J.R.R. Tolkien

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

One of the most prolific authors in the modern period - the author of the twentieth century, according to one admirer - Tolkien is also one of the most influential, controversial, and challenging. He inspired a craze for fantasy literature that persists today and that itself has influenced the movies, games, and images of pop culture. As often as readers praise his novels, however, critics (particularly scholars) vilify them for their plots, style, and characters. Further complicating this reception is the fact that as a writer Tolkien, who by trade was a medievalist and philologist at the University of Oxford, produced far more than his well-known books on Middle Earth. In an effort to get a broad understanding of Tolkien as a writer and of the continuities that run through everything he wrote, we'll read these blockbusters, but also some of his original poetry, several of his academic articles, and his translations of medieval poems. We'll consider what it meant to be a writer when Tolkien was, including the way he balanced teaching and writing, the importance of his writers' group (the Inklings), and the process by which his sometimes illegible handwritten drafts found their way (changing in the process) to the finished products that shook the literary world.