Tolkien and the Romantics: Forging Myth and History
LecturesWill Sherwood
J.R.R. Tolkien famously 'found' his legendarium, translating and editing The Red Book of Westmarch for his twentieth century readers. This is not the first time an author has 'forged' a 'lost' literary history as James Macpherson's 'Ossian' documents from the 1760s started a craze for forgeries. Thomas Chatterton's Rowley and Turgot manuscripts similarly fed off the Ossian controversy while questioning what it really meant to 'forge' a document.
Course Instructor: Will Sherwood
Course Instructor: Will Sherwood
- Lecture 1: The 1760s, the Age of Forgery48:26
- Lecture 2: The Growth of Romantic Nationalism59:36
- Lecture 3: Oral Traditions: Immortality and Youth01:00:00
- Lecture 4: Textual Traditions: Mortal Anxiety and Tangible History01:02:31