Oxford Tolkien Seminars
Since Michaelmas Term 2023, the Oxford Tolkien Network has organised a weekly academic seminar during term time, featuring a wide and diverse range of Tolkien scholars from many different backgrounds and approaches.
Recordings of most talks are available on YouTube and/or The Fantasy Literature Podcast (full list of speakers and titles below, with links).
Highlights:
A Grandson's Reflections (Michael G. Tolkien)
Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon Calendar (Eleanor Parker)
Tolkien and the Palaeoanthropological Imagination (John Holmes)
Inventing on the hoof: How the Riders of Rohan suddenly became Anglo-Saxon (John Garth)
The Arkenstone and the Ring (Mark Atherton)
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Dimitra Fimi (University of Glasgow) Tolkien the Mythographer
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Kit Richards (University of Birmingham) The Dwarves are a race apart’: Tolkien’s contribution to the specialisation of dwarves in popular fantasy
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Rafael Pascual (University of Granada) Tolkien and old English prosody
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Patrick Curry (University of Wales Trinity St David) Themes in The Lord of the Rings: A Defence and an Exploration
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Carl Phelpstead (Cardiff University) 'Alight Here for Middle-earth!': Tolkien, Place, and the Past
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Mareike Huber (University of Freiburg) Languages on the Move: Tolkien's Invented Languages and Their Use in Adaptation
- Philippa Boynes (Screenwriter) Other Minds and Hands
- Holly Ordway (Houston Christian University) Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture: The Making of The Lord of the Rings as a Modern Book
- Stuart Lee (University of Oxford) The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?, and J. R. R. Tolkien and G. B. Smith: Two Forgotten War Poets?
- Michael Ward (University of Oxford) C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings
- Giuseppe Pezzini (University of Oxford) The authors and styles of The Lord of the Rings
- Grace Khuri (University of Oxford) Medievalism in the Margins: Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen
- Mark Williams (University of Oxford) A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages
- Michael G.R. Tolkien (Poet and Critic) – A grandson's reflections on J.R.R. Tolkien
- Catherine McIlwaine (Tolkien Archivist, Bodleian Library) “Being a cult figure in one’s lifetime is not at all pleasant”: Tolkien’s relationship with his fans
- John Holmes (University of Birmingham) A Veritable “Middle Earth”’: Tolkien and the Palaeoanthropological Imagination
- Will Sherwood (University of Glasgow) "I am a link in the chain": Victorian Transformations of British Romanticism and their Influence on Tolkien
- Edmund Weiner (Oxford English Dictionary) ‘I always felt that something ought to be done about the word…’: Tolkien's latchwords
- Hugo Lacoue-Labarthe (Exeter College, University of Oxford) Tolkien’s Lancelot in The Fall of Arthur: the living memory of a decaying world
- Dr. Eleanor Parker (Brasenose College, University of Oxford) Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon Calendar,
- David Bernabé (University of Oxford/University of the Basque Country) Riddles in the Grass: the characterisation and narrative value of landscape over the fields of Rohan
- Mark Atherton (University of Oxford) The Arkenstone and the Ring: wilful objects in Tolkien's The Hobbit
- Elena Vermeer (University of Oxford) Tolkien's 'Sellic Spell' and Beowulfian Poetics: the Artist and the Critic
- Bond West (University of Oxford) Wisdom in the Lord of the Rings
- Holly Ordway (Houston Christian University) “Fundamentally religious and Catholic"? Authorial Intent and the Intentional Fallacy
- Dion Dobrzynski (University of Birmingham) Ents and Ecological Entanglements
- John Garth (Author and Journalist) Inventing on the hoof: How the Riders of Rohan suddenly became Anglo-Saxon
- Eduardo Gutierrez (University of Oxford) Tolkien Beyond Tolkien: Unleashing the Sub-Creative Imagination in an Era of Bridge Building
- Anine Englund (University of Oxford) “In the halls of Mandos”: Death, Deathlessness and Inter-Racial Relations in Beren and Lúthien
- Stuart Lee (University of Oxford) ‘How to write The Lord of the Rings’
- Michael Ward (University of Oxford) ‘Peak Middle-earth: Why Mount Doom is not the Climax of The Lord of the Rings’
- Giuseppe Pezzini (University of Oxford) ‘Tolkien and the Classics’
- Grace Khuri (University of Oxford) ‘A Heroic History of the Elves: Tolkien’s “lost” Mythology of England?
- Laura Varnam (University of Oxford) ‘Tolkien and Beowulf’
- Simon Horobin (University of Oxford) ‘J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Philologist’