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To Enter the Perilous Realm or Not to Enter? That is the Question

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Trudy Shannon

Presentations Hall

The Unknown is calling – will you heed it? Trudy Shannon compares Smith from Smith of Wootton-Major with the tale of Aldarion and Erendis from...

Tolkien and Alchemy

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Dr. Sara Brown

Lectures

Transformation and the process of transformation, either physical or of the self, is a significant theme in Tolkien’s writing and appears thro...

Tolkien and Textiles: Feminine Agency and Power

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Jackie Sheppard

Presentations Hall

How does Tolkien’s construction of textile arts relate to feminine agency and power? Jackie Sheppard examines Tolkien’s attitudes toward texti...

Tolkien and the Legacy of World War I

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Robbie Park

Presentations Hall

‘An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience…’ – J.R.R. Tolkien How did Tolkien’s wartime experiences affect his wri...

Tolkien and the Romantics: Forging Myth and History

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Will Sherwood

Lectures

J.R.R. Tolkien famously 'found' his legendarium, translating and editing The Red Book of Westmarch for his twentieth century readers. This is ...

Tolkien and the Tasks of Grief

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Karen Pollock

Presentations Hall

How does Tolkien depict the tasks of grief? Karen Pollock discusses the processes of acceptance, processing, adjusting and finding connection ...

Tolkien and the Use of Words

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Ruth Barratt

Presentations Hall

Fool, smile, torture and torment: where and why does Tolkien use these words? In this fascinating paper, Ruth Baratt presents a quantitative a...

Tolkien's Modernist 1920s Poems

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Lorena Farias

Presentations Hall

What makes a “Modernist” and how did Tolkien use this framework in his poetry? Lorena Farias explores the poems Progress in Bimble Town, The C...

Tolkien's "Vision of Faërie" in "Smith of Wootton Major"

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Trevor Brierly

Academic Production Hall

Tolkien's story "Smith of Wootton Major", written in 1965, and an accompanying essay written at the same time, provide a rich understanding of...

"Untangling the Pentangle: The Knighting of Sir Gawain"

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Elizabeth Lyon

Presentations Hall

How did traditional elements of the knighting ritual appear in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Gawin is already a worthy knight, so why does ...

Ursula K. LeGuin: Worldbuilder

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Kris Swank

Lectures

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) described herself as “A Citizen of Mondath,” that country of the imagination where live the storytellers, the my...

Viking Hogwarts: A Guide to Old Norse Magic

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Irina Manea

Lectures

Paganism was most likely never a unified system of belief, and may have been much more complex and diverse than our current sources can let us...

Viking Hogwarts: Battle Magic and Mythology

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Irina Manea

Lectures

In this module we examine the most violent practices in Old Norse Sorcery. Beyond domestic practices, sorcerous aggression manifested e.g. thr...

“Völsungs rímur: A New English Translation”

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Galen Miller-Atkins

Academic Production Hall

Rímur are long, narrative poems developed in the late medieval period in Iceland. While they form an important link between early medieval Ice...

Weird Languages

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Shawn Gaffney

Lectures

Many people do not realize the variety of language structures and strange language phenomena that exist in the world's languages. This module ...

You Will Not Find It Poison

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Catherine Madsen

Fiction Production Hall

Sitting at the exquisitely uncomfortable intersection of love, faith, wonder, and the coldness of the modern world, You Will Not Find It Poiso...