Course Details

To the horror of many modernday 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 was 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? These will be important issues for us as the class progresses.

Class meets twice a week for an hour and fifty minutes; each class session is divided in two halves, separated by a short break. The course as a whole revolves around in-class discussion of the readings; sometimes reading for one day in a week will be heavier than for the other, so it is important for students to read ahead when this happens. Occasionally, I will lecture on various Tolkien-related subjects, and there are some movies scheduled as well, some mandatory and some optional. There are three written assignments: a midterm essay; a final essay or creative project; and a final exam. The following books are required for the course. All except TFMR will be available for purchase at the University Bookstore; they will also be on reserve at OUGL.

1) PLEASE NOTE: To be read before the course begins: J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit (any complete edition)
2) PLEASE NOTE: To be read before the course begins: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (any complete edition)
3) J.R.R. Tolkien/Christopher Tolkien, ed., The Silmarillion
4) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader
5) Humphrey Carpenter, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (abbrev. Letters below)
6) C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
7) Turgon/Smith, ed., The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader (abbrev. TFMR below)
8) C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
9) J.R.R. Tolkien/Christopher Tolkien, ed., The Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth (abbrev. Unfinished Tales below)

Grades will be determined according to the following percentages:

Midterm paper: 20%
Final paper: 30%
Final exam: 25%
Participation in discussion: 25%