Course Details

To the horror of many literary critics, J.R.R. Tolkien has several times been selected in national polls as “the author of the twentieth century”, beating out such contenders as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Recently his works have become even more popular in the wake of the success of Peter Jackson’s film version of Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings. This class takes on the challenge of understanding how this man; an Oxford don, devout Catholic, and survivor of the horrific World War I Battle of the Somme; came to write how and what he did. Why did he choose to write through myth instead of through some more realistic genre? What relationship did he see between his philological studies as an academic, and the (invented) languages in which he embedded his mythology? Why did such a religious man create a world in which religion is to all appearances absent? How did his knowledge of the northern mythologies of medieval Europe inform his fiction?

Through a series of lectures and discussions, we will endeavor to answer these and other questions, focusing particularly on the manner in which his academic and personal experiences helped to shape his most important works. Topics to be considered include:

–invented languages and the worlds in which they reside
–religion in a godless world
–the nature of good and evil
–warfare and heroic identity
–women and gender
–the color green (nature, Tom Bombadil, and the symbolic significance of food)
–monsters, half-breeds, and the issue of racism
–the medieval background to Tolkien’s “mythology for England”
–Tolkien and the Inklings

Books

1. The Hobbit (any edition)
2. The Lord of the Rings, comprising the three volumes The Fellowship of the
Ring; The Two Towers; The Return of the King (any edition)
3. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, J.R.R. Tolkien
(Harper Collins: ISBN 026110263X)
4. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien (Del Rey Reissue: 0345325818)
5. The Tolkien Reader, J.R.R. Tolkien (Del Rey Reissue: ISBN 0345345061)
6. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Houghton Mifflin: ISBN 0618056998)
7. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis (any edition)
8. The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader (probable) (Cold Spring Press: ISBN 1593600119)

We will also read some short essays on Christian theology and on battles of World War I.

Assignments: Grades will be based on participation in our weekly discussions; 3 short (2-3 pp.) reader response essays spaced evenly throughout the term; midterm essay or creative project (5-7 pp); analytical research paper (8-10 pp); in-class final exam.

Important note: it is essential that every student enrolled in the course have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (text, not appendices) BEFORE our first class session. We will be reading these works again in the course of the class; however, the class will be structured according to topic rather than moving sequentially through the books, so students will need to be familiar with the content of the whole in order to make sense of each week’s discussion.