by the very helpful staff and surrounded by stacks of grey boxes filled with treasures.
The other major archive holding Tolkien materials, as might be expected, is at Oxford in the modern manuscripts collection. Here you can find some manuscript drafts of Tolkien’s work, such as The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, as well as lectures, notebooks, translations, letters. Anyone with a chance to visit Oxford should definitely take an opportunity to tour the old and wonderful Bodleian Library, including the Duke Humphrey’s reading room (better known as the library in the Harry Potter movies).
But Tolkien’s papers are actually held in what was called the New Bodleian across the street from the old library. Scholars used to work in a fairly cramped reading room. You would check your bags at the door and after showing your reader’s pass proceed down a rather dark corridor into a long, crowded room at the end of the hall. Rows of tables seemed to be squeezed into the space between bookshelves, files, microfilm readers, and librarians’ desks. I think I remember windows, but if I recall correctly, they were rather high up on the wall and did not provide a view. But who cared when you were sitting there and handed a Tolkien manuscript to read! I spent many an hour in that room squinting at Tolkien’s scrawl and then typing at a furious pace to transcribe as much of what I was reading as possible before closing time.
That library has undergone an extensive renovation and has just recently opened to scholars and now to the public, renamed as the Weston Library. From the look of some videos and news reports the rooms are light and spacious — and apparently you can even buy a cup of coffee there! I can’t wait to go back — I hope very soon. The following video presents the mind-boggling massive extent of the Bodleian’s operations and includes a look at the new Weston building:
Anyone have any experiences or memories of archival work they’d like to share? Has anyone visited these or any other archives holding Tolkien materials?
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!
This week’s “Talk on Tolkien” features the historical, biographical, and literary research of John Garth, who continues to dig into Tolkien’s early years, the beginnings of his mythology, and his experiences in the First World War. Garth’s book, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, published in 2003, won the Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Scholarship and has been translated into five languages so far. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the experiences of Tolkien and his friends in the war and for tracing the early stages of Tolkien’s writings.
Recently, Garth has published more new research in his booklet Tolkien at Exeter College: How an Oxford Undergraduate Created Middle-earth, which presents a vivid picture of Tolkien’s friendships and activities while a student at Oxford. You can find more of Garth’s research in other publications, but one good place for keeping up with his work is his blog, which features reviews and news of his ongoing research.
Although I don’t have a video recording of a complete talk by John Garth, the following presents some intriguing highlights from his presentation at the Tolkien Society‘s Oxonmoot in September 2014. In this video, Garth talks about Tolkien’s early writings, “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star” and his “Story of Kullervo.” Some additional details can be found in Garth’s blog post, “Middle-earth turns 100.”
In the video clip above, John Garth sets Tolkien’s early writings against a backdrop of war. You can also hear him speaking more about this subject in the following documentary, “Tolkien’s Great War,” (Elliander Pictures), which provides an excellent account of Tolkien’s early life, his friendships at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, the way in which he and his friends faced the Great War, as well as some observations about how Tolkien’s war experiences influenced his writing. This beautifully filmed documentary provides a glimpse into the kind of research that informs John Garth’s various publications.
This week’s “Talk on Tolkien” video comes from Oklahoma State University, where Janet Brennan Croft gave a presentation last November about Tolkien’s life and how his war experiences are reflected in his fiction. Croft is the author of War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, which was published in 2004 and won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in 2005. She is one of a number of critics, such as Tom Shippey and John Garth, who discuss ways in which Tolkien can be seen as a war writer.
Croft, who is a librarian at Rutgers University, is also the editor of the peer-reviewed journal Mythlore. You can find out more about her many books and articles by going to her Academia.edu page.
Croft’s talk covers aspects of Tolkien’s life including his experiences as a soldier in the First World War and as a parent with sons in the Second World War.
I thought it might be interesting to compare George R.R. Martin’s views on war and on Tolkien. The following is an excerpt from a Rolling Stone interview by Mikal Gilmore, published on April 23, 2014. You can read the full interview here.
In the interview, Martin talks about how his objection to the Vietnam War influenced his writing of characters. If Tolkien had been writing The Lord of the Rings throughout the Vietnam War, do you think his characters might have turned out differently? The peace movement was very visible in the 1960s, and Tolkien’s work was widely read by many who participated in the anti-war protests. Were you one of them? Any observations to make about that time and how Tolkien’s work was received? (Please keep in mind that all comments should be respectful towards different political views).
We talked earlier about your unwillingness to fight in Vietnam. The Ice and Fire books are shot through with the horrors of war. As Ygritte says to Jon Snow, “We’re just soldiers in their armies, and there’s plenty more to carry on if we go down.”
It’s true in virtually all wars through history. Shakespeare refers to it, in those great scenes in Henry V, where King Hal is walking among the men, before the Battle of Agincourt, and he hears the men complaining. “Well, I hope his cause is just, because a lot of us are going to die to make him king of France.” One of the central questions in the book is Varys’ riddle: The rich man, the priest and the king give an order to a common sellsword. Each one says kill the other two. So who has the power? Is it the priest, who supposedly speaks for God? The king, who has the power of state? The rich man, who has the gold? Of course, doesn’t the swordsman have the power? He’s the one with the sword – he could kill all three if he wanted. Or he could listen to anyone. But he’s just the average grunt. If he doesn’t do what they say, then they each call other swordsmen who will do what they say. But why does anybody do what they say? This is the fundamental mystery of power and leadership and war through all history. Going back to Vietnam, for me the cognitive dissonance came in when I realized that Ho Chi Minh actually wasn’t Sauron. Do you remember the poster during that time? WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR AND NOBODY CAME? That’s one of the fundamental questions here. Why did anybody go to Vietnam? Were the people who went more patriotic? Were they braver? Were they stupider? Why does anybody go? What’s all this based on? It’s all based on an illusion: You go because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t go, even if you don’t believe in it. But where do these systems of obedience come from? Why do we recognize power instead of individual autonomy? These questions are fascinating to me. It’s all this strange illusion, isn’t it?
You’re a congenial man, yet these books are incredibly violent. Does that ever feel at odds with these views about power and war?
The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that. World War I is much more typical of the wars of history than World War II – the kind of war you look back afterward and say, “What the hell were we fighting for? Why did all these millions of people have to die? Was it really worth it to get rid of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that we wiped out an entire generation, and tore up half the continent? Was the War of 1812 worth fighting? The Spanish-American War? What the hell were these people fighting for?”
There’s only a few wars that are really worth what they cost. I was born three years after the end of World War II. You want to be the hero. You want to stand up, whether you’re Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin, or the American saving the world from the Nazis. It’s sad to say, but I do think there are things worth fighting for. Men are still capable of great heroism. But I don’t necessarily think there are heroes. That’s something that’s very much in my books: I believe in great characters. We’re all capable of doing great things, and of doing bad things. We have the angels and the demons inside of us, and our lives are a succession of choices. Look at a figure like Woodrow Wilson, one of the most fascinating presidents in American history. He was despicable on racial issues. He was a Southern segregationist of the worst stripe, praising D.W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation. He effectively was a Ku Klux Klan supporter. But in terms of foreign affairs, and the League of Nations, he had one of the great dreams of our time. The war to end all wars – we make fun of it now, but God, it was an idealistic dream. If he’d been able to achieve it, we’d be building statues of him a hundred feet high, and saying, “This was the greatest man in human history: This was the man who ended war.” He was a racist who tried to end war. Now, does one cancel out the other? Well, they don’t cancel out the other. You can’t make him a hero or a villain. He was both. And we’re all both.
First up for this week is a podcast featuring the eminent Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, who has edited Tolkien’s Story of Kullervo. This is the latest in the “new” books by Tolkien that have been published in recent years, including his Beowulf, Fall of Arthur, and Sigurd and Gudrun. The Story of Kullervo was available in the UK and Canada late last summer but only a few months ago in the US, so the book is still fairly new to most Tolkien readers.
