• Blog: A Single Leaf
  • Welcome
  • Teaching
  • Research
  • Service
  • Contact

Anna Smol

~ Department of English, Mount Saint Vincent University

Anna Smol

Tag Archives: Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works

Christopher Tolkien 1924-2020

17 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by Anna Smol in Tolkien

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, Christopher Tolkien, JRRT: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Tolkien Gateway, Tolkien Society, Yvette Kisor

I had just finished my Tolkien class yesterday when I returned to my office and found my social media sites flooded with news of Christopher Tolkien’s death. Just an hour before, I had been telling my students that, as Tolkien researchers, we owe a great debt to his son Christopher.

My students have been doing presentations on sections of The History of Middle-earth that include drafts of The Lord of the Rings. This exercise gives them just a glimpse of this immense project (12 volumes in all!) that Christopher Tolkien edited. I had just been saying to my students that morning that Christopher has given us all — students, fans, scholars — the means to experience what it is like doing specialized archival research with manuscript drafts. While we only get a few samples of Tolkien’s actual handwriting in The History of Middle-earth (HoMe), which is often the most difficult part of deciphering his actual papers, we can at least gain an understanding of Tolkien’s revision process for The Lord of the Rings, a glimpse into what characters and ideas he was developing and what ideas he knew he wanted from the start.

The presentations I’ve assigned my students are inspired by Yvette Kisor’s article, “Using The History of Middle-earth with Tolkien’s Fiction” which appears in Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works. As she explains on p. 75,

Christopher Tolkien’s commentary, replication of different drafts, description and dating of manuscripts, determination of the order of composition, and other scholarly apparatuses expose students to the editorial tasks that go into the production of any authoritative edition.

But it’s not just Lord of the Rings drafts that are included in HoMe. There is a wealth of material, including unfinished stories like “The Notion Club Papers” which I’ve been working with in recent years. I’ve heard very occasionally the criticism that Christopher shouldn’t have published unfinished drafts without knowing if his father would have wanted the world to see them. But had those drafts been placed in the Bodleian Library with his other unpublished papers, I would have written about them anyway, as researchers do. Instead, Christopher gave access to such materials to a wider public.

HoMe is not the only publication that Christopher produced. Having trained as a medievalist, he edited and translated several medieval texts before resigning his position at Oxford to work full-time on his father’s materials. The Silmarillion is one of the texts that Christopher compiled after his father’s death (with the help of Guy Gavriel Kay), and although he wasn’t satisfied in later years with all of what he had produced, it nevertheless must have been a daunting task to make sense of these disorganized papers, something that his father himself was not able to do. The Silmarillion that was published in 1977 gave the world the first look at the mythology Tolkien had been working on for most of his life — the backdrop, in a way, to the action of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Christopher was always closely bound with his father’s writing. From listening to his story-telling when a child, drawing maps for The Lord of the Rings, typing up drafts, and, as an adult serving in the RAF during the Second World War, reading and commenting on chapters of The Lord of the Rings that his father mailed to him, he knew his father’s work intimately.

Christopher Tolkien dedicated his career to providing us with the materials for understanding his father’s works, and I am immensely grateful for that opportunity.

Here he is reading the ending of The Lord of the Rings:

From JRRT: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien, 1996

Notes

The Tolkien Society announcement of Christopher Tolkien’s death.

Yvette Kisor’s essay can be found in Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, edited by Leslie Donovan, MLA publishers, 2015, pp. 75-83.

An up-to-date list of Christopher Tolkien’s publications can be found on Tolkien Gateway.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s LotR has arrived (for real this time)

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Anna Smol in pedagogy, Publications, Teaching, Tolkien

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, English 1171, Leslie A. Donovan, MLA publications, Teaching Tolkien in the First-Year Literature Survey, Waymeet for Tolkien Teachers

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Other WorksI can now definitively say that Leslie Donovan’s Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works is available. Back in July, I posted an announcement of the book’s August release, but it’s only this week that I’ve received my copies from the publisher and that I’ve noticed the book is available for order (and not just pre-order) on Amazon websites.

Leslie Donovan has collected a wealth of information that can be used by teachers who want to run a full course on Tolkien’s works or who want to incorporate a study of his works into various kinds of college and university courses.

In “Part One: Materials,”  Leslie describes editions of Tolkien’s works, multimedia aids for teaching, and the standard scholarly and reference works useful for the study of Tolkien. In identifying these resources, she draws on her years of experience as a Tolkien scholar and teacher, but she also had additional input in 83 survey responses received from Tolkien teachers (Preface xi). You can click on the images below to read the full table of contents.

“Part Two: Approaches” consists of 29 essays describing ways of teaching Tolkien — at different levels; in large classes and small; in English departments and others; from a medieval or a postmodern perspective — I have yet to sample all of them. The contents of Part Two are divided into the following sections: Teaching the Controversies, Tolkien’s Other Works as Background, Connections to the Past, Modern and Contemporary Perspectives, Interdisciplinary Contexts, and Classroom Contexts and Strategies for Teaching. My own article is on “Tolkien in the First-Year Literature Survey Course” and is based on my teaching of English 1171 here at Mount Saint Vincent University.

To supplement all of this information, you can also check out the resources posted in the new journal Waymeet for Tolkien Teachers, where some of the essay-writers have posted their course materials.

Click on the thumbnails below to read the full table of contents.

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings & Other Works. Contents Part OneApproaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works. Contents Part Two ApproachesApproaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works. Contents Part Two continued

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Teaching Tolkien’s Works: new book and journal

31 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by Anna Smol in Medievalisms, pedagogy, Publications, Teaching, Tolkien

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, ENGL 1171, ENGL 4475, Leslie Donovan, MLA, Waymeet for Tolkien Teachers

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings & Other Works Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works is a volume of essays published by the MLA (Modern Language Association) in their Approaches to Teaching World Literature series. The book, to be released tomorrow, August 1st, is edited by Leslie Donovan, and contains essays on teaching Tolkien’s works in various programs and course levels. I’m planning to post the Table of Contents as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.

I have an essay in the book, “Teaching Tolkien in the First-Year Literature Survey Course,” which is based on my experience in teaching a section of English 1171 in my department here at Mount Saint Vincent University. In this course, I teach Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring in the context of other works in the English literary tradition. (For an upper-level course dealing with more of Tolkien’s works, you can check out my English 4475: Tolkien and Myth-making webpage).

Associated with the release of this book is a new digital journal for Tolkien teachers:  Waymeet for Tolkien Teachers: a digital journal for teaching J.R.R. Tolkien’s works and life in post-secondary schools. The journal is starting to gather materials under links for Syllabi, Class Materials, Online Resources, Articles, Publications, and a discussion Forum. In the journal you can find the syllabus for my 2014 version of English 1171, “Introduction to Literature: Reading Historically.” The journal also contains my research paper assignment from that class, simply titled “100-level research paper” under the Class Materials > Formal Assignments link.

Take a look at the rich resources already being posted on Waymeet: materials on teaching Tolkien’s works in courses on medieval and modern studies, myth, war, children’s literature, science. I think that this journal and the MLA book will become a valuable source of inspiration, tips, techniques, and materials for anyone teaching Tolkien’s works in universities and colleges. I’m definitely looking forward to browsing through the materials before my next round of teaching Tolkien.

You can pre-order the Approaches to Teaching book from Amazon in the US, Canada, or the UK or from the MLA bookstore.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Dr. Anna Smol

This site includes my blog, "A Single Leaf," and webpages about my research and teaching in Tolkien studies, medievalism, Old English, and higher education pedagogy. Creative Commons License: <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License</a>.

Twitter Updates

  • RT @ekerson: Pay attention Canada! 6 hours ago
  • RT @TolkienSociety: NEW TOLKIEN BOOK: The Fall of Númenor will be published on 10 November 2022. Edited by Brian Sibley and illustrated by… 2 days ago
  • RT @inversedotcom: Meet the on-set dialect coach working to bring language to life in the ‘The Rings of Power,’ the Amazon Prime series tha… 1 week ago
  • RT @BlogTolkien: On 15 June 1967, #Tolkien had his poem recitations recorded for Poems and Songs of Middle-earth album, combining spoken wo… 1 week ago
  • RT @canMedievalists: Tomorrow! Last day of the CSM/SCM Conference Mardis Médiévaux. Power in and over Literature, a roundtable on #SSHRC st… 1 week ago
Follow @AnnaMSmol

Recent posts

  • Tolkien talks in May 2022 & reminders for July
  • April 2022 conference sessions on Tolkien
  • Tolkien Reading Day 2022: Love & Friendship
  • What did he really mean? Carpenter on Tolkien on Drama
  • Save the dates!

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Anna Smol
    • Join 923 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Anna Smol
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: