Course Details

Course offered Spring 2015

Honors 212 B: Reading Tolkien (A&H)

Honors 212 B: Reading Tolkien (A&H)

SLN 14847 (View UW registration info »)

Robin Stacey (History)
Office: 106 Smith, Box 353560
Phone: 543-9418
Email: rcstacey@uw.edu

Credits: 5
Limit: 35 students

Honors Credit Type

NOTE: ALL STUDENTS ARE REQUIRED TO HAVE READ THE HOBBIT AND THE LORD OF THE RINGS BEFORE OUR FIRST CLASS MEETING.
To the horror of many modern-day critics, J.R.R. Tolkien has several times been selected in national polls in the U.S. and Britain as “the author of the twentieth century,”beating out such worthy opponents as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. The recent success of Peter Jackson’s film version of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s best known work, has served to increase his popularity even further. This course takes on the challenge of understanding Tolkien in the context of the many different “pasts” he negotiated in the course of creating his complex mythology. Tolkien was first and foremost a philologist: what became Middle Earth had its origins in his habit of inventing complex language systems for which he then felt compelled to construct entire new worlds and populations. He was a medievalist, a specialist in the northern mythologies of early England, Scandinavia, and the Celtic lands; the heroes and monsters of those early tales fired his imagination from his earliest boyhood and continued to animate his scholarly and popular writing throughout his adult life. He as also a devout Catholic who combined complex Neo-Platonic theological notions of good and evil with the fatalism of the Germanic myths. But if Tolkien was a man of the past, he was also a person caught up in some of the most dramatic trends and events of his own day: the trench warfare of World War I, in which he lost two of his closest friends, the battle of the Somme, from which he was himself invalided out, and the changes sweeping over his beloved land of England before and after World War II.

All of these facets-combined with his popularity as an author, of course-make Tolkien an ideal figure through whom to introduce students to the importance of myth as a way of understanding the challenges we face as humans living in the modern world. The themes of this course are the themes with which Tolkien and his contemporaries were so fruitfully preoccupied: the relationship between language and myth, religion and the existence of God, the nature of good and evil, the possibility of heroism in an age of total warfare, the age of the machine and its impact on the environment. At issue also are the ways in which Tolkien and his work have been received and interpreted. Was he, as many have argued, a racist whose only terms of reference for the depiction of evil were black and white? Was he a sexist, unable to imagine women in positions of real independence? An ivory tower sort, complacently divorced from the realities of the world? How can one possibly explain the appeal of a work like The Lord of the Rings in an era of feminism and sexual liberation, racial integration, popular anti-war protests, and the rise of technology? All will be important issues for us as the class progresses.

Almost all of our class sessions will be devoted to in-class discussions of Tolkien’s works, although I will do a few background lectures here and there. There will be two papers: one (5-7 pages) due around midterm comparing Tolkien’s work to that of other writers of the First or Second World War, and the second (10-12) pages a research paper or creative project centered on a Tolkien-related topic of the student’s choice. There will also be a final exam and a brief oral presentation on the midterm essay. NOTE: ALL STUDENTS ARE REQUIRED TO HAVE READ THE HOBBIT AND THE LORD OF THE RINGS BEFORE OUR FIRST CLASS MEETING.