Anna Smol: A Single Leaf

Category: Tolkien

  • Tolkien Conference Season in the US: Spring & Summer 2014

    This coming spring and summer will see a number of Tolkien conference sessions in the US: you might have to pace yourself carefully! I’m focusing on American conferences, since those are the ones I know best — let me know if there are others I’ve missed.  I would also love to hear about upcoming Tolkien…

  • Popular Culture Association: Tolkien Studies — deadline Nov. 1st

    The Popular Culture Association has designated a new special topic of Tolkien Studies, which may become a permanent area in the conference if enough interest is shown.  Currently, I know of roundtables being proposed on the state of Tolkien Studies and on the Marquette Tolkien Archive, and I’ve also heard of individual papers likely to…

  • Tolkien’s Guinever

    In my previously posted thoughts on Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur, I predicted that the character of Guinever would give rise to a lot more discussion, and we are seeing that debate occurring already on several sites.  Troels Forchhammer, who has listed a thorough collection of reviews on his blog Parma-kenta, has added his own…

  • Now Available: The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium

    I am pleased to announce that The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, has been published and is now available for ordering.  I am also very happy to see that my essay in this book (“Frodo’s Body: Liminality and the Experience of War”) is in such great company! See…

  • Roman Association of Tolkien Studies

    The international appeal of Tolkien was recently highlighted for me when I was informed that Italian Tolkien scholar Roberto Arduini had translated CF Cooper’s Mythcon reports for the Associazione Romana Studi Tolkieniani / Roman Association of Tolkien Studies. The post, “Premio a Verlyn Flieger: diario della Mythcon 44” is obviously written in Italian, which I…

  • Fall of Arthur – more reviews

    I posted a list of reviews of Tolkien’s Fall of Arthur back in June, but I now have a few more to add.  Most recently, Kathy Cawsey has published “The Lord of the Round Table” in Open Letters Monthly. Below is my collated list of selected reviews in online publications and in a few blogs (including…

  • Mythcon 44. Days 3-4: Multidisciplinary papers, awards, traditional entertainments, and an extended airport edition

    One of the features of Mythcon is that presenters come from many different disciplines, and on Sunday (July 14) I decided to take in some of the talks from fields outside the areas I typically work in. I started off the day listening to Andrew Higgins undertake “A Linguistic Exploration through Tolkien’s Earliest Landscapes.” Andrew’s…

  • Mythcon 44. Day Two: the land and its inhabitants in fantasy

    The second day of the Mythopoeic Society conference began with a Mythcon tradition: a procession of attendees into the auditorium to listen to the first plenary talk. Our pre-conference updates suggested that we wear our academic regalia for this event — have you ever tried to cram an academic gown into a carry-on bag? I…

  • Mythcon 44. Day One: hot sun, fanfic, and ice cream

    Travelling to Mythcon  in East Lansing, Michigan, I wondered what to expect at my first Mythopoeic Society conference. I later realized that the Tolkien 2005: The Ring Goes Ever On conference that I attended in England was a combined Mythopoeic and Tolkien Society meeting, a fact that I barely recognized at the time in that…

  • Calls for papers on Tolkien

    It’s never too early to start thinking about next year’s conferences! Here are two calls for papers for those who are engaged in the scholarly study of Tolkien’s works. Proposals are due this fall. Tolkien at Kalamazoo 2014 The Tolkien at Kalamazoo group is sponsoring four sessions for the 2014 International Congress on Medieval Studies.…