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:

HT 2025 Series

  • Dimitra Fimi (University of Glasgow) Tolkien the Mythographer

  • Kit Richards (University of Birmingham) The Dwarves are a race apart’: Tolkien’s contribution to the specialisation of dwarves in popular fantasy

  • Rafael Pascual (University of Granada) Tolkien and old English prosody

  • Patrick Curry (University of Wales Trinity St David) Themes in The Lord of the Rings: A Defence and an Exploration

  • Carl Phelpstead (Cardiff University) 'Alight Here for Middle-earth!': Tolkien, Place, and the Past

  • Mareike Huber (University of Freiburg) Languages on the Move: Tolkien's Invented Languages and Their Use in Adaptation

MT 2024 Series

  • 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

TT 2024 Series

  • 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

HT 2024 Series

  • 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

MT 2023 Series

  • 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’