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ENG 3XX - Living Traditions: ENG 386 - J.R.R. Tolkien

This guide supplements ENG 3XX Living Traditions course, which looks at six different authors over six semesters.

J.R.R. Tolkien

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ENG 386 - Living Traditions: J.R.R. Tolkien

Perhaps no literature participates in the purely imaginative as much as fantasy, and Tolkien’s important ideas about human co-creation underwrite his work, which continues to cast a long shadow on the genre. Tolkien’s invented realm of Middle-earth is deeply rooted in our actual world, grounded in medieval literature and norse mythology, inseparable from the anxieties of pre-war England, participating in the hopeful realism of his faith. In addition to Tolkien’s own writing, we will delve into his medieval and mythological sources, the work of contemporaries such as C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and of course exemplars of modern fantasy. Tolkien understood the fantastic not as merely “escapist” literature-a derisive term-but as a vehicle for myth, for enduring images and truths that guide us as we escape into imagined worlds in order to better find a place within our own.

Malone Honors Thesis

Tolkien's Legendarium

A collection of scholarly essays edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter on the History of Middle-earth series of books relating to the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. 

It includes a bibliography of works by Christopher Tolkien compiled by Douglas A. Anderson.

Tolkien's Legendarium won the 2002 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies.

MALONE DOES NOT OWN THIS BOOK. YOU CAN REQUEST IT THROUGH ILL (INTER-LIBRARY LOAN)